The Hustle and Hypocrisy of Andrew Young's Atlanta
Norman, Geoffrey
.................................................................................................................. Geoffrey Norman THE HUSTLE AND HYPOCRISY OF ANDREW YOUNG'S ATLANTA The...
...As we go to press, the clubs are still open...
...The report supplied twenty-five examples of each kind of story...
...But after a time the boosterism be comes oppressive, like the miasmic air outside the air-conditioned hotels and restaurants...
...Tomorrow night, most of the shelters will close...
...It listed the various improvements that would be made at the airport and elsewhere to impress the visiting delegates and, more importantly, those 15,000 reporters...
...We had seventeen homocides in the last quarter of '87...
...I did not lock my door when I came here," he says...
...However...
...You cannot have one without the other, and since there would be no Atlanta without growth, prosperity is necessary to its very being...
...something in the spirit of Ted Turner, who is from Atlanta and owns the local baseball franchise...
...He is mayor of a city of less than half a million souls, some 70 percent of them black, but he has made himself an international figure, pounding the pulpit for prospering, successful Atlanta...
...Sometimes the city's racial hair-trigger leads to ludicrous spectacles, such as the widely reported race for Congress between two prominent blacks who had both soldiered faithfully in the civil rights wars: Julian Bond and John Lewis...
...Consider: In mid-February, the Chamber of Commerce issued a document updating members on the city's preparations for the convention...
...Russell's bid turned out to be some $10,500 lower than the Jones-Mitchell bid (on a more than $13 million contract...
...Long-time Atlanta people will tell you that newcomers are direct and uncomplicated racists...
...The most pressing problem in the neighborhood, he says, is crime, because the crime problem, especially the drugs, is making the housing situation worse...
...But the problems are deep and possibly beyond solving since many of them come down, in the end, to race...
...Call it a slum or call it a ghetto...
...One of Mayor Young's earliest promises was to reopen Underground so that tourists and conventioneers staying in down town hotels would have something to do at night...
...The positive way of looking at the taxi problem is to say, as Dan Sweat, a spokesman and leader of the Atlanta business community for more than twenty years, does: "It's a problem in every major city...
...It is not just desirable...
...To accommodate his buildings to the fear people feel for the streets, architect John Portman designed overhead walkways so that visitors can go from building to building, looking for shops, restaurants, and other diversions, without ever touching the sidewalk...
...In fact, Atlanta may be the most racially touchy city in the entire union...
...W hile it may be unfair to hold Young entirely accountable for the problems on Atlanta's police force, it is instructive in this, the year of the preacher/politician, to look at the way he has governed (as opposed to promoted) the city...
...When I first moved here," he says, "there was a tremendous sense of hope...
...It has become a way of life...
...According to law and precedent, the late bid should never have been opened...
...One of the outlying counties is the fastest growing in the nation...
...M onths before the first delegate had even bought his ticket to Atlanta for the Democratic National Convention, the city was at work, getting ready...
...so difficult in fact that Dan Sweat's organization-Central Atlanta Progress, a group which works to coordinate private and public sector efforts in the city-has put up money to send recruiters out to military bases in the South and is awarding a finder's fee to anyone who brings in a qualified recruit who makes it through training...
...Camellias and dogwoods still grow on the suburban lanes and Lewis Grizzard still churns out his lame good-old-boy humor in the pages of the local paper, but Atlanta is Sunbelt contemporary in every way, from the expense account restaurants to the BMW dealers to the transplanted New Jerseyites who live in the 90-percent-white northern counties and worry about the blacks coming in and ruining the schools...
...Attorney, Robert Barr, secured indictments of two black Fulton County commissioners (one a former Atlanta police chief) as a result of an investigation begun by his black predecessor, an Atlanta city councilman charged that it was part of a conspiracy to discredit black officials...
...There is even, God help us all, nude dancing...
...Ford had told his visitor that even the churches have abandoned Summerhill...
...He disdains procedure"jumping through hoops," he calls it-and his most precious asset, his political popularity, remains untarnished even though corruption has become more and more a part of the way Atlanta does business...
...The local appetite for scandal is just not there...
...Traffic is horrible and getting worse...
...There is a Pulitzer Prize waiting for someone who will go down to city hall and dig for it," is a phrase the visitor hears more than once, including from people in the media...
