Atlanta, Indiana by Flickr user J. Stephen Conn

Sometimes when we get too bummed out here in Atlanta, Georgia, we like to check in on what other Atlantas are up to, to see if they’re living up to the hype, or even just making do. Makes us feel like we’re not alone in the world – somewhere out there, there’s another Atlanta, plodding along, learning valuable lessons through its constant mistakes, and just trying to make a name for itself in this crazy game we call life.

Atlanta, Illinois via www.atlantaillinois.org

Atlanta, Illinois: It’s hard to tell a lot of what’s up in Atlanta, Illinois, as the Atlanta Argus is updated online only monthly. The water leak on North Street will be repaired soon. There is a problem with unnumbered houses in the town that the council has to deal with. Dollar General needs a business license and the grocery wants to start selling liquor on Sunday.

There is so much to see and do in Atlanta, located along Route 66 and proud site of “the Bunyon Statue” of Paul Bunyan holding a hot dog and Illinois’ only eight-sided limestone public library and museum. You can get some great Atlanta souvenirs at the J. H. Hawes Grain Elevator Museum and find out where cornflakes come from in their new exhibit.

Atlanta, Kansas: This tiny town has STOLEN OUR HEARTS. First of all, read this:

It’s a compact little town, four blocks in each direction. What makes Atlanta special is the way the town works together. The big round table in the Branding Iron Cafe, the heart of town, is a good example. This table, and the other furniture, was built by local volunteers when they were rebuilding the building that houses the cafe; over 5,000 hours of volunteer labor. The building itself is owned by a community economic development group that makes sure that Atlanta has the essentials, including a cafe. Other community projects are an outstanding volunteer fire department and a local first-response team for medical emergencies. Community efforts also keep the downtown buildings maintained and occupied. The old movie theater is still used as a community center. The 1921 City Hall has a tiny jail inside, but the building is mostly used now for preparing utility bills.

Right now you are like, “Tiny jail!!! TINY JAIL!!! SO CUTE!!!” But get this: Atlanta also has Willow Roc MINIATURE HORSE FARM!!! They accept Paypal and have a 30-day layaway plan!!!

Atlanta, Texas: A mini-cyclone hit downtown Atlanta in August of last year and the city is still repairing some stuff. Meanwhile, the First Baptist Church is raising money to build on a nice addition.

Atlanta, Texas Mayor Keith Crow

Atlanta, Indiana via www.atlantaindiana.com

Atlanta, Missouri via www.ci.atlanta.mo.us

Atlanta, Missouri: You can have fresh eggs delivered from the Dausman Hobby Farm for $1/dozen, and a pint of honey from the Creech Bee Farm for $7. A Main Street Burger with cheese is $3.25 and an Atlanta Burger with cheese is $3.75 at the Olde Atlanta Locker Restaurant, “where meats no longer hang around but our friends do.” Enjoy this photo essay – and do give Kelly a call the next time you are passing through Atlanta.

In the interest of Christmas cliches, we have compiled our annual naughty and nice list. Do you want the good news first or the bad news first?

Naughty
1. Kim Severson
2. Robbie Brown
3. Kim Severson and Robbie Brown on the same byline

Everyone’s still buzzing about Severson’s latest thing, “that pecan article” (come on, Hawkdogg hasn’t updated his MySpace page since March!), and we’re probably still rolling our eyes over Severson-Brown’s “black Hollywood” piece. (Good inventory of subtle offenses here.)

Oh, and let’s not forget Brown’s Waffle House crime story.

These are the issues that Atlanta and the South face. THESE ARE THE THINGS NEW YORK TIMES READERS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TO CONTINUE SHAPING THEIR WORLDVIEW which apparently begins and ends with that one scene from Mame where Lucille Ball goes to Savannah to meet Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside’s family.

But these articles to which we’ve already alluded barely scratch the surface of what Severson and Brown are capable of! Sometimes they cover the ho-hum trend pieces for which The New York Times is famous, or they’ll hone in on one person in a human interest profile and won’t try to convince the readership that this one Bogart man or “Windy” (=Gone With the Wind fanatic) represents the whole of the South, all of it, every last person. But then there are the times they get carried away, lost in some grotesque scattershot caricature that they know readers from other geographic regions will read with glee.

Behold some of their most offensive clippings and anecdotes from the past year or so:

In some cities, residents have decided to celebrate Halloween on Saturday to preserve the purity of the Christian Sabbath, while others would rather not choose between Halloween and college football.

- “The Tricky Business of Halloween Sunday”, 10/28/10

What people in the South don’t know about cold is a lot. When it gets chilly like this — and mind you, 20 degrees is really cold here — morning news anchors remind viewers to wear warm coats, hats and gloves.

- “Uncommon Cold Strikes in Georgia”, 12/8/10

Here is a sign of how brutal the weather is — at least by Georgia standards: Before canceling the ball, Mr. Deal even called off the scheduled prayer service, as drastic a move in the South as canceling a football game.

