Happy Night Before New Year's!

This is when I start my partying. Happy 2012, Atlanta, and remember the good times.

A Bad Era for Landmark Businesses?

Pearson's Wine is closing after New Year's Eve, just as The Poster Hut did two weeks ago, and the Varsity Jr. on Lindbergh Drive more than a year ago.

I haven't patronized these old standbys before (but will most likely swing by Pearson's for some discounts tomorrow), but their disappearances are a bit disappointing. I didn't post this just to be gloomy, though, but as a reminder to stick to your most favored neighborhood businesses instead of surrendering to the chain-store machine, especially if the experience isn't any better at the latter. As far as I've seen, it really isn't.

Atlanta Aspiring for International Renown Again

Before our airport's new, more efficient international terminal opens in a few months, the Convention and Visitors Bureau is hustling to attract more visitors and investors from abroad.

I'll be thrilled if this works, and my city becomes ever so slightly less homogeneous, but as I said on 25 November, we shouldn't even be luring visitors if we can't find anything worthwhile to engage them. The idea is for them to come back, or maybe even make Atlanta their new home, not to return to where they live now and spread the word about how we promised more than we could deliver.

(Note the description of the US Poultry and Egg Association as "one of metro Atlanta's biggest convention." Nice proofreading, Mr. Stafford.)

Bronze Plaques New Hot Item for Thieves

Oy.

Fellow Atlantans, always report if you see something as ostentatious as a man prying a bronze plaque from its holder. That's the least we can expect of ourselves, isn't it?

City Council Not Unanimous on Airport Contracts

More specifically, two members of the Transportation Committee, namely Felicia Moore and Michael Julian Bond (a superbly polite man in person, by the way), are upset about the increasingly apparent secrecy of the process of awarding airport concessions contracts in Atlanta. Stay tuned to see how long this battle will rage, and whether any meaningful casualties will be produced.

Scripted Responses Only, Sir

Mayor Reed has finally decided to open up about the airport concessions bidding process, about which I've previously written. Note his promise to publicize the names of the bid selection panel, a procedure which will hopefully be made permanent.

Merry Christmas, all.

A Quiet Christmas Eve

I haven't much to write about tonight, but only two items of good news to link to. Enjoy your Christmas, everybody, and stay away from news sites as much as you can for the duration.

Total Republican Takeover, Still In Progress

Sad news has arrived on the front of state-level redistricting. Eric Holder's Department of Justice, weirdly enough, has pre-cleared new district maps evidently designed to separate white and black voters as thoroughly as possible. Atlanta would be split into three separate districts under this map.

I can't imagine that Holder would let this through if he studied the map closely; that's my hope, at least. In any case, it's not a done deal, and there's still time to speak up about it. Insignificant though it may seem, I've emailed the Department with my concern.

The Greatest Idea Atlanta Has Had in Years

Here it is.

Not only will this place a default, 24-hour police presence in the city's rougher neighborhoods, but abandoned and gutted houses are finally being renovated and occupied. Forgive me for being uncritical, but this is the greatest community development plan I've seen in a while. Bravo, Atlanta.

A Bounced, Odorous Check

In lighter news today, PARKAtlanta has returned a check to a very irate object of their ticketing. Accusations of fraudulent tickets aside, I know what PARKAtlanta's problem is, and so does this anonymous loony; the brutal efficiency with which they issue tickets is so offensive, in most cases, that some visitors to the city are actually less wont to visit these days.

Indeed, I was once ticketed by them, but because they were forced that weekend to issue only warnings, I didn't lose any money (or sleep) over it. Never mind, of course, that I had been away from my car for maybe two minutes.

A moral for City Hall to digest: being extremely rude to visitors is a net loss.

Yet Another City Council Redistricting Meeting

I'm presenting a short reminder to those who are interested: Atlanta City Council is holding a public meeting on redistricting on 3 January at 11:15 AM. Of the different maps, Plan 5 will be considered. As I'll end up in the ridiculously gerrymandered District 4 no matter what, the new map makes no difference to me, but perhaps it will to you.

About Airport Contracts, Briefly

If you remember my post on the 14th about new restaurants coming to the airport, and were awaiting some insight into how they were selected, some has finally arrived. Granted, I first learned of the restaurants' planned arrival from the most fawning publication in town to City Hall.

Don't Litter, And That Is All

I'm still very ill, readers, and to boot, there's no news today. I didn't even encounter anything worth writing about today.

Therefore, I'd like to use what mental energy I have to remind everybody not to throw their trash wantonly around our city. Every cigarette box, candy wrapper, and miniature liquor bottle puts an ever-uglier veneer on the town, one that stays in the minds of our residents and visitors.