...Intoxicated This is a city that insists on seeing things in a "positive" way...
...In fact, there is kind of a glow of pride among the people who tell visitors about the power of the black vote here in the city too busy to hate...
...That is twenty officers less than we need...
...his capacity as Mrs...
...The first black mayor of Atlanta, Maynard Jackson, appointed a black police chief and pushed vigorously for equal opportunity on the force and for promotion of qualified black officers...
...It is all right for the rich to get richer, he has said, as long as their gain "bubbles up to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and heal the sick...
...If we are successful, the media and their audience will see a sophisticated city with tradition, charm and beauty, harmony among citizens, stability in municipal authorities and prosperity in its business community...
...Don't nobody care...
...On the matter of the eternal highway construction and the consequent bottlenecks, Sweat is equally positive...
...Anyone who has ever taken a cab from the Atlanta airport will be exceedingly reluctant to do so again...
...Young, as widely reported, placed a call to Bond's wife after she told police her husband and several other prominent blacks, including Young himself, were cocaine users...
...three minutes after the deadline for sealed bids had passed, another company, owned by Herman Russell, a prominent black Atlanta businessman and a crony of Young, also submitted a sealed bid...
...Landlords convert single family residences into rooming houses and charge drug dealers as much for a single room as families had paid for an entire house...
...It is important to realize that black officials are being harassed all over the country," said a speaker at what was called a "Freedom Rally," held in support of the indicted officials...
...To insure this, Hartsfield built the first big Atlanta airport and provided it with runways long enough to handle jets, even though no jets were yet in service...
...We thought we were going to get five million in federal money, under one of these community action grants," says Ford, "but Mayor Young grabbed it for Underground...
...A large measure of the city's police problems can be attributed to low morale on the force...
...Prosperity in Atlanta is not a mere rational desire for healthy economic growth, it is a consumptive fever...
...They were afraid of street criminals, virtually all of them black, who hung out at bars with names like "The Mineshaft...
...We had built us a stadium and put a major league team in it and there just wasn't any stopping us...
...And how wildly...
...I feel like Andy Young has turned his back on us...
...It all made Atlanta seem like some hick town trying to come across as big time, pointing to the brand new rotating restaurant on top of the bank building as a sign of its sophistication...
...They are putting adults, children, babies on the street," she says...
...construction company in the country...
...that Herman Russell was his friend and political supporter...
...The report then went on to brief members on what kind of stories about Atlanta they could expect the media to cover during the convention...
...This in spite of the fact that he came close, recently, to being indicted for obstruction of justice in the famous Julian Bond drug investigation...
...If one wanted to find a suitable, if overused, regional metaphor, it would be kudzu, the Southern plant that devours rural areas and buildings in its ceaselessly growing tendrils...
...Young added that Axam was acting like a fundamentalist preacher, taking Sunday School teachings too seriously, and that she did not appreciate the difference between the letter and the spirit of the law...
...But when those SROs were torn down, they had nowhere to go, except to the streets and to the shelters...
...These impressions will pay dividends into the 21st century, tangible dividends: more investment, more jobs, a broader tax base to pay for our infrastructure needs, and a secure reputation as a truly world-class city...
...They never replaced them and, when they did that, they cre ated a refugee situation that continues today...
...In the late sixties and early seventies its cutesy nightspots were a tourist draw...
...If it failed before because of crime," says Bill Shipp, who for years covered city politics for the Constitution and now publishes his own newsletter, "then there is a good chance it will fail again because of crime...
...Look at New York...
...And what makes that even harder to accept is that it has been happening with a black regime in power...
...The race turned ugly and one of the issues became...
...The police have a difficult time finding qualified recruits...
...There are different theories to explain why Underground failed in the first place, and may well fail again...
...You see those dudes up there on the corner," Dean says to his visitor...
...0 precedent and the bid clock...
...That is understood...
...Being of the breed, boosters in Atlanta tend to exaggerate or even lie, outright, about their city...
...Churches are empty...
...The rule has always been, no one who is over 15 years old is invited...
...It may have it now, with a new editor who was formerly Washington bureau chief for the New York Times...
...The biggest problem, according to Ford, is housing...
...The "positive" view is that it was undercapitalized and disrupted by construction of a MARTA line through one end of the area...
...But when the stadium went up, Atlanta was admitted, literally and figuratively, to the big leagues...