- “South Snarled by Second Snowstorm in Weeks”, 1/10/11

While many new residents of Atlanta — transplants of more homogenous areas of the Deep South — would be much happier spending their free hours getting blazed and shooting snakes from a second-floor deck in an exurban apartment complex, the bars of Buckhead still offer a much-welcomed opportunity to snag a drunk Auburn graduate looking to settle down with someone, anyone, named Carter or Trevor.

- We just made that one up for kicks.

And the worst one yet:

In Atlanta, where a giant peach drops from a downtown building each New Year’s Eve, a driver can get lost among all the streets with variations on the name Peachtree.

- “Peach Rivalry Becomes War Between the Tastes”, 7/29/10
If someone could promise us we would never have to hear that platitude about too many Peachtrees again as long as we live we would gladly support the renaming of all streets in the City of Atlanta to honor living Central Atlanta Progress board members. GLADLY.

Nice
1. This is the place where, a year ago, we would have said Thomas Wheatley. But now we’re going to say Thomas Wheatley’s mom, because she casually shared with us that Thomas spent a portion of his formative years at the Cheshire Motor Inn – WE ARE NOT LYING ABOUT THIS. That information is our Christmas give to you, readers.

2. The person who sent us the last P-Hut holiday card we’ll ever receive again, a classic scene of three lesbians lovingly trimming a Christmas tree in 1991.

3. The bears in the window of Atlanta Period Furniture.

Previously: Just thankful that “hick” rhymes with “sticks”

Shortly after this song debuted, Bad Street was renamed “Atlanta’s Historic Livingston Mims Motorway” to shed itself of negative connotations with the notorious and sloppy wrestler vs. punk blood feud that plagued the thoroughfare for the majority of the ’80s.

If I had to pick a real-life Bad Street Atlanta G-A, maybe I would go with the very south end of Moreland Avenue, past Coco Loco de la Noche. There are just a lot of beige nearly-windowless “sports” bars that seem like weathered men go in there every night and come out with nosebleeds, either from brawls over whether to play trashy honky-tonk or thrash metal in the jukebox, or because of snorting too much hillbilly heroin.

Now a real road – Auburn Avenue.
“Auburn Avenue” by The Spirit of Atlanta (produced by the legendary Tommy Stewart, from the 1973 soundtrack to the never-made film The Burning of Atlanta)

This whoooooole album is sooooooooooo goooooooooooooood. I can only imagine what the movie for which it was recorded would be like. What was the plan for “Buttermilk Bottom“? I am dying to see the heavy nightlife scene for which that was likely intended. There’s also “Hunter Street” (now MLK Drive – thanks jolomo) which is clearly scored for a police chase scene. And if you like funk woodwind and brass riffs, you’ll love the instrumental “Down Underground“!

Here’s one last song with street undertones, while we’re on the subject of Tommy Stewart.
“Atlanta Get Down” by Tommy Stewart (from the 1976? self-titled album)

Do any of those streets or radio stations that get shout outs exist anymore? Simpson Road, no. WQXI was Dr. Don Rose’s station. Someone find out out about the rest.

Now do what the ladies say! GET DOWN!

Previously: Atlanta’s music scene

Woman in corn field, surrounded by harvest vegetable crops, holding a live turkey, Georgia, 1930s

Man holds an axe, looking down at turkeys in front of him, November 1940

Thanksgiving food donation display, 1970

Thanksgiving food donation cornucopia, 1970

Parade float with live turkey dressed as Miss America, named the Turkey Queen, Molena, Georgia, 1940s

Earliest known Thanksgiving proclamation issued in Georgia, November 1954

All photos from the GSU photographs special collections.

Previously: Hot trainny mess

Hey, snap out of it, you! This is truly one of the most amusing, ineffable episodes of them all. Especially if you like grand sweeping staircases and the letters “DOT” flying in your face. Oh, and more visuals with FOOD. You’ll see soon enough.

Here’s how the third-to-last episode of The Making of Modern Atlanta starts:

WHOA WHOA WHOA!! What is this? Clearly we are impeding on some sort of fancy dinner and similarly fancy conversation…

Dr. White: “…Maybe when we’re shooting The Making of the Modern Riviera.” [Inhales goblet deeply.]
“Mmm, delicate fragrance. Fine taste. Robust but not ill-mannered. Ah, what’s the vintage?”

“1992 Chattahoochee, by way of Buford Dam and the Atlanta Waterworks.”
Who controls the water? Has it always been this way? Who else controls our lives in this metropolitan region – without us even realizing it? That’s what this program is going to tell us.

These puppetmasters are the “alphabet agencies” that may or may not have any real power. But for the sake of this episode, let’s pretend like they do!
“In this program, we’ll look at how and why this alphabet soup of agencies came into being and what their roles have been in the often bitter controversies that Atlanta experience as it emerged from a city into a region.”