Yes, People Are Still Moving Here

I have no news items to link to today, and am feeling very ill, so I would just like to mention something that I thought was a positive sign. At my family's Christmas gathering this evening, I found out that two of my cousins, raised in the suburbs, have moved into the city this year. Perhaps gentrification (or re-urbanization, inward migration, densification, or yuppification) isn't yet dead.

Pop Art Is Dead

The city's Bureau of Code Compliance has forced property owner Jeff Vantosh to paint over a mural for King of Pops, on the grounds that King of Pops, a popsicle-cart business, has no permanent presence on the property.

Here's my constructive advice to the Bureau: we, residents of Atlanta, love to see well-drawn, colorful murals such as this. They add genuine character to our city and brighten our mood just a bit. Blank white walls facing the street are ugly, uninteresting, depressing, and invite gang tags, more of which I would like to see you eradicate rather than selectively enforcing an advertising policy in order to destroy pretty murals. Through actions such as the whitewashing of this mural, you imply that your office exists primarily to sustain its employees, rather than clear surfaces of unwanted (let me emphasize the 'un' in 'unwanted') graffiti and tags, or force slumlords to maintain their properties to the most basic aesthetic standards.

If you miss this mural, make your complaint to Bureau of Code Compliance director Kevin Bean (telephone 404-330-6190), or District 2 Councilman Kwanza Hall.

At Least MARTA Won't Rob You

I apologize for writing such paltry posts lately. I've caught a terrible virus, and haven't even been able to leave my apartment in days.

My friend visited me briefly yesterday, though, and told me a very interesting story about his ride on Gwinnett County Transit. On the way to Doraville MARTA station, his bus broke down, and when a replacement bus arrived, every passenger had to pay an extra dollar to board.

For all of the luxurious executive contracts and deferred maintenance on MARTA, they look positively angelic in comparison to this suburban bus agency. Also, MARTA operates on Sundays. It begs the question of whether a change in MARTA's management, only for the sake of change, would improve service.

Finally, Onion Rings at the Airport

In what is likely the immediate fallout of a failure of bureaucracy, our airport's immaculate yet nondescript atrium, and any of its other hallways wherein food is sold, will likely become better-defined in the near future. Louis Miller, The airport's Aviation General Manager, has described plans to bring to the airport such unique Atlanta eateries as Yeah! Burger, Sweet Georgia's Juke Joint, and yes, The Varsity. I could only imagine this being an improvement over the current, chain-heavy restaurant lineup.

As distrustful as I am of any story involving concessions at the airport (hello, same captain), I would much prefer to eat somewhere local, while waiting for a flight, than at any restaurant I can find in my destination city. For now, I'll leave the remaining gory details of business at the airport to your inquiry.

A Fast Train We Could Use

Never mind the maglev to Chattanooga, apparently. The state DOT has allocated $4 million for the study of a high-speed passenger rail line to Charlotte.

I'm not reacting as cynically to this story as I do to most, though. The fact that the DOT is even willing to allow for the possibility of high-speed rail in Georgia is a vast improvement in demeanor over the past several years. Let's hope that, as airline tickets inevitably climb in price, and as Charlotte becomes more formidable competition to our own city, the line is considered more seriously in the future.

I'm sorry for posting something so cursory, but I must be going now. After all, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Redistricting Takes an Academic Turn

Atlanta residents, in addition to City Council and state House and Senate districts, have a third redistricting on which to fix their eyes. Atlanta Public Schools has decided to redraw its student districts, allegedly to relieve overcrowding in its most highly regarded schools. Regardless of which new district map is approved, school closures are planned.

Some parents are concerned that longer-distance busing will be used to balance the enrollment of schools. Upsetting though it may be to some, and though childhood education is far from my area of expertise, I suggest shuffling teachers and other faculty betweeen different school clusters within Atlanta, at least on a single occasion. Although such problems as poor building maintenance and adjoining neighborhood crime can lower the desirability of a school, a greater problem, I think, is disinvestment on the part of faculty an students, which can occur in a sort of feedback loop.

Atlanta, Ever-Defaced and Ever-Changing

Although this probably should have been yesterday's post, I would like to mention how glad I am to actually be back in Atlanta. I had so desperately wanted to take a vacation to a city I've never seen before, which in this case was New Orleans, and although I loved the opportunity to see, eat and hear what I did, my hometown is, at least now, a sweet sight to me.

Given the preventable calamities of the past decade (yes, even Fox News blames the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), New Orleans is obviously not a city one would expect to compare favorably with Atlanta, at least from a perspective besides tourism. Mugging and carjacking appear to be at least as problematic there as here, for one thing. Several multistory buildings downtown still lie abandoned after Katrina, with blown-out windows and disintegrating facades; one was even directly across from my top-story window at the Renaissance hotel. Police patrols are more rare, although I thankfully saw more officers on foot than in Atlanta.

