Bloglanta

In New York, the MTA is radically shaking up how they manage the various train lines that run through the city.

Each Train line will now have its own manager, who is personally accountable for the on time performance, security, and cleanliness of their line. Their names will be public and their job performance will depend on how well their line is run.

Perhaps MARTA needs to do the same thing for the trains and bus lines. Can you imagine if, rather than contacting a public relations department, you could personally confront the person in charge of that particular line when you had a problem?

Perhaps a Union Rep could also be assigned to each line, and they would be required to listen to and address public concerns. (this seems like a pipe dream, but what the heck)

Further, employee bonuses could be pegged to the lines that had the most courteous staff and on time performance.

If nothing else, it would create meaningful benchmarks for the people administering the system.

Places of quiet contemplation in the heart of a city are vital and Atlanta is losing them.  Yes, there are parks, coffee houses, stores, malls, sidewalks, but fewer and fewer non-commercial spaces to simply quietly contemplate.  The saddest example of this is that The Temple of All Faiths at the King Center has been locked for years.  Contemplations of Faith are no longer welcome there.

The same goes for many churches, which are now locked more often than not.  On a recent Sunday afternoon the First Presbyterian Church was locked up tight.  Even Catholic Churches are closing their doors to those who simply wish a quiet moment in a solemn setting.  Right now, only the Airport Chapel and those in Hospitals are available all the time, and even during the day few places are available.  Though, if they’re not in session, the Georgia House Chamber is a beautiful place.

Atlanta needs a space such as the Baha’i Temple in Chicago.  Anyone can go there and meditate on the world.  They will be left in peace to consider as they will.  There is no pressure to participate in their religion, though people are there if you have questions.

What prevents places like this from developing?  A few challenges seem to stand in the way.  The two worst villains are the twins of Security and Insurance Liability.  No one wants the headache.  Second, I fear that the vagrancy problem the city faces has a perceived impact.  Still, it’s sad that there is no respectful non-denomination place for all the city to gather to think, pay respects, or celebrate greatness.  Maybe that’s the next great thing on which Bernie Marcus can invest in the city…

The Immortal Game lives in Atlanta!  Chess is among the longest lasting, most powerful contests humanity has created, and Atlanta has a chess culture.  It’s not talked about or covered in the paper, but people here talk about chess, think about chess, and support institutions that let it thrive.   It’s an underground movement.

Here then are three of the most important places on the chess circuit in Atlanta:

1. The Atlanta Chess Center is a great resources.  That there is a cultural center dedicated to chess here speaks highly of the city.  Annual memberships are only $100 and you can sit in and play a casual game for $2.  They sell chess clocks, sets, books, and videos as well as a variety of snacks!  It’s a great place to do play actual people rather than a computer or on line.  It’s also a chance to get some instruction if you want to move your game to the next level.
2. Woodruff Park.  The Southwest side of the park is Chess Hustler Central.   Again, no chess hustlers, no real city.   The chess here is often for money, is fast and furious, and transcends all.  This is where the well-healed and the homeless meet on equal turf.  Everyone’s King is equal and everyone’s a pawn.  Just be ready for the kibitz that will surely come your way.
3. The Village Bakery.  This is the chess players’ tavern in town.   There are four sets in the the building including one that is a meter square!  Located at Memorial Drive and Ponce in Stone Mountain, the German food is excellent, the beer is fresh, and the proprietor, Clause is a great guy.  He’s also not a bad player!  On a recent visit the bar was not crowded and friendly people stopped by to check out the boards in play.  Places such as the Village Bakery deserve community support as they are the real deal.  This might be the true thinking man’s tavern.

Hopefully, Atlanta will begin to acknowledge the broad based support for the game.  It would be great to see Creative Loafing or Sunday Paper carry a regular column on chess.  It would be even better if all the Starbucks and other coffee houses in town which had chess boards on their tables went to their local dollar stores and bought a couple of chess sets.  It would create community for the coffee houses and symbolize the city’s commitment to more than one kind of Queen.

Atlanta is still not a 24 hour city.  Compared to other cities, there are some amenities we need and some changes that should occur.

Atlanta is still a place where Dunkin Donuts closes.  The Brookhaven Dunkin’ Donuts is a mile from Oglethorpe University, yet by 10:30, it’s closed.  Don’t they know if they throw a wifi router in the place and advertise they have access, the place will be packed 24/7?  Worse than that, we don’t have Tims!

The same goes for Starbucks.  Some are closed by 7.  Others by 10.  What’s with that?  There is not a single 24 hour Starbucks in Fulton or Dekalb County.