To get anywhere, we have to go back in time. In the 1940s, the city did everything – water, roads, trash. By the ’50s and ’60s, as the city expanded beyond its boundaries, the counties started stepping in and doing more. Eventually, the state started exerting some influence in the urban areas, building roads (DOT) and creating agencies that crossed municipal boundaries (ARC, MARTA).

Even further back, in the ’20s, the city hired its first planner and in 1924 hired John Beeler to create what would become just another holy grail to Atlanta transportation planning nerds, the Beeler Plan. Beeler invented the viaducts in an effort to raise car traffic above the railroads and relieve some congestion. “A by-product of that stroke of genius was Underground Atlanta.” The plan also had electric railway cars going as far as Marietta and Stone Mountain – “thus creating a framework for a regional city.”

The problem was the other cities! It always is!
Sidenote: One of the great injustices of post-modern Atlanta is that these “Welcome to Atlanta” and “Leaving Atlanta” signs on Ponce aren’t more iconic; they really should be replicated ad nauseum at craft booths at neighborhood festivals.

Opulent staircase number one: City Hall.
The Lochner Report comes out, ARC is invented, but Mayor Hartsfield resists and just tries to annex everything to the City of Atlanta.
“Meanwhile, on the outskirts of town…” [sinister organ music plays]
“Here in what was then the DeKalb County Courthouse sat Hartsfield’s wily nemesis, Commissioner Scott Candler.” He built up the state’s first urban county through the deeply unsexy work of water plants and sewage treatment. You know what you can’t do without water and sewers, though? GROW! And expanding and developing after WWII was all anyone in the south could think about. “He put the water pipes and the sewer pipes in and made it possible for us then to politically turn it from a cow county to a big thriving urban government with every power that a city has except one or two.”
Dr. White takes us into his secret chamber – his Emory University office.
Here’s some gossip: He’s currently retiring and slowly emptying his library, giving away some special books to special students! If anyone can snag a signed (by him) National Geographic (he has so many!) I’ll be forever grateful.

The whole reason he invites us into his office is to show off yet another plan for the city’s growth – the first regional comprehensive plan, Up Ahead. Booooooring?
Except that Mayor Hartsfield wanted the plan to plan, as plans are wont to do, for the expansion of black neighborhoods. “Up Ahead was damned as too liberal for recommending negro neighborhoods in all parts of the suburbs and too conservative for bowing to segregation. Up Ahead went up in smoke.“

Now the city is just 20% of the population of the 19-county region and it matters even less what the mayor wants…but enough of this policy administered by underpaid poor dressers, I want glitz and glamor! No, glamour! With a U! The History Twins sense this impatience and whisk me away to a romantic dinner at the Commerce Club, to a simpler time when “Atlanta ran things,” to “a place where even Dana White wears a tie.” Finally, we’re back to the luxury-oriented mood that the episode started with.

You guys, it is going to feel so good to have our lives back when The Making of Modern Atlanta is finally over. But for now, these are the cards we have been dealt and we have to get through this – together. We have to keep moving here and not focus on details like in the last episode. If you signed up for the email list (You: “What email list??!!” FIGURE IT OUT.) then we can talk about details later. Just know that this happened: Why not?
Then they go to the Georgian Club, just to prove that there was more than one exclusive institution for fancy white men who worked for Coca-Cola or banks to hang out and eat cottage cheese and boiled salmon.
The point in all of this is, “Today, there are many more players in the field and their spheres of influence are much smaller.” (IT’S LIKE THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT ATLANTA INTERNET!!!!)

Cruelly, the next shot after Dr. White makes his point about small spheres of influence is “unofficial mayor of Buckhead” Sam Massell sitting nearly alone at a board room table covered in ashtrays.

TMOMA then launches us into a montage of people pointing to maps and models of the city because THAT IS THEIR JOB.

CAP (Central Atlanta Progress):

APC (Atlanta Preservation Center):
(Obviously these are the “artsy” bureaucrats – because that one guy looking at the map is wearing a black turtleneck.)

Another day, another marble staircase. (R.I.P. City Grill.)
Enough about these provincial losers at BC, CAP, and APC, let’s talk about the real map lookers of the region, ARC and DOT.“DOT’s plans for I-485, the Presidential Parkway, Georgia 400, and an outer perimeter have caused more strife than any other realm of public policy during the last quarter century of Atlanta history.”

“Just after World War II we had this what I think’s a wonderful innovation called the freeway, a highway that allowed travel without interruption. And the freeways, it seemed to me, then served as a formative element.”

“We continue, unlike almost any other city in America, to build expressways inside the city which will continue to have the same devastating effect. Georgia 400 is the latest example of pulling development out of the city to the suburbs.”

“I think 400 was a terrible precedent. The kind of quote ‘progress’ or ‘expansion’ that will gut a city’s heart for the automobile is an absolutely terrifying precedent.”

This was 1991? when the following things were discussed. Maybe 1992 at best:
“But we will become dramatically more balanced during this time in history than has been the case from ’74 up until today. We’ve got to spend more energies on rail.”

