The health of Atlanta’s historic Downtown has an effect on the whole city
Atlanta Mayoral and City Council candidates: how will you address the disused spaces and the disheartening emptiness of our Downtown? In a time when other cities are creating high expectations of what a historic city center can be, we’re still struggling. How can you help?
Above is a photo of Peachtree Street (near Woodruff Park), Downtown Atlanta, 1945. I’ve labeled some of the buildings that are still standing. The one labeled “Moe’s” contains that restaurant today, and that whole block of commercial structures it’s connected to still there. Surprisingly, almost half the buildings in this view are still around.
This photo gives a glimpse of the level of density and street life that Downtown is capable of supporting, versus the often empty and sad streets you can find around Woodruff Park on the evenings and weekends.
Below is a photo I took on the same stretch of road as the one above, but facing the opposite direction. The scene on Peachtree is bleak most evenings after the office workers and GSU students are gone. After almost seven years of living near Woodruff Park with my family, I’ve had a chance to view this awkward flood-and-drought pattern of street vibrancy, and it stinks. We’re better than this.
This drought of street life is a sign of bad land use. We can improve this, and the first step is prioritizing a more multifaceted growth beyond the current emphasis of daytime office/government/education use, plus attractions and events.
For a great read on this need for diversity in downtown land uses, see Strong Towns’ recent post The Big Urban Mistake: Building for Tourism vs. Livability. Here’s a quote from it:
City leaders, this one’s for you. You can either cater to your new residents by going into the downtown apartment buildings and listening to real people, or you can hop on the big ticket project train en route to a revolving door downtown. You can either build for livability or build for fleeting, often overrated promises of tourism revenue. You can facilitate local small business and community development, or you can create a short-lived wow-factor by opening the floodgates to developers and business interests who take money out of our communities. You can empower and invest in your new downtown residents and let them be the ambassadors for our growing urban paradises, or you can ignore them and build casinos and other flashy complexes that cater to the outsider and likely line the pockets of someone beyond the boundaries of the community.
This passage really hits home with Downtown Atlanta, where a new tourist-focused, free-standing Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville restaurant is proposed in a spot that would require the demolition of historic buildings, while acres of parking lots sit nearby undeveloped. That’s the wrong kind of investment for a 21st Century city center. That’s straight out of the 1980s.
Downtown’s connectivity is perfect for sustainable growth
With its gridded structure of small blocks, its good sidewalks and multiple transit access points, Downtown is the most sensible spot in the city for added density of residential and commercial development. Particularly if we want to grow the city’s population in a more sustainable way — one that emphasizes pedestrian trips over car trips — this is a great place to showcase smarter growth.
The pre-automobile street grid here is made for walking. It produces a “density” of intersections that provide a level of connectivity you can find in no other part of Atlanta. Studies have found that intersection density has the largest effect on encouraging walking — and reducing car trips — than any other metric, including population density, distance to a store, distance to a transit stop, or jobs within one mile.
But look at this street grid in the southern portion of Downtown, around the Garnett MARTA Station. This pedestrian connectivity (and transit access) is being wasted by land use that is largely devoted to parking. And this describes several sections of Downtown that were ravaged by automobile infrastructure as suburban flight and regional sprawl seemed to make us forget the true value of compact, walkable urban places.
Here’s another example, from the Fairlie-Poplar district around the western part of the Atlanta Streetcar route. Everything in this image is a parking facility except for the things highlighted in red. I can’t tell you how many times my family has seen bewildered visitors wandering around these dead spaces wondering where the real downtown is. I want to tell them: “there aren’t enough people living here to provide the 24/7/365 support for the kind of urban neighborhood you were expecting to find.”
City leadership has to prioritize the health of our historic core
Can the next wave of city leadership help prioritize better land use here, and work with the owners of these disused properties and make walkable, transit-appropriate, good urbanism happen? This is a question I’d like to hear each candidate for Atlanta’s 2017 mayoral and council race answer.
Just as we can understand that everything happening throughout the city and the region ends up having an effect — good and bad — on the city’s historic center, we can also recognize that the health of that center as a truly great, multifaceted urban place is something that affects the city at large. The way we treat our geographic birthplace can offer clues to how we feel about ourselves as a culture and as an urban place.
What are we saying to Atlantans and to the world when the cradle of the city is sad and disused? When it is, basically, the unattractive picture of Dorian Gray in the attic that reveals our city’s scars of bad core-health, while the surrounding neighborhoods like Midtown flourish with youthful energy?
Emptiness and tourist traps are not what people expect to see in a historic downtown in 2017. People expect to see a thriving urban place where a real neighborhood plays a big part. We have a sky high level of residential occupancy in the small amount of apartment buildings here, and a ton of disused dead space, and a lot of confused visitors wondering why the streets are so empty. How can you help?