...This time, the positives say, there won't be any construction and there will be plenty of money...
...When the current U.S...
...But the taxi mess and the unfinished roads do not dampen the spirits of Atlanta's boosters as they prepare for the convention...
...When you tell someone where you are sending your children to school," says a prominent (white) attorney, "the first question you're asked is, `What's the mix?' Atlanta is just like that...
...But that image was old and unexciting and, besides, everyone had heard about how Atlanta had whipped bigotry through prosperity...
...I did not think there was such a chance in this case...
...If the Chamber of Commerce could hire a mayor, Young would have the job for life...
...If Young has administered Atlanta ineptly and tripped over the details, then it hasn't dimmed his national reputation...
...These were divided into two categories...
...When a serial killer was murdering black children in Atlanta, rumors quickly spread that the KKK was responsible, that the police knew who the killers were but were covering up because the killers were white (this in spite of the fact that the officer in charge of the special task force was black), or that the police were not doing enough because the victims were black...
...To the Reverend Ford, the possibility of crime in Underground, when it is completed, is abstract...
...While this convention would only be the fourth largest held in the city in 1988, it would-by any measure-be the most visible...
...And they are more arrogant than deluded...
...But the airport line will not be dedicated until a month or so before the convention, so the visitor who has come for an early inspection of the city is obliged to pick up a rental or take a cab...
...But, then, Atlanta isn't really a Southern city anymore...
...He introduces a woman who lived in the same building for twenty-six years and found herself faced with eviction when the landlord decided to renovate and turn the building into single rooms for rent...
...There was much to amuse a visitor in this episode...
...And the cabs themselves were, if anything, worse than the drivers...
...He will no doubt give a welcoming speech to the delegates and be hailed as both leader and symbol of the new party...
...The visitor-or the convention delegate-will likely find this sort of boosterism harmless and amusing at first...
...To be sure, there is a sheen of prosperity about downtown Atlanta where the convention will be held and the hotels are located...
...Some of the racial hassling is faintly comic...
...Under negative examples there was Nude Dance Clubs...
...He said he argued with his subordinate Clara Axam, who wanted to stick with The jury, acting in the spirit of a fundamentalist preacher, found for Jones...
...Just as the city will never agree to any plan that calls for its incorporation into a government that represents the metropolitan area and reality...
...At one time, Atlanta had more public housing than any other city in the U.S...
...Some of it is general and symbolic-a loathing of the dum dum bullets used in police sidearms, for example...
...Along with the nudie bars, the report had listed the missing and murdered children case, Ku Klux Klan activity, and profiles of civil rights activists among the twenty-five possible negative stories the media might find in Atlanta...
...Everything in Atlanta sooner or later comes down to race," Bill Shipp says...
...And they don't know where to go...
...Finally the man sued under the equal opportunity statutes and won his case and a judgment of almost a quarter of a million dollars against the city...
...Gone to the west side where the black middle class lives...
...No less a local figure than Manuel Maloof, DeKalb County chief executive officer and owner of Manuel's, a restaurant and saloon that is the closest thing in all of metropolitan Atlanta to a celebrity-sports-press-hangout, will tell a visitor: "That's when I knew we'd made it, the first time I went out on Highway 85 and saw that stadium all lit up for a major league baseball game...
...and the spoils of power...
...Explanations and apologies followed...
...Portman has also considered building a high rise that would serve as a kind of Underground: all the shops and bars in one building, connected by aboveground walkways so that the street people can't get in...
...Its murder rate approaches Detroit's...
...It is called Hartsfield International after one of the first in a series of Atlanta mayors who saw a big future for the city, as the commercial hub and capital of the new, prosperous South...
...In the end, Atlanta does not so much seem the city of the twenty-first century or the city too busy to hate as a city that suffers from all the ordinary problems...
...If he could not get a modern domed stadium, at municipal expense, then he would have to leave town...
...He says, "I look at that as a healthy sign...
...There is, for example, the case of the disgruntled white historian who thought he was the best-qualified candidate to run something called "The Cyclorama," an old-fashioned diorama depicting the Battle of Atlanta, the Confederacy's last doomed attempt to halt Sherman on his way to the sea...
...There is crime, racism, corruption, pollution, poverty, homelessness, and so on and so forth...
...Good news is vital and Atlanta works desperately to create it and spread it...