“We’re looking, as you know, at establishing commuter rail service into the city. We need to talk about inter-city rail service within the state. Amtrak service should and can be expanded. We drastically and desperately need to find a way to get MARTA out of its two-county shell.”

“We must truly earn the title ‘Department of Transportation.’”

Okay, we know there’s perpetually this drama over roads in metro Atlanta, but the real life-or-death issue is water. Chattahoochee River, etc., etc. Dr. White pronounces “resources” (as in DNR) “reh-zources“. “Nobody at ARC carries a badge and a gun.” That’s why local governments have to enforce regional policies – and some local governments don’t want to play along. WHICH COUNTY COULD THIS BE?

To set the stage for this historic conflict between neighbors and an attempt at secession, there’s some weird Civil War re-enactment as a metaphor. This should also be your first clue. “A temporary truce is established. Soldiers return to camp…As Atlanta’s first architect of urban renewal noted, ‘War is hell.’”

We can’t even bear to go through some of the big picture ideas that a few people throw in at the end here. What was supposed to be a fun frolic through a quirky 20-year-old GPB series has become a reminder of every prominent failure of Atlanta to live up to much. Can the History Twins lighten things up a bit for us here, at the end, in our hour of need?

Dr. White: “If we Atlantans want a say in Atlanta’s future development, we’ll have to come to terms with the alphabet agencies.” “Will we find an ARC, a DNR, or a DOT in our soup?” We were seriously laughing for a full week after seeing this image:
“Or will we be forever in hot water?”

Dr. Crimmins’ thoughts always bring us a little closer to tears, but maybe he’ll get to sum up some heavy ideas in the next episode. Forgive us our apathy this episode – maybe when we’ve all had time to reflect on blessings for which we’re most thankful we’ll have a little more vigor to bring to the table.

Next: Part Seven – “Cultured Pearls in a Sea of Grits”

Previously: History Twins, will you mayor-y me?

“Mr. Mayor, Professors Crimmins and White are here to see you.”“Who?”“Tim Crimmins and Dana White – the professors doing the public television series on the making of modern Atlanta.”“Oh yes, the History Twins!”Mayor Jackson and his scheduler, Brenda Johnson, share some light banter and quote Bernard DeVoto and Thomas Carlyle to each other. Needless to say, she delays the History Twins’ visit with the mayor until the end of the show. The first rule of television is you can’t just start out an episode of anything with a Maynard Jackson interview. You have to build up to that.

The Twins stroll through City Hall and introduce what this particular program will cover: the five mayors who shaped modern Atlanta, starting with William Hartsfield. “For many, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind is the Atlanta book. But for some of us, Floyd Hunter’s Community Power Structure is not only a more important book, it’s also a better read.”Ya burnt, Scarlett O’Hara!The “Regional City” described in Hunter’s study was a thinly-veiled Atlanta, and its Mayor Peter Barner was really Mayor Hartsfield who served, more or less, from 1865 to 1962. I mean, you try and name one pre-Hartsfield mayor! Do it right now!

Charles Josey, journalist, explains Hartsfield’s three political rules.

1. Never call the press unless you have something for them to take a picture of.
2. Never let anyone be your enemy or your friend too long.
3. When you really wanted to make progress, the quieter you could be about it the faster you could move.

And with whom did Hartsfield most like slipping under the radar, slinking around behind the scenes? Robert Woodruff, king of Coca-Cola.“Hartsfield said once, openly, on the record, that he never made a single decision in politics in his entire career without first thinking how it would affect the Coca-Cola Company.”

The city tripled in size (square miles) under Hartsfield’s annexations and 1951 plan. There was so much stuff going on at this time – the Federal Highway Act, the Lochner Plan, the Federal Housing Act, etc. Interstate construction and urban revitalization were going positively gangbusters in the 1950s! I wonder which segment of Atlanta’s population will be most negatively impacted by this progress???

Hartsfield, political beast that he was, realized he couldn’t really leave anyone out of progress, especially in a city with a sizeable and well-organized middle-class black population. “He also knew that ballots didn’t have any color and he became a more thoughtful, reasonable man with which to deal.”
But Hartsfield’s major intentional contribution to his dear city was the airport – oh, the airport.

“If Floyd Hunter’s book Community Power Structure is the old testament of Atlanta politics, then this book is surely its new testament.” (Dr. White just went there!) If you have ever taken a class in certain disciplines then you already know what this sacred tome is, even without its dustcover.
“It’s Clarence Stone’s Regime Politics. It’s about how public bodies and private interests work together to govern the likes of you and me. It’s about one special time in the 1960s, and one special place – Buckhead.”

IT’S IVAN ALLEN, JR. TIME! IVAN ALLEN, JR. TIME! (1962-1970)
If you haven’t noticed, this episode basically assigns you a reading list. It’s almost winter; you’ll have time.
The Buckhead Boys! “We were white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Atlanta. Business-oriented, non-political, moderate, well-bred, well-educated, pragmatic, and dedicated to the betterment of Atlanta as much as a Boy Scout troop is dedicated to fresh milk and clean air.” (From Allen’s Mayor: Notes on the Sixties.)

