The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Carl Heintze

The South has risen again in the rebirth of Atlanta

Just back from Atlanta, the Phoenix City. It's called that because, like the mythical bird, it constantly rebuilds itself from the ashes. Atlanta, of course, is the home of Ted Turner (and Jane), the Cable News Network and Jimmy Carter, the place where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached and is buried and where Gone With the Wind was born and has never died.

Atlanta is a remarkably clean, integrated and racially peaceful (it's 60 percent black) and busy (the traffic is as bad as in Santa Clara County). It's the financial, cultural and historical center of the old and new South. Its skyline rivals that of San Francisco. Stone Mountain Park is bigger than Golden Gate.

Atlanta gets its nickname because it rose from the ashes twice, once after General William Sherman burned it to the ground at the close of the Civil War and once later when a disastrous fire did the same thing all over again.

Atlanta's latest reincarnation is the result of civic leaders like the Rev. Andrew Young, once mayor of Atlanta and once ambassador to the United Nations, and Ted Turner, who turned a second-rate TV station into CNN.

Together with others they brought the Olympics to Atlanta in 1996 and with it a downtown redevelopment that has forever changed the city's face.

The makeover created among other things spanking-new parks, new high-rises, new dorms (once the Olympic Village) for Atlanta universities and a stadium which now houses the Atlanta Braves , a covered dome for the Atlanta Falcons football team, the Atlanta "World Congress," a huge convention hall and, of course, a memorial to the two who died in the still-unsolved Olympic Park bombing.

Needless to say, both the Braves and the Falcons are owned by Ted Turner.

But that's not all. Atlanta cleaned up and put its best face outward. "Ambassadors," participants in a program originated during the Olympics, still walk the streets in uniforms and white pith helmets, helping travelers and others find their way. MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) completed its two lines through the city, one north and south, the other east and west. They meet at Five Points in the center of the city. The train cars rival BART's, and they're cleaner.

Those are the outward signs of change in Atlanta. The city also boasts a large and growing financial district and is a major airline hub for flights both around the U.S. and to Europe. It also is a proud city and one that remembers.

There are still antebellum houses to be found in and around Atlanta, and like Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind, the city has never forgotten its treatment by General Sherman.

Before he set off on his march to the sea and Savannah, Sherman laid siege to Atlanta, bombarding it for days and then, after its capture, reducing it to ashes, a foretaste of what was to come to many cities in World War II.

He did the same thing to a 100-mile swath on his way to the Atlantic, something even present-day Atlantans have never forgotten or forgiven. But in the past couple of decades there has been another invasion of Atlanta from all over the country by those working in the New South's new capital. The Georgia drawl is getting harder and harder to find, even as is the memory of the Battle of Atlanta.

Lest you should forget, however, Stone Mountain at the edge of the city now bears the graven images of Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, all at least as large as the figures on Mt. Rushmore, and the Cyclorama, a vast 400-foot painting of the Battle of Atlanta, lies in a round city-owned viewing building. One looks at it by sitting in a rotating grandstand that turns before it in a circle. Very impressive. In it, Sherman is reduced to a tiny figure on a horse in the distance.

The South hasn't forgotten that it was the major battlefield of most of the Civil War, and Atlanta will forever remember that it was the scene of the final major struggle of that war. And Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler may have been fictional characters, but they have come to be real people in Atlanta.

And if you look for them, there are other signs of the South about.

Grits and sausage biscuits, of course, the standard fare of many Atlantans. And unfailing courtesy and politeness, regardless of race or station.

People don't push or shove on MARTA. They say "please" and "thank you" and "excuse me" and mean it.

The South has risen again in Atlanta. The phoenix has been reborn once more of its ashes. But they still haven't done away with tornadoes.

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