...But if you drive a few blocks, cross the interstate, and then turn down Capitol Street and go past the stadium where the baseball Braves and the football Falcons perform (miserably) you will find yourself in another world, this one full of vacant lots, burned-out buildings, crumbling clapboard homes, and a few dreary project houses...
...City councilmen have been sentenced to prison for taking bribes in the form of consulting fees (as equal opportunity experts) and the suspicion is widespread that there is much more there than meets the eye...
...And I figure a little parking deck like this was probably not much for them...
...It's a rare occasion when an Atlanta booster will admit that his city is equivalent to any other, and especially New York...
...An example of Young's executive style came to light in court earlier this year...
...Lately, its visionary citizens had taken to calling Atlanta "the next international city" or "the city of the twenty-first century...
...This is Summerhill, part of the city of Atlanta and depressingly familiar...
...They sing all night and raise the dead...
...In Atlanta, everyone is an apostle of growth...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 25 of Emmaus House...
...That was the most in the city and a 13 percent increase...
...The cost to the city was $1 million...
...One wonders, from time to time, if it is possible to look at things in a merely factual way, and decides that it is not, at least not in Atlanta...
...In the meantime, however, Atlanta has found it needs a new stadium...
...Robert Barr says, cautiously, "I felt that the law had been broken but my standard is to ask the grand jury for an indictment only when I think that there is a good chance of winning a conviction in court...
...But many people had lived in some of those buildings for thirty years...
...We've got people being evicted up and down this street," Dean says...
...The mayor of the city, Andrew Young, an ordained minister and Jimmy Carter's delegate to the U.N., has become an evangelist for economic growth and one of the few conspicuous black prophets of trickle-down economics...
...With work to do, Ford excuses himself after introducing his visitor to a slim black man who wears a suit and tie and carries a briefcase...
...Even if your facts are correct, you are being "negative...
...Oh yeah...
...Crime in his neighborhood is, on the other hand, immediate enough that he has bars on the window of his small church, an abandoned building that his parish bought for $10,000...
...It was quickly decided that a domed stadium was feasible and necessary and it was planned for another poor section of town where still more homes would be destroyed to accommodate it, and the Falcons' owner...
...Austin Ford, an Episcopalian, has been here for more than twenty years now...
...When he wonders aloud why nobody has done the investigative work, he is told that the newspaper lacked the will, for years and years...
...Dean then explains that Summerhill is part of what the police call "zone three," the most dangerous of the six zones the city has been divided into...
...Geoffrey Norman THE HUSTLE AND HYPOCRISY OF ANDREW YOUNG'S ATLANTA The Democrats have chosen an appropriate site for their July convention, a city where all their fantasies thrive...
...because they were very seedy places...
...Today is the last day of March...
...Somebody, it was said, had even called the telephone number for the exact time on that day and, yes, the clock was three minutes fast...
...On the visit to the daycare center, he described the annual Christmas party Emmaus House holds for neighborhood children each year...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 27...
...The Rev...
...If we ever get to where we're not building more highways, then it'll be a bad sign...
...Crime in zone three, he explains, is out of control...
...For years, it has been unusual to find a cab driver at Hartsfield who could speak English, make change, or find his way around town...
...There is very little street life in downtown Atlanta after dark...
...There is a city and a downtown area but the reality of Atlanta is the continuous, festering growth that extends across some six different counties and forty-two different municipal governments...
...For a generation now-since the days of the sit-ins-Atlanta has been "The City Too Busy To Hate...
...Told of people in other Southern urban areas who claim that they don't want to be "another Atlanta," Young responds: "They're lying...
...Good news will encourage people to emigrate to Atlanta and Atlanta needs the growth...
...And then there were "negative" stories...
...That would cost blacks, and black politicians, too much power...
...Its air quality is third worst in the nation...
...which black man was the white man's candidate...
...Some lots are vacant, some houses boarded up...
...And Atlanta, which is a city that, above all, knows how to get things done, even the toughest things, went to work to make sure that those 15,000 would see the city as the city sees itself...
...A tlanta's law enforcement needs have been recognized for years...
...To them, racism has never been an institution, only an attitude...
...CAP hopes to add more than 200 officers to the shorthanded force and to help morale in the bargain...
...Those interstates, along with a beltway around the city and several other large highways, have been in more or less constant construction for the last twenty years...