“Mayor Allen’s monument to Atlanta was the building of the Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, and the luring of a major league baseball franchise to the city.” We already know about that! When the sporty people were pleased, he got the Civic Center built. Look at these amazing wealthy artistic types so delighted to enter the Civic Center!!!

While Hartsfield accidentally stumbled into the beginning of some semblance of civil rights in the city, Mayor Allen really understood and embraced those rights as “a matter of decency and dignity.”

But, “The Duke of Buckhead chose not to succeed himself, and an era ended.”
“But a new one was not yet ready to begin. As the cracker Camelot crumbled, no once and future king stepped forward to claim the crown.”

Wow, I guess there were really low expectations for Sam Massell, Atlanta’s first Jewish mayor (1970-1974), who now holds a title much more powerful than Allen’s rinky-dink “Duke of Buckhead” – Mayor of Buckhead.

He built the Omni Coliseum, which was cooler than Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium because it was indoors and hosted not one but two teams.
But his real monument was MARTA.“Yes, I’m predicting that circumstances are such at this time in history that we will either end up with the best transportation system in the country, or with no transportation system at all.”

There were other, more complex pieces of Massell’s single term. His “think black, think white” speech, which is hard not to wince through. His campaign slogan, “Atlanta is too young to die,” when he ran for re-election against his vice mayor, Maynard Jackson.

Speaking of MONUMENTS, how about some commentary from “Manual” Maloof?
He says some stuff about how Massell’s “too young to die” message was misunderstood.

“The Father of MARTA didn’t survive long enough politically to become the first mayor to ride our rapid rail.”
“That distinction went to his successor – the big M.” (Maynard I and II, 1974-1982)

You guys, I know this is taking forever. We have two mayors left. Just stop reading this and dive into Regime Politics instead if you’re so bored.

“Youthful and energetic, Maynard Jackson was there for Atlanta – through thick and thin.” [Montage of Jackson's various weights/sizes; his ride on a MARTA bus; his fight with Muhammad Ali; Ali saying to reporters, "He's so big, he's like a balloon! If you hit him, he'll bust! I couldn't bust him."]
Atlanta’s strong mayor system had arrived.

Jackson’s monument: the airport’s international terminal. And the groups he worked hard to include in the city’s power structure – African-American small businesses, women – got a piece of that. Needless to say, the “downtown business community” – i.e. powerful white guys – were miffed.

Next up was Andrew Young (1982-1990); unlike the his modern predecessors, he took a step down accepting the post of mayor after a career as a fancy diplomat.

He drove the Democratic National Convention, the redone Underground Atlanta, a City Hall expansion, the Georgia Dome (now finished – in the last episode, if you remember, it was not), and the 1996 Olympics.

And while he didn’t need the “downtown business community” to get elected, he quickly made them his allies.

His enemies were a lot of the people who first voted him in – the neighborhoods, the anti-Presidential Parkway activists, black people, poor people. This wasn’t long after our beloved and insane Neighborhood Planning Unit program was first created, so the NPUs were especially baffled to have their power stripped so quickly.

Dear lord, even Dan Sweat says that Young was “a little too pro-business”! (P.S. While we’re assigning books, let me throw Imagineering Atlanta on the pile.)
“One time I said, ‘Why don’t you and I just have a fight?’ I said, ‘Like Maynard and I used to, and maybe that’ll just help you out.’” (Nice inkjet printer, Dan Sweat!)

“Action Jackson” comes back for his third term (1990-1994) but the History Twins don’t have a lot to say on Maynard III yet. It’s time to offer some concluding thoughts.

“Over the past 50 years, managing Atlanta has come to mean more than just running the city. Today, it means managing a sense of the region, a 19-county metropolitan region.”
Perfect segue for their next episode.

Oh, and if you thought the stars of the Wits’ End Players all passed away between 1991 and 1993, you’re wrong – they sing “What a Friend We Have in Maynard” through the closing credits.

Friends, we have realized we cannot fully capture the magic – and especially the sweeping cinematography, the precise choreography, and stirring theme music – of The Making of Modern Atlanta on this very limited blog. If you are interested in whatever the future may hold in regards to TMOMA (whatever that means), please include your email address here so we have it on file for said future.

Next: Part Six – “The Alphabet City”

Previously: The episode with the inevitable Field of Dreams allusions

Previously: Atlanta’s pagan roots

In our last viewing of The Making of Modern Atlanta, the History Twins explored the mysterious suburbs and exurbs, where all the Pier 1 Tuscan Heritage Collection wine racks and Rubbermaid bids used as children’s furniture in the world cannot keep up with the sprawling tentacles of cul-de-sacs and Colonial Williamsburg strip malls. (I know, I know; that run-on sentence is inconsistent because this show was filmed in the early ’90s and Tuscan decor didn’t hit big time until a decade later.) And if this is the first time you’re joining us on our serial exploration of The Making of Modern Atlanta, please start back here.)

