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The ATL - love it or hate it?

A

AlchemisTO

Guest
So I was in Hotlanta for a conference this weekend and I'm kind of torn between love and hate. On one hand, this is the most archetypically sprawling, car-oriented city in the world (its urban footprint is about half the physical size of Switzerland, honestly), but on the other hand it has a fantastic nightlife scene, some great leafy neighbourhoods and a generally great vibe. It's also the only city I've been to in America with a real black middle class.

The whole city is kind of a waste of time for people who like walkable neighbourhoods and subtlety; Peachtree street is basically like Yonge St., NYCC on steroids and the SUVs are hung with bling. The PoMo architecture is more ridiculously overscaled than the basilica of St. Peter, but also a lot more exciting and brash than the frugal pedestrian condos we are building here. Sometimes Canadian understatement (aka being cheap) can get tedious and boring.

I think that the ATL is probably the diametric opposite to Toronto in just about every way, but that's precisely what made it a great place to visit. Anybody else with similar experiences?
 
Sounds like the same reasons why I found Vegas so interesting - I really hate the place: it has got to be the most unsustainable city in the US - growing like mad, in the middle of the desert, surrounded by mountains, with every subdivision having a gate around it, and SUVs everywhere, with an economy based on tourists seeking sin and crass, and financial back offices.

Though the strip is something completely different - talk about your ridiculous overstated architecture. I think it is worth seeing once. Unfortunately, my trip to Vegas predates my first digital camera, otherwise I'd post pics.
 
There are a couple of nice neighbourhoods, like Little Five Points. The downtown is dead, or at least it was when I was there last time - and it wasn't even the sweaty season then.
 
I'm ambiguous as to the place, the sire of CNN and Coca-Cola and all that, yet reading Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full years back painted a more varied picture. I suppose I'd have to check it out for myself. Some photothreads of the place on SSP impressed me.
 
I spent 13 months working in Alpharetta, so my view of the Atlanta area is quite sour. However, there were some nice outdoor walking trails in my area.

Little five points was a decent area - hung out there a few times. But there are such large distances between everything.
 
I spent five days in Atlanta in 2000 visiting a friend who had moved from Toronto to Mid-Town Atlanta. Honestly, I think it can be a great place to visit, but would never consider living there.

Little Five Points is great in a Torontoish way, but is horribly small and not reflective of the rest of the city. Most of the "action" (if you can call it that) was not downtown (or midtown), but in some strange Mississauga-ish place called "Buckhead."

Everyone also told me to see the "Atlanta Underground" which they billed as some giant subterranean shopping complex. Truth was it was a very modestly sized tourist trap and I was out of there within 10 minutes.

Atlanta is a big city, but honestly doesn't feel like much of a world city nor a city that hosted the summer games only a decade ago. The old downtown (not the tourist one) is sort of scary and underinvested in. Parts of the MARTA system are encouring though and indeed some parts of the city are incredibly beautiful in a Designing Woman way. Also fantastic is the fact that the city truly does have a "black middle class." Still, when it comes down to it, it really doesn't have much to offer an "urbanist."
 
I did enjoy the Midtown Music Festival there where I got to see some really cool bands (Foo Fighters, Drive By Truckers, Ludicris) and some really crumby bands (the "new" Doors with Ian Asterbury from the Cult, Wyclef Jean (surprisingly), Ashley Simpson (who was still better than the Doors or Wyclef)).

I also liked the CNN tour. The World of Coke was stupid. The hockey arena is nice, and the ballpark where the Braves play is very cool (though hard to get to on transit). Transit seemed generally pointless - fine from the airport to downtown, but beyond that not of much use.

Buckhead reminded me of most other party / club districts.
 
I was in Atlanta some years ago for about four days and found it loathesome. I remember thinking, "there's a city here somewhere I think, but damned if I can find it". I didn't have a car and spent the whole time being shuttled around on buses. From a city design point of view, it's extremely incoherent.
 
Buckhead -- that's the name I was trying to remember.

I have read, somewhere, that Atlanta has the 3rd biggest gay population in the U.S. Must be the southern refuge for those Brick Pollitt's not yet ready to go West or live with Yankees.
 
Well outside of the "inner city" Toronto and Atlanta are basically the same. Suburban subdivisions with shopping malls.

Atlanta like every city is going to have nice things. No place can be fully written off.
 
What a lazy and absurd response.
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Especially when same person is always saying how much denser our suburbs are than typical American ones (and can thereby support higher order transit).

Five minutes on Google Earth will show that there's little similarities.

I have read, somewhere, that Atlanta has the 3rd biggest gay population in the U.S. Must be the southern refuge for those Brick Pollitt's not yet ready to go West or live with Yankees.
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Despite everything, it is a pretty gay city. There's a collection of mega-clubs (I think they were in Midtown) that cater to the scene. They are pretty spread out though and there's no "village" by any means, but certainly businesses that cater to the queer community can be found all around. From what I've also heard the lesbian community is generally outside of Hotlanta in Decatur County (a.k.a. "Dick Hater County").
 
^LOL

The low-density nature of the city cannot be stressed enough. Even midtown, you could be within spitting distance of 1,000 ft skyscrapers and yet the neighbourhood could feel like some weedy back lot behind a gas station in Delhi, Ontario. My flight back to Toronto was at night and I'm not kidding when I say that twenty minutes later, when they already began serving drinks, we had still not left the asteroid belt of cul de sac streetlights behind! The exurban sprawl is hidden under extremely dense (the only thing that's dense in Atlanta is the tree cover) foliage so that when you fly in, the city kind of looks like Angkor Wat or Chichen Itza - a huddle of imposing buildings surrounded by dense forest growth.

Atlanta is still an influential city and the home of the whole Crunk movement. It's the headquarters for some of the most influential corporations in the world, Coke and CNN, and the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr. Like I said earlier, and Darkstar reiterated, it's the only city in America that has a solid black middle class and that puts it very high in my books, above many "walkable" US cities. If the city does indeed have the 3rd largest gay population in the US and a black middle class, it has to be a very progressive place that offers something to people that might just be more meaningful than the ability to get around without a car.
 
The exurban sprawl is hidden under extremely dense (the only thing that's dense in Atlanta is the tree cover) foliage so that when you fly in, the city kind of looks like Angkor Wat or Chichen Itza - a huddle of imposing buildings surrounded by dense forest growth.
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Yes! When Darkstar and I flew into Atlanta last year we were both amazed by the amount of dense forest everywhere within the sprawl.
 
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