More Trader Joes are great, but as the NFT Atlanta points out, we like chain stores a little too much.  Other cities have gourmet stores that largely stock local product.  The closest we have is Alon’s.

We lack late night gourmet food.  Only Atkins Park is still serving ‘better than bar food’ on a Tuesday at 1 AM.  Yes, there are more diners, and some pubs still serving, but when you need a 1 AM business dinner, you’re left with Atkins Park or Chinese.

There are too few independent book stores in town, and none of them have a full service restaurant or bar in them.  Someone is missing the opportunity to make some serious cash.

We have too many governments and that is going to quash our regional effectiveness.  While other cities are in uni-gov mode, we’re splintering even more.

At least 3 of our major sports venues are inaccessible directly by subway.  Further, none of them have won a Championship this century!

MacDonald’s here do not serve Newman’s Own Organic Coffees.

One of the better midrange chocolate companies does its manufacturing here and most Atlantans don’t know because local stores don’t carry Flyer Bars!

The Museums around here have no free day, and rather than showing off the great art they own and acquiring more, they rent art from other museums!

Okay… enough snarking, but after visiting other cities, it’s clear we’re slipping.  Still, there is hope.  Housing is surely plentiful.  The city of Atlanta was truly strengthened by the Olympics.  People here are ambitious and want to get things done.  We have Atlantix.

One wonders, however, how long Metro Atlanta can survive until the lack of affordable starter homes, public transportation, and bickering between the various counties cripples the place.

Alvaro Alvillar is a stunning success.  How does he know?  The cops want shut his work down.  Anytime your art scares the police, you’ve succeeded in raising the issue your art sought to raise.  The police officers here are dead wrong.  Being a police officer means having to accept whatever the world throws at you without feeling or emotive response.  You’re there to serve and protect, not be an art critic.

Are the police valuable community assets?  Yes.  They have a tough job and generally deserve community support?  Yes.  This however, is a case in which they are their families are not under any threat.  Officers and members of the benevolent association however think they should be able to limit what an artist has to say within an art gallery and that’s flat wrong.  Even if the art portrayed the police in a highly negative light, they should only criticize it as citizens.  Write a letter to the editor.  Write your own blog entry.  However, International Brotherhood of Police Officers puts the imprimatur of law enforcement behind it and that is unacceptable.

Now, on to the art itself.  This is not the first time Alvillar has done a flag piece.  He did one last year in Dalton.  This piece is titled “Formula for Hate” The pieces are a series of US flags with inscriptions.  Read across the inscriptions of the various flags are two questions:”Politically its OK to hate the white man” and “Is it OK for me to hate if Ive been a victim” [sic].   So, through use of the flags, one can surmise that Alvillar is examining his statements and questions in the context of the American field which the flags represent.  Second, one can see that he intends the statements as a ‘formula for hate’.  Given that, a person might well surmise that Alvillar himself believes that victimhood is not a justification for hate, nor is it politically okay to hate white people.

The questions, however, are ones the permeate our society and might resonate particularly among folks in the city.  Atlanta is undergoing a major racial shift.  It’s becoming whiter and more Hispanic despite having an African American power structure.  We also live in a time when members of any given group have been the victim.  Indians, Korean, Serbs, Columbians, New Englanders, Africans, Jews, Syrians, and on and on and on have all been victims because of where they were born, what they look like, or what creed they follow.   No one has a monopoly on victim hood and no one has a monopoly on hate.

If we want to be a world class city, it’s time to grow up and accept that a variety of viewpoints are out there.  People are going to have to learn to argue these points through a continued rhetorical and reasoned argument.  The clash of ideas is important and it’s better to let all the ideas, even the dumb ones face the light of day and stand scrutiny rather than trying to use the power of the state to forcibly remove them.

NYC’s Streetsblog recently began compiling a list of other blogs that focus on livable streets in their local areas. Streetsblog, for those who have never checked it out, is a group blog produced by The Open Planning Project. Their focus is on “the burgeoning Livable Streets movement” in NYC.

It’s also a wonderful resource for both new and “mature” ideas on making streets safer for pedestrians, bicyclists, and yes, even drivers.

As I mentioned, they’re seeking livable streets blogs in other cities. In Atlanta, there don’t really seem to be any such blogs. One commenter pointed out PEDS, which is not really a blog — though certainly it’s a great organization working on the issue of livable streets in Atlanta. Another organization (disclosure: I’m on the board), Citizens for Progressive Transit does maintain a blog, but the organization is more geared toward transit. Which isn’t to say transit and livable streets are mutually exclusive — they’re more mutually beneficial than exclusive of one another.