...Ford has established a community center called Emmaus House in Summerhill...
...Now, we need these bars...
...Young admitted that he had talked to a representative from the Russell company in the period between the submission of the bids and his own decision to award the contract to Russell...
...Young also testified that he'd never heard of another instance in which a contract was awarded to a bidder who came in late...
...When they came in here and built that stadium, they tore down 5,700 dwellings," says Ford...
...Law suits followed and morale plummeted as promotions were frozen for several years...
...You just can't keep going on like that...
...We'll do this by providing credible, consistent information, access to articulate spokespeople, and flexibility in accommodating the myriad of requests, concerns and problems that will inevitably occur...
...To a visitor who could remember the city from the days before it boomed, when people talked about camellias more than business and the only major company in town was Coca-Cola, it is stunning to see just how much the place has grown...
...Perhaps...
...He will most likely win the black vote automatically...
...Now, according to Ford, 11 percent of the public housing in this city has closed down...
...The city and the state had hoped that work south of the citybetween the airport and downtownwould be completed by the time the convention opened...
...The convention will be a chance to spread the good news...
...But the Baptist and Methodist churches have moved out...
...The visitor will hear, over and over, this distinction made...
...We don't have enough police to take care of the murders...
...Any booster's litany will inevitably include the fact that Hartsfield is "the nation's busiest airport...
...So the prudent visitor decides on a rental, and once he has cleared the lot he heads for town on one of the three interstates that feed into the city...
...When a test for promotion to sergeant was administered and the preponderance of officers who passed were white, Young threw out the test as racially biased...
...Jones was in a limited partnership with a local company, E. R. Mitchell, in order to comply with stringent city requirements for minority participation that were instituted when Maynard Jackson was mayor...
...The airport was being painted and recarpeted, though in spirit it remained what it has always been: infuriating...
...Political corruption is widespread, if not endemic...
...Their feelings are captured perfectly by Andrew Young...
...They have torn down forty-two of the fortysix single occupancy hotels in the city, to make way for new construction and...
...Would San Francisco or New Orleans close down some strip joints because a political convention was coming to town...
...But Atlanta suffers, also, from an acute case of the worst American disease of all, one that is surely deadlier...
...Ford concludes a tour, for the visitor, After a time the boosterism becomes oppressive, like the miasmic air outside the air-conditioned hotels and restaurants...
...Would San Francisco or New Orleans close down some strip joints because a political convention was coming to town...
...Here, and all across zone three, the problems of race are of a more desperate nature than a case of municipal job discrimination...
...Everything...
...They never -replaced them, thus creating a refugee situation that continues today...
...If greater Atlanta is growth, then it is also prosperity...
...The sidewalks are littered with trash...
...Like other, less conspicuous boosters, Young must stress the positive...
...and that as far as he knew Jones-Mitchell had not received a hearing, although, in his opinion, Y oung, who cannot run for a third consecutive term as mayor, is considering a campaign for governor of Georgia...
...This is a city that insists on seeing things in a "positive" way...
...Finally, the Reverend Young testified that he saw himself "presiding over what was basically an ego battle between two departments, and I really don't think of this as having any consequences as far as these developers were concerned, because I thought it was basically a small job for both of them...
...And for a little while, it seemed like things did get better...
...Neither Andrew Young-who will be a figure of symbolic importance for the Democrats as a successful black mayor THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 23 of a large Southern city-nor Atlanta itself is likely to let the opportunity pass...
...The mayor of Atlanta will always be black...
...Before the stadium, Atlanta was just another growing little Southern city...
...Young told Alice Bond that she should not report rumors...
...They provide a sort of fellowship and they are very good at separating people from their money...
...E ven four and five months before the opening of the convention, the visitor could see evidence of the preparations...
...With this sort of contract the bid clock is virtually sacred...
...The Atlanta Braves are arguably the worst team in the majors, but this does not deter Turner from calling them "America's Team" on the cable TV network which he owns and which broadcasts the hapless Braves' games...
...Many months later, Andrew Young was on the stand, explaining why he had decided, against all precedent and advice from officials in his own administration, to award the bid to Herman Russell's company...
...The city ignores the problem, he says, which is one thing...
...Dean and the visitor drive around the neighborhood...
...The negatives say that they will appear again, when Underground reopens, that they've never gone away, and that people who stay in downtown Atlanta are still afraid to go out at night...