Now we will explore the next means by which Atlanta has expanded beyond its capabilities for quality and long-term sustainability: major league sports. The History Twins LOVE sports.

Literally the first sentence of this episode has a Field of Dreams reference. “Atlantan Billy Payne heard a voice: ‘If you build it, they will come.’” So now we know that this, like many of the episodes of TMOMA, will be framed in the context of Olympics anxiety: “Have we made it? Is Atlanta Losersville or a big-league city?”

Somehow, I feel the answer to that question will be both.

Anyway, what was Atlanta setting out to build? The Olympic Village – you know the one! – after 50 years of drumming up a sports culture here. This episode is spent recapping those decades of attempted team spirit.

Just an FYI – Dr. Dana White teaches a class on baseball – this is his thing.

“Because spectator sports are an inescapable part of contemporary culture, we have to acknowledge their power and presence. In this program, we’re going to acknowledge the role of major league sports in the making of modern Atlanta.”

Naturally, we have to start with the most boring sport that is somehow wildly popular, baseball. And if we start with baseball we have to start at ground zero for the Atlanta Crackers.A couple of Atlanta Crackers from the Southern League (white) and Black Crackers – Bob Montag and Chico Renfroe – discuss their heyday and wander around the vast pre-Sembler parking lot.
Mr. Renfroe died soon after this was filmed and the episode is dedicated to his memory.

Then the Braves came from Milwaukee (previously from Boston). A major league team. To demonstrate how MLB teams jumped around from city to city, TMOMA shows this map of the U.S. with lines demonstrating where teams moved, and an increasingly exasperated baseball in the top corner watching over it all.There’s a clip of Mayor Allen announcing the “verbal contract” of the relocation of the Braves, and the way he pronounces “Atlanta” is one of the most satisfying sounds you will ever hear in your life.

Atlanta was still the Deep South, and the Jim Crow laws that kept the Black Crackers in a separate part of the stands during white Cracker games were still very much in place. But the team that came down from Milwaukee included black and Latino players, including Hank Aaron. By the mid ’70s, fans had a reason to show up at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium (remember that era, when sports arenas were named for combined municipalities?): Hank Aaron.Once Aaron returned to Milwaukee, attendance at Braves games plummeted and “Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium became known as a nice place to get away and be alone with your thoughts.”Enter: TED TURNER. The Braves improved, Dale Murphy made a splash, everyone wore baby blue uniforms. Unfortunately this episode doesn’t have time to delve into the influence TBS had in shaping the hearts and minds of millions of future Braves fans across the South. There is a brief mention later with the Hawks, though.

“From there it was pretty much downhill.” As early as the mid-’80s there were threats of relocating the Braves to a newer stadium in Gwinnett County. Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium was old – 30 years! – and gross!That didn’t pan out, but obviously something needs to happen to replace this appalling relic before the Olympics. The real question is, does anyone think this is a good idea? Let’s ask some classically classy Braves fans what they think.
Wacky uncles say yes.
Your dad says yes.
Cool guy says yes.
Furman Bisher says NO!
Skip Caray says something about parking…ingress…egress…walking too far…I think that’s a yes?
This woman in the Goofy hat is obviously drunk; let’s not worry to much about if what she just said is a yes or no. I think we all know how this “new baseball stadium for the Olympics” scenario played out. It played out with people inventing a fake neighborhood called Turner Field and trying to make the name “The Ted” catch on – 15 years later, no one but Atlanta magazine calls it The Ted.

Finally, the baseball part is over. Time to talk about what a disaster the Falcons’ management has been, and how ridiculous it is to build a new stadium for the Falcons considering that they only play 7 or 8 games a year in said stadium and because they suck. Naturally Furman Bisher leads this discussion.

But this new stadium will be domed, don’t you see? “The newest, state of the art status symbol for sports towns.” Excuse me while I get a refill on sauv blanc.

“Here’s how the deal came down.” Who but……everyone’s (including velvet-voiced Steve Goss) favorite GSU historian. BESIDES YOU, Dr. Crimmins! Besides you!

Basketball: Ugh, I love those shots of the History Twins each alone on the crimson seats of stadiums past. So epic.I also love all these shots of dollhouses! Here’s Sam Massell and a Hawks player unveiling the Omni dollhouse.But seriously, seriously, are we a loser town are not? Are we “Losersville,” the name given us by our own local paper? Surprisingly, all of the people deeply invested in Atlanta’s sports culture who were interviewed for this episode say Atlanta is awesome and each name a couple of other cities that have worse teams than ours. Typical Atlanta defense mechanism – “We’re still better than Tampa, you know.” (No one actually says this; but I’m sure someone was thinking it.)

This must mean we’re wrapping up this episode – time to zoom in on the History Twins from far away while they pontificate on how far Atlanta has come, and what this means for the Olympics.“Being big league gave Atlanta the status its boosters craved. That’s why they rallied to keep even habitual losers like the Falcons in town. The city’s leadership paid for its big league image.”