Sad though I am to see the city still hurting after that disfiguring flood, New Orleans at least has one edge on Atlanta. Its inhabitants, even those who were old enough to remember when they first moved to the city, are obsessively proud of it, affectionate towards it, and apt to stay there through the hardest of times. This could be analytically explained several ways; it was founded roughly twelve decades before Atlanta, was the largest city in the South well before Atlanta's postbellum rise to prominence, and gained a cultural uniqueness, through isolation by water and bayou and its history of Spanish, then French, then Anglo-American colonization. As it was the only city in the antebellum South to allow slaves to play their music in public, it eventually spawned a new form of music that would help define 20th-century America.

Atlanta, by contrast, was destroyed near the end of the Civil War, and has since struggled to retain its history in the face of 'forward-looking' urban renewalism from state highway planners, architects seeking to cocoon tenants from the scary city outside (and being rewarded in life with an illegally renamed street), and mayors with a bent towards demolition. My grandfather and great-grandfather were frequent visitors to the city, and loved being here, but much of the connected, vibrant city they knew is forever destroyed. Atlanta's problem, in this regard, is that its inhabitants, especially the powerful ones, often regard the past as irrelevant, or even to be despised entirely based on certain hateful aspects of years gone by.

This, not the local preponderance of non-natives (which is what my grandparents all were), is why the pride I felt in New Orleans is missing here. We, Atlantans, don't know who we are, struggle to know what to preserve and what to let fade away, and each have a personal opinion, rather than much of a consensus, of what makes our city unique and worthy of having us.

Let The Transit Wars Commence

I apologize for not posting yesterday, as I had promised; I couldn't fly out of New Orleans on Thursday, and instead had to take Amtrak home. Beware of the moribund AirTrain Airways, by the way, as they massively overbooked every flight of the day, and I had to petition their ground staff in New Orleans for an hour before receiving a refund. My vacation was pretty fun, nonetheless.

Sadly, I had to return home to this sort of description of people's reactions to next year's proposed transit tax. At a Transit Governance Task Force meeting yesterday in Cobb County, Susan Stanton, hailing from a certain political movement, advanced the familiar argument that urban planning with mass transit in mind was communistic and reminiscent of the Soviet Union. It would force a lifestyle on local residents, she asserted; evidently, she doesn't believe that has happened before in Atlanta. I'd be surprised if she didn't assemble many of her friends to vote against the tax next year.

The state of Georgia is proposing that GRTA become an oversight agency for metropolitan Atlanta's transit agencies, ostensibly to maybe, perhaps act as a financial intermediary from the state to the agencies. Will MARTA receive specifically dedicated state funding, like its peers elsewhere? Though I wouldn't count on it, this is the closest the state has moved in that direction for many years.

A River Runs Grey

A creek running through Perkerson Park, in the Sylvan Hills neighborhood, was discovered by Creative Loafing author Andisheh Nouraee to be flowing grey. I've encountered such noxious-looking creeks on occasion before, though I don't exactly know the pollutant; it could be sourced to anything from raw sewage to stone quarries. The creek eventually drains into the South River.

The polluter, if the state Environmental Protection Division deems it prudent, will eventually be fined, perhaps even forced to agree never again to dump the substance into the creek. As they have placed the onus for the investigation upon the City of Atlanta, however, this depends upon the cooperation of both. Given the creek's path, the likely source of the pollution is an industrial section off Avon Avenue visible from MARTA rail.

A Banner Day for Public Access?

There is some good news for those who are still fans of cable-access television. City Council has apparently approved a one-year extension of funding for People TV, which is cable channel 24 within the city limits. More specifically, Kwanza Hall (my Councilperson until next year's redistricting), Natalyn Archibong and C.T. Martin have previously introduced ordinances to further fund People TV.

I find one inherent asset immediately obvious in public access television; the programming, though entirely user driven and unregulated for the most part, is brought directly to the viewer without having to be sought out and evaluated based on the appearance of a hyperlink, front page or DVD cover. It is presented to the channel-surfer immediately, in full force, and whether that potential viewer stops there or moves on is based on his or her perception of the program itself. Weird, unpopular ideas have at least as much of a chance on terrestrial television, in my judgment, as in the ever more widely encompassing internet.

The Slow Death of the Corporate Newspaper

In highly predictible news that happens to be about the news, the Journal-Constitution has adopted a policy to avoid mention of competing news outlets. Simply put, reports from or events hosted by any journalistic source besides the Journal-Constitution, WSB-TV, or WSB radio cannot be sourced by name. Obviously, stories written by the Associated Press are not under this restriction.