...But unlike most other boosters, they seem to believe what they say and take deep offense when anyone points out that not everything is glorious in Atlanta...
...We've got to be the only city in America violating the Geneva Convention," Dean said...
...But now, things have been getting worse...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 Progress was slow...
...At one point it was announced that Underground would be open in time for the convention...
...He said he placed the call in "When they came in here and built that stadium, they tore down 5,700 dwellings...
...Little early in the day for them...
...And Atlanta, for all its-boasts about being too busy to hate, has not discovered the secret path to racial enlightenment...
...The farthest reach of metropolitan Atlanta might be as much as forty miles from the center of downtown...
...Atlanta is first in number of flights and, hence, frequently in number of delays as well...
...Yes...
...That's progress...
...Like Jesse Jackson, Young relies more on emotion and intuition than on reason or analysis...
...Young said that he decided for the Russell bid because it was $150,000 lower than the Jones-Mitchell bid, and that a bid should not be eliminated simply because the clock was fast...
...there were few blacks holding the rank of sergeant or above by the time Young became mayor early in the eighties...
...There were (surprise) "positive" stories...
...Ask a county executive how things are this year and he answers in number of construction permits issued...
...Only the Holiness churches are left...
...When people talk about "Atlanta" they Geoffrey Norman is a contributing editor of Esquire...
...Many of the big new office buildings and the million dollar homes are rising out on this expanding frontier...
...I don't think we even notice anymore...
...The airport seems to have bitten off more than it can chew, which is altogether typical of the city...
...Under the heading of positive stories one found, for example, Gone with the Wind...
...There are new office buildings and lavish hotels on almost every block, and they fairly gleam in the sunlight...
...That first airport was, by all accounts, one of the principal reasons Atlanta got such a jump on competing cities like Birmingham, Nashville, and Charlotte in the race for regional dominance...
...Last year, with his team racking up the worst record in the National Football League, the owner of the Falcons began complaining...
...Even more interesting was the fact that one of the people behind the project was the publisher of the city's only major newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution...
...The city ignored the man's protests and appointed a black woman with demonstrably inferior credentials to the post...
...It's much worse than it was in the sixties...
...This is remarkable in Atlanta, a city which has gone from the old ideal of color blindness to an almost supernatural visual acuity in all matters relating to race...
...Among major American cities, Atlanta has a poverty rate exceeded only by Newark...
...Bond's minister...
...Then, remarkably, he said that he knew Jones was "one of the largest builders in the world...
...Adding a touch of absurdity to the affair was the fact that no one could quite decide whether prosecutor Barr was black or white, and he wasn't saying...
...Could anyone imagine the publisher of the New York Times participating in a campaign to woo visiting reporters...
...They're crack dealers...
...Jones-Mitchell attorneys immediately filed protests and prepared to enjoin...
...It is the disease of consumptive decline and its chief symptom is the root condition of Atlanta-an obsession with image, a denial of reality, and an inability to distinguish between the fevers of disease and the glow of health...
...It now appears this was a miscalculation...
...As in the nation at large, no one in Atlanta questions the fitness of this...
...More if predictions of a brokered convention came true...
...We have someone come in as Santa Claus and we give little presents and have refreshments...
...are not talking about a city in the old sense...
...The force of that number hits you and numbs you, the same way any vast and depressing number-British troops killed on the first day of the Somme, number of nuclear warheads in the Russian arsenal-hits you and leaves you feeling small and helpless...
...They were menials, who had jobs washing dishes or some other way to provide in a very limited way for themselves...
...Underground Atlanta lies on the southern flank of downtown...
...What is worse is that the city created it...
...There is a positive way of looking at things and then there is the negative way...
...The weather is warmer, and people presumably do not need to sleep inside anymore...
...But his first priority seems to be national coverage...
...It turned out that the Chamber had drawn up plans for "spin control," including the creation of a 200-member volunteer squad of flacks who would be supplied with lists of spokesmen standing by should the need for interviews or quotes arise...
...however, some of the local civil rights activists objected strenuouslyin the press, of course-to their inclusion on the list...
...The city would be in an unremitting spotlight for three days, at least...
...We got more drugs, more crack and heroin, more crime, more pimps...
...They can't be worrying about drug pushers...