This wraps up the first half of The Making of Modern Atlanta. The next four episodes were filmed in 1993, two years after these first four, and you’ll see there is a different feel to them. Some of that is due to basic technological advances made in the two-year interim.

Next up: Part Five – “Monuments to Mayors”

Previously: The Making of Modern Suburban Atlanta; or, The Great Dunwoody Tennis Boom of 1991

These findings are likely due to the fact that Pecanne Log’s only reader is Thomas Wheatley, and that’s just when we pop up in his Google Alerts for himself. We also might be like the 80th result when Thomas Wheatley googles “Sam Massell’s Celebrity Transit Policy Alaskan Cruise 2012.”

Anyway, all this goes to say that the average reader of this blog might also find interest in Burnaway’s annual art party fundraiser, happening this Saturday night:

1. The theme is “trains”
2. Tickets can be purchased online
3. Thomas Wheatley will be performing
4. There will be food trucks (of course) but it’s cool if you bring your own Jimmy Deans

To make up for there being no Atlanta cookie cakes for sale this year, here’s some TRAIN FASHION.

Southern Railway, Southern Streamline Train; March 1941

Southern Railway, The Tennessean; May 1941

Southern Railway, The Tennessean (period clothes); May 1941

Harvey Smith Enterprises (Trade Show Exhibits); May 1951

Eastern Air Lines, Model train; February 1950

Southeastern Maytag Company, 706 Lee Street; February 1956

Southern Streamline Train; March 1941

Southern Streamline Train; March 1941

Tucker Wayne Company, Kids on Train; March 1948

Tucker Wayne Company, Kids on Train; March 1948

Shriners Leaving on train at Terminal Station (Challenger, Sweet pea the skunk in a baby carriage); May 1947

Rex Allen, North Carolina and St. Louis Railway; May 1950

Southern Railway; 1941

Lambdin Kay's wedding sendoff, 1927

Miss Georgia (Betty Shepard) and others in train station, 1941

Miss Georgia (Betty Shepard) aboard train

Marcus Bartlett with Fred Waring's band, 1930s

Southern Railway, Southern Streamline Train; March 1941

All photos from the GSU photographs special collections.

Previously: Members only

The History Twins meet us by Arabia Mountain in DeKalb County. I love when they both go casual at the same time.They are hanging out in the driveway of their producer’s log cabin in the forest. “He seems to think that this log cabin helps him maintain his ties with his Appalachian roots,” jokes Dr. White. “In the 1990s, even log cabins come with adjustable-rate mortgages,” adds Dr. Crimmins later.
This is all a big joke to them. A BIG HILARIOUS JOKE.

White then tries to explain where all the interstates are. He calls I-285 “the archetypal Main Street of today’s urban America.” Ladies and gentlemen, behold the Tom Moreland Interchange, crudely nicknamed “spaghetti junction” after an ethnic dish. You’ll meet the man behind the traffic jam soon enough in this episode.He takes us on a terrifying drive through this “between” place.
Does anyone else feel like they’ve just been kidnapped?

After that stressful trip on the interstate, let’s just be casual at a linear park. What’s this? No big deal! Just a guy with his hand on his hip, talking about Druid Hills and other planned suburbs!They quote Warren Manning, landscape architect and Frederick Law Olmsted mentee: “Atlanta now begins to seriously feel the pangs of overcrowding, and to realize that something needs to be done. The solution requires the appreciation of and the need of adequate access to the landscape beauty of the region that the automobile now makes readily accessible to the city for homes and for vacation periods. Atlanta, tomorrow a city of a million, will by the year 2000 extend more than 15 miles out – far enough out on the spokes of transportation ways to permit radial roads to again pass off from secondary centers into the country. They will lead to industries and homes on the city’s south side, and to magnificent estates on the north – a piedmont picturesque.” (1922)

Innovative! And transportation planning in the 21st century still uses the same little calculations Manning ran to arrive at his radius distance. But seriously, this spokes concept is a great idea for the Atlanta regional roundtable to consider funding. Fifteen miles of radial roads out of Five Points so we can all get to our log cabins and vacation homes in Lithonia and Pine Lake.

The first ring of suburbs began, but guess who wasn’t invited to invest in and live amongst those tasteful lawns and well-apportioned Georgian and neoclassical manors? African Americans.  The color line issue again. And so the birth of the black suburbs, starting along Ashby Street.Sociologist Dr. Larry Earvin returns to discuss the westward and southern expansion of Atlanta’s black community. He briefly alludes to Mayor Allen’s Peyton Road barriers but TMOMA spends no more time highlighting this incident, which I think is a pretty major oversight when talking about “color lines” and how the city adjusted to the growing affluence and mobility of its African-American residents. So read more about it yourself here, here, and here.

