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.