Top 10 Signs You’re A City
‘And now a good hand for my friends Paul Shaeffer Ladies and Gentlemen…’
‘I have in my hand here tonight’s Top 10 list’. Tonight’s list: Top 10 ways you know you live in an actual city…
10: You have a subway system that gets people from where they live to where they work! [Atlanta gets a D here. MARTA is great for conventioneers or getting people from business to entertainment, but it has not saturated housing yet. The beltline, however, will make great improvements]
9: Your city’s sports teams sell out whether your team makes the play-offs or not. [Atlanta gets a C. The good? Support for the Thrashers. The bad? The Braves don’t sell out their play-off games. Two words: The Hawks.]
8. You have more than two universities that people from out of your city would clamor to attend. [Atlanta gets a B. It’s not Boston, but Tech, Emory, GSU, and the CAU schools make an important contribution. The question is how to better integrate Emory and CAU in particular into the life of the city.]
7. Your city has neighborhoods in which signs must be in languages from three different continents. [Atlanta Gets a D. This only happens in Chamblee & Norcross, and those places have not been made very pedestrian friendly; in fact, they’re strips more than neighborhoods.]
6. The city has a red light district. [Atlanta gets a B] As one comedian says, ‘It may be Metropolitan in the day time, but it sho’nuff Stewart at night!’
5. Your International Airport has flights that are actually international! [Atlanta gets an A]. Biggest Airport in the world with a concourse just for international? We win.
4. Your city has a full time opera company. [Atlanta gets a C]. Atlanta’s Opera community is growing, but there is only one part time company. Opera requires a sophisticated, educated audience with resources and a dedication to this art form. William Fred Scott does a great job, but New York has 3 full time companies. We’ve a way to go.
3. Your restaurant community is so large, that no one in town could possibly sample all the cuisine available. [Atlanta gets a B. We have a wider variety of food than nearly any other southern city…. which is about the same as saying that we have a great baseball team when compared to the mets.]
2. You have a Jazz Festival worth attending. [Atlanta gets an A. We do. It’s a shame so few people attend, but we have one of the countries most vibrant jazz communities. ]
And the Number 1 way you know you live in a real city….
CHess Hustlers!!! [Atlanta gets a B. There are actual chess hustlers, but only a few and only in Woodruff park. Chess is a hotspot for intellectually competitive people everywhere. When you see a Georgia State professor competing against a Slavic construction worker who just beat the Jamaican who owns the board, things are looking up!]
June 8th, 2004 at 10:45 pm
I won’t pretend I don’t resent some of those assessments. After all, Atlanta isn’t Chicago or New York. Still, it’s all more or less true.
I will, however, bicker with #2. Atlanta doesn’t have everything there is to offer in cuisine. That much is true. But the variety of cuisine in New York, Boston, Chicago, &c. is due largely to the variety of immigrant communities in these cities. Atlanta’s population, however, is older and more homogenous. The word to categorize Atlanta’s distinctive food offerings isn’t “international” but rather “regional.” Furthermore, because Atlanta likes to think of itself as cosmopolitan, it frowns upon Southern food as quaint. (That’s one of the big problems with Atlanta: it’s angsty.) That’s not to say you can’t get a good gravy biscuit in town–just that you can get a much better one outside the perimeter. Regardless, if you’re looking for distinctive cuisine in Atlanta and bemoaning the lack of Turkish food, the problem is with your paradigm, not with the city’s offerings.
Finally, when I was living in England, I realized that Americans are horribly elitist about all things concerning cities. What is a city? they ask. What’s the best city–New York or L.A.? So on and so forth. At root, it’s just a pissing contest. (Oh, but NY has the MET and the East Village!) Elsewhere they don’t concern themselves with such petty definitions. By American standards, Newcastle-upon-Tyne is not a city. The only thing it really has is some clubs and a metro. But to the English it has an industry (though a dying one), a lot of people, a little grime, and some culture, and that’s all it needs to be a city. The question is why isn’t it a smoothly functioning, thriving city? And that should be the question for Atlanta as well. There’s no sense questioning its cityhood. It is what it is. But it could be a better city.
June 28th, 2004 at 3:46 pm
Woohee! Those sure aren’t the top ten hallmarks of a great city in my book. I’ll take our jazz radio staion over the jazz fest and the great theatre over the opera. I think our restaurants stack up pretty well, and how about our great parks?
To each his own, and that includes what makes a city great.