...Bids were invited, and the low-bid company was J. Jones-in some years the largest they were probably entitled to one...
...Fifteen thousand reporters was the figure you heard, over and over again...
...None of these afflictions are necessarily fatal...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 by their own carefully created image and the lies they tell, Atlanta boosters believe that somehow they have found the solution to problems that have frustrated the nation's other major cities...
...The report described the C. of C.'s intentions thus: We want to participate with, not manage, the media so an accurate picture of Atlanta and Georgia emerges...
...call it anything you want, there is no way to make it into a positive story...
...When Wayne Williams, a black man, was arrested and charged with the murders, many white Atlantans are reported to have said, "Thank God he's black...
...Even though things were bad, there was an almost universal belief that they were going to get better...
...This newer airport immortalizes Hartsfield, though there are citizens of Atlanta who remember him better as the man who filled the city's swimming pools with concrete rather than allow "coloreds" to swim in them...
...Metropolitan Atlanta grew at a 20 percent rate between 1980 and 1986, and is now the tenth-largest metropolitan area in the nation...
...It consists of three failing clapboard buildings, one of them a church, one a day-care center for the babies of unwed teenagers, and one an office and referral center for people who need help in dealing with the bureaucracy...
...Some blacks still believe Williams was framed and that whites committed the murders and went free...
...This year, it was astounding to see the number of girls who were under fifteen who came with their babies...
...The diorama, looking like a sullen, oversized crypt, sits in Grant Park, on the border of Summerhill...
...Unfortunately, the Chamber report itself became a kind of negative story...
...There are plenty of these but the city is trying to get them closed down before the conventioneers arrive...
...There is something naive and shameless about it...
...that he had not talked to anyone from Jones-Mitchell...
...It has become not so much a city-defined by its nucleus, its center-as something else: an organism (the clich~ of course, is cancer) defined by nothing except its growth...
...Metropolitan Atlanta has created more jobs in the last five years than...
...Which is a partial truth...
...In pursuit of this vision, Young flies around the world trying to entice people, business, and money to come to Atlanta...
...He added that Jones's name "seemed to be on half the buildings going up in town...
...But it eventually failed financially and all the bars and boutiques closed and the buildings were abandoned...
...He is more salesman and spokesman than administrator and leader...
...It's because of the drugs...
...it is essential...
...The matter in dispute was a city contract for the construction of some parking decks at the airport...
...Jones filed suit...
...And it will open, eventually, but about five years behind schedule...
...Eventually, the mayor made a personal decision to award the contract to his friend Russell, on the grounds that Russell's attorneys had established that the bid clock in the purchasing officer's office at city hall was exactly three minutes fast...
...But, then, at the risk of being considered "negative," someone ought to point out to the mayor and his fellow boosters, in and out of the local press, that there is much about Atlanta that one would not want duplicated in his own city...
...To much of Atlanta, especially white Atlanta, the stadium was the city's first claim to real status...
...In spite of the fact that Dean and other community leaders are pleading with the city for more police protection, there is deep antagonism between the police and blacks...
...They have this obsession with building all these new things, with mindless growth," Ford says...
...They asked for a hearing as a disappointed bidder, which, by law, they were entitled to do...
...Nothing was heard from the Klan...
...People were increasingly afraid to go there...
...Journalists would hit Peachtree and Five Points like army ants on the march, looking for material, devouring the city of stories, especially if the convention were not brokered and turned into another dull coronation...
...They carry no bagggage of guilt from the bad old days of formal segregation...
...The new airport is a point of pride here...
...The negative view is that Underground was done in by crime...
...They never received a response, nor were they granted their hearing...
...Douglas Dean is a former member of the Georgia legislature who grew up in Summerhill and is still a community leader...
...It begins to cloy and choke and you look for relief...
...well, than any place in the country...
...Because the crime hasn't gone away, and they don't have any better idea now than they had then what to do about it...
...But to patrol this area, with 81,000 people and all this crime, we have eighteen officers on duty at night...
...Convention business is vital to the city's economic health...
...But the affair was characteristic of Atlanta, a city obsessed with image and furiously defensive about the image it has so carefully created...
...By convention time, the arriving del egates will be able to ride the rapid transit, called MARTA, to their downtown hotels...
...Chicago's O'Hare handles more people...
...They sell right on the street like that...
Vol. 21 • June 1988 • No. 6