Why do the executives of this paper feel so threatened? For one thing, the Journal-Constitution's print circulation has been falling for years, as has that of newspapers in most of the world. Last year, the paper's staff were moved from the steadily emptying brutalist building at 72 Marietta Street to an office park in Dunwoody. The Journal-Constitution, upon its exit, donated the building to the city. Whether they had no choice but to move or simply felt more comfortable in the suburbs is still a mystery to me, but Creative Loafing was rather colorful in its imagining of their motives.

Much has changed since the Journal and Constitution were merged in 1982, and even in the last few years. The paper doesn't seem to be the force it once was in the city, almost as though its writers are acknowledging its dwindling relevance. It is my belief that such publications as Creative Loafing, Atlanta Progressive News, the Daily Report and the Atlanta Voice, among others I might have forgotten, are the future of journalism in the city, alongside blogs such as this. We are already past the age of highly centralized news media in Atlanta, and I truly couldn't be happier about it.

The Dog Lady

The Capitol View Manor neighborhood is currently experiencing an infestation more familiar to our friends in the suburbs. The city has closed Emma Millican Park after a small den of coyotes was discovered. Coyotes, which were historically native to the Great Plains before spreading to most of North America, are very elusive creatures, and rarely attack humans. Nonetheless, precaution is crucial when dealing with wild canines, and the city has demonstrated no less than the requisite degree of precaution in this instance.

It turns out, however, that the den is on private property adjacent to the park that is owned by Ami Ciontos, in whose yard leg traps were set against her wishes. The city has thus fired the trapper hired for the mission and is seeking a replacement. Ami is quite the advocate for dogs, particularly pitbulls; she is founder and president of the Atlanta Underdog Initiative, and has worked for many other such organizations. Moreover, she has appeared on Fox5 not once, or twice, but thrice to advocate for pitbull owners and breeders.

I'm no hater of dogs, myself, or even coyotes, despite being more of a cat person. A coyote ate one of my family's two cats three months ago, whom (or which, if you prefer) I had watched grow from the frail runt of the litter into a healthy but decidedly cuckoo eleven-year-old adult. Though I still miss Georgie, I take comfort in knowing she was food for a wild animal whose only prerogative was survival, rather than just roadkill. Imagine how dumb it would be for me to be mad at a coyote. They can't reason, at least not nearly as well as they can hunt.

More succinctly, coyotes are not at fault for Millican Park's closing; humans are. At the expense of the neighborhood's largest park, a place for children to play and for all residents to get to know the outdoors in Georgia's most populous city, Mrs. Ciontos has inflexibly prohibited the "just cruel" trapping of non-native fauna on her property. The city is currently exploring which action, if any, can be taken against the Ciontos household, and because the couple have placed their inordinate love of dogs above the needs of their neighborhood, I encourage the city in their fight.

Is Vine City Still on the Hook for the Georgia Dome?

Though I'm ordinarily an impatient person, I consider myself lucky that the Community Development Committee meeting at City Council this past Tuesday ran an hour behind schedule. I learned much of the myriad forces, both legalistic and neighborly, that battle over the path to be taken by development (and, more often recently, demolition) in the city. In the midst of so many items and petitions, I never expected to hear mention of one of Atlanta's most insular economic generators.

The Georgia Dome, apparently, has a housing trust fund named after it, established as a conciliatory measure after plans for the site were challenged in Vine City, which was partially destroyed in the process of building the Dome. It is alternately referred to as the Community/Housing Development Trust Fund, or the Vine City Trust Fund. Allegedly, money from the fund has built and restored dozens of homes in the neighborhood since it was established.

Despite this, Vine City hardly appears to be faring better today than in 1989. The two Census tracts comprising the neighborhood, 25 and 26, have lost residents since 2000, most notably nearer to the Dome. Vacant houses and apartment complexes abound, and neighborhood improvement efforts are constantly facing an uphill battle. Heroin trafficking has a vicegrip on the neighborhood, which is referred to in the context of drug dealing as "the Bluff" together with English Avenue. The biggest economic catalysts moving to Vine City in the near future, at least according to last year's news, are a new Wal-Mart, the footprint of which is causing some concern, and the conversion of a former Bronner Brothers building into condos.

Clearly, the presence of a mammoth football stadium literally across the street hasn't helped Vine City, at least not as much as an outsider would expect. It's not the legal or professional responsibility of the Georgia Dome or the Atlanta Falcons to keep this neighborhood out of the abyss. Still, the attachment of the Dome's name to a meager neighborhood trust fund, which to this day is mentioned periodically in City Council, lends the dishonest appearance of communal concern on the part of these masterful examples of capitalism. Either genuinely contribute to the neighborhood you overshadow, I say to them, or step aside and let those who do care be the saviors of Vine City.