The Wits’ End Players perform “Don’t Monkey with Peachtree.” The audience LOVES it.Then Dr. Crimmins makes some awesome faces talking about suburban shopping.Two things:

1. At the time of his appearance in the parking lot of Briarcliff Plaza, the Plaza Thatre was playing La Femme Nikita for $2.50, according to the marquee.
2. He pronounces Ponce de Leon weirdly. Something off about the “Leon” – like LEEÜNE in one quick syllable.

Lenox Square, Phipps Plaza, the Federal Aid Highway Act, more Leon (pronounced LEEÜNE) Eplan talking, George Goodwin talking. The three interstates are joined Dowtown. Leon Eplan talking more about interstates pulling people out of the center city into the suburbs, especially in the northside – “where lies our ultimate suburb, Dunwoody.”(Side conversation: What is considered “our ultimate suburb” in 2011?)

A humorous monologue by a “Mrs. Ashford Dunwoody” exaggerates the blue-blooded suburban breed.
But then we meet some of The Real Housewives of Dunwoody Village.“I’m aware of the tennis jokes and all that…the one about how a Dunwoody wife goes to a funeral? In a black tennis outfit. I really don’t like those jokes. I really think people have a misconception of this area.”

“I am a tennis player but I don’t really play. I don’t like that sort of competitive tennis all the time…and women sitting around. I don’t like that. I’ve done that. I did that in New Hampshire when the tennis boom was on.”

“We like the look of the Williamsburg look here in the middle of Dunwoody Village, but I guess since I’m a child of the ’70s it bothers me that everything would have to be exactly the same. When Turtle’s built a new building they had a purple awning on it and some of the Dunwoody people are fighting it, and I just think there’s so many more important things to fight about than a purple awning to wreck the Williamsburg look. I just say relax about it.”

The tennis jokes and awning panic may be over soon enough, ladies!

“I kind of think that Dunwoody housewife is a vanishing breed at this point, too, because most most women, most households need a second income.”

As Atlanta became “The City Without Limits,” special geographic boundaries had to be created by its residents like “inside the perimeter” and “outside the perimeter.” I guess there were no acronyms for this yet in 1991.

Outside the perimeter are “the new exurbs.” “The new exurbs exist within themselves alone.” Dana White takes us on a trippy and really visually metaphorical tour of Gwinnett Place Mall. “This mall is Gwinnett Place, but it could be any place.”“There’s nothing about it that bespeaks Atlanta. The Rich’s department store in this mall isn’t like the historic Rich’s downtown that finally withered and died. Here there is no Magnolia Room, no Pink Pig, no Christmas tree. No tradition of family ownership stretching back to the 1870s. The average shopper here doesn’t relate to any of this…For many such transient households, ‘community’ is more a generic term than a vital place.” HARSH.Get it?

Let’s be fair to the suburbanites and exurbanites, Dr. White! It’s a little more complex than that! All your good friends from episodes one and two created a lot of ways for people to get out of town.

Here comes the best part of the WHOLE SERIES.“In place of the old fried egg analogy with a single center, we now how a pepperoni pizza model with many centers spreading around the metropolitan area.”That’s Gwinnett Place that he’s indicating with his plastic knife up there.I WANT TO GO TO THE MALL FOOD COURT AND MAKE PIZZA MAPS SOOOOO BADLY NOW!!!“For the future, I suspect that this process will continue and will add even more centers to the eight to ten that we now have. For example, the outer perimeter highway that’s being proposed – “

OUTER PERIMETER?!?!?! What would we even do with an extra perimeter? When the first perimeter is still so popular! What would we do with more roads? Should such a thing be built?

“I think it ought to be built. I proposed it.”INTENSE! Who will save us from this expensive nightmare?

“The outer loop is the most ridiculous proposal in the state of Georgia…Before we spend any money on it, I hope we come to some form of sanity and stop it…The expense of that, the fragmentation and dispersal of the energies and the critical mass that makes for something great and efficient begins to disperse and becomes totally inefficient. Enormous waste of capital. I hope to God it never comes to pass.”

Dr. White sums up the sprawl and fracturing of the metro’s community: “A ‘City Without Limits’ perhaps, but also a city without focus.”

Time to get this all over with. What better place than back in southeast DeKalb County where we began this episode? But this time at “a moonscape, where construction of yet another giant regional mall has been stalled for years because of poor planning.” (Is this Stonecrest? Anyone?)“Can the outback be tamed, or does it have a momentum all its own?”“Right now, in the race between regional planning and development like this, the odds are with this.”[Foreboding music.]I don’t have a lot to add to this episode since the urban/suburban conundrum has been done to death. Frankly, this episode could have stood to have dug like five seconds deeper into a couple of the issues it raised or didn’t raise. However, there are still some really delightful moments like the Sbarro map of Atlanta’s growth hubs, the reference to the New Hampshire tennis boom, and Dr. Crimmins driving his maroon Volvo while looking like he thinks he’s being tailed.

Next up: Part Four – “How We’ve Played the Game” – This one is all about sports. Ughhhhh.

Previously: The History Twins: Forget all your troubles, forget all your cares…