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.