Certainly, if New York is experiencing a Renaissance of livable streets, Atlanta is still in the Dark Ages. There is no shortage of material. If we Bloglanta writers were to begin writing an occasional piece on making our streets more livable, what area would you like to see us focus on first? And — this is a call for more writers — is this a subject you would like to write about?

When Americans think about the national architecture, they don’t think much of Atlanta.

The American Institute of Architects surveyed two thousand Americans at the end of 2006 to find out what buildings they valued.  They don’t value Atlanta much.  No Atlanta building ranks in the top 50 and there are only 2 out of 150 on the list.  The High Museum makes the list at #96 & The Hyatt Regency downtown makes the list at #103.

The poll was conducted by Harris and shows that Atlanta really isn’t on the national radar for great architecture.  There is a certain irony in this as some of the leading architecture firms have started here or put key offices in Atlanta.  The cities on the radar include New York City (25 Buildings), Washington DC (17), and Chicago (16).

We’re in the same category as St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Austin.  Further, the national perspective does not match our own.  In survey after survey, Atlantans choose the Fox Theater as their favorite building.  The High Museum would also likely be up there, but one would guess that the Hyatt would not be the first choice of Portman buildings for Atlantans or even their third favorite building.

Hopefully, Atlantans will wake up to the importance of good solid design.  Renzo Piano’s addition to the High Museum is successful not only for the attention he brought, but because the additions work well.  They made the space better.  They are good spaces in which one can see art.  That is what will keep the building important for a long time.

There are various signs that you are becoming a bigger better city.  One of them is how many newspapers are readily available for purchase, and for the first time, Atlanta has crossed into the zone.  Of course there is the local rag, and it’s easy to get the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Now however, there is alternative.  If you want to crawl through the newspaper equivalent of Bill O’Reilly’s Brain… if you want to read the Weekly World News‘ leap toward semi-legitimate news coverage… if you want to discover the true meaning of tabloid journalism, you should go the Kroger at Brookwood Station…

There you can buy the daily national edition of The New York Post.  Now, it’s a buck seventy-five, and it’s not as big as the New York edition (which is only a quarter), but still…  How can you match headlines such as “Burger Flippers are K-Fed Up!” (about the Former Mr. Britney Spears Superbowl commercial)?  Or “Foe unfurls Trump Move” (about a lawsuit against Donald Trump)?   This right wing populist rag now has a place on Atlanta newsstands… for better or worse.

Residential towers are not such a terrible thing, especially when placed appropriately — near existing transit stations. If the market for retail space isn’t saturated, put in some retail space on the ground floor, and you have a mixed-use site with great amenities. In Atlanta, this gives us the embryonic stages of a great street life.

In Manhattan, meanwhile, a great street life is not everywhere. For years, the business district has had a reputation for shutting down completely during non-business hours. I took this photo of a New York City block in the middle of a business day:

Someday, this may change, as new residential towers are rising in south Manhattan.

(more…)

In Atlanta, there is little appreciation for the power of infrastructure. Atlanta’s residents would rather fight individual battles in the relatively inconsequential zoning wars than get into the real meat of defining a community’s character. Even major infrastructure projects like the Beltline get reduced to the individual projects proposed within the TAD boundary.

A recent article by John Sugg points out the most fundamental flaws in how Atlanta’s residents think about the Beltline.

The Mason project is not perfect. The oversupply of parking spaces within the proposed Piedmont Park towers will inflate the project’s cost to an amount greater than the project’s real value. Assumptions about the local infrastructure are being made ahead of actual decisions about the local infrastructure.

Meanwhile, in New York, Manhattan is not the only place where you can find tall condo towers next to parks. (Central Park and its surrounding developments have been a frequent image in the minds of Mason’s critics.) In Brooklyn, new developments are cropping up to accomodate new masses of people moving into the borough. Among these developments, I caught this tall tower next to a public park:

Granted, the tower isn’t as tall as Mason’s proposed development. What I saw with my own eyes was a development that fit within the existing infrastructure, which included a tight street grid with public parks integrated within the local urban fabric. Some of the parks, such as the one above, included sports fields. Others were simply parks with trees, grass and very cute and friendly squirrels. For the most part, Mason’s proposed development will fit within the context of the proposed infrastructure for the area. As more people move back to the city, single family homes will become increasingly out of context.