When my children were young, one of their favorite series of books were the “Where’s Spot?” books. Each page had flaps, and Spot would be hiding under one of the flaps.
I felt I was reading the “Where’s Spot” books as I was looking through pages and pages of different City of Atlanta lists for MARTA and the Transportation Special Purpose Local Sales Tax (T-SPLOST) projects.
Something was missing. The Peachtree Streetcar.
Looking back at the events of the past several days, I can honestly say that Atlanta is living up to its ideals and coming into its own.
The public is invited.
Atlanta is undergoing an unprecedented planning effort – to envision a city with twice as many residents.
The Atlanta City Design Studio, located above the food market at Ponce City Market, wants people to participate on how the we want to grow our city.. The twitter account is #ATLCityStudio.
The recent focus on the future of the Atlanta-Fulton Central Library designed by world-renowned architect Marcel Breuer is making me feel old.
I am still grieving over the demolition of the beautiful Carnegie Library that used to stand on the same block as the Breuer building from 1902 until 1977.
The late Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson was the ultimate disruptor.
When he was elected mayor in 1973, he was only 35 years old and the first black mayor in the city’s history.
Given that the lunch counters were already integrated, Jackson set out to make sure that all races could participate in the city’s economy. That meant disrupting the existing way of doing business to invite blacks, women and Latinos to the table.
NEW YORK – Walking around New York City with my sister, Elena, I kept seeing the ghost of William Hollingsworth “Holly” Whyte.
Whyte, who passed away in January 1999, helped rethink how to design and build urban public spaces – discovering an innovative social science based on how people enjoy different places.
For nearly five decades, Muhammad Ali has had a special relationship with Atlanta.
With the passing of “the Greatest” on Friday at the age of 74, it is an appropriate time to reflect on Ali’s relationships with Atlanta – two that are well-known events and two relationships that are less known.
For nearly 25 years, multi-use trails have been developed all over the region – primarily by the PATH Foundation.
Now the board of the Atlanta Regional Commission has unanimously passed a new regional bicycle and pedestrian plan with a goal of linking and connecting all those paths into one integrated system.
After the news broke of the Friday firings of two key officials from Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s administration, once again I was struck by how much City Hall has changed over the years.
On May 20, Reed parted ways with Miguel Southwell, aviation general manager who was in charge of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport; and Jo Ann Macrina, commissioner of the Department of Watershed Management.
The City of Atlanta has much at stake in the passing of an additional half-penny sales tax for MARTA.
The 40-year tax would give MARTA a total of $2.5 billion to invest in transit-related projects – local funds that could leverage federal dollars.
For 20 years, metro Atlanta leaders have been traveling to other cities to gain insights on how to address our most pressing issues by seeing how other urban areas address theirs.
The LINK trips – organized by the Atlanta Regional Commission – also have played another vital role. They have helped leaders from all over the region get to know each other in an away-from-home setting – hopefully creating relationships so we can reach consensus and collaborate as we move forward.
An axis of peace. That’s probably the best way to define the relationship between two of Atlanta’s greatest leaders and their families – the late Martin Luther King Jr. and former President Jimmy Carter.
It is a special multi-layered relationship that keeps building upon a shared foundation of non-violence, human and civil rights. And both MLK Jr. and Carter were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts.
The 2016 LINK trip to Dallas – scheduled from May 4 to May 7 – will mark the Atlanta region’s 20th anniversary of the annul visit to peer cities – providing metro leaders an opportunity to reflect on the value of the trips and consider their future.
About 110 metro Atlanta leaders are scheduled to be on the three-day to the Dallas-Fort Worth area – studying transportation, urban planning, downtown renaissance, the arts, education, millennials, suburban development and regional economic development.
Part-time Atlantan Ron Terwilliger has become one of the leading voices for federal housing policy reform in the country.
Terwilliger, retired chairman and CEO of Trammel Crow Residential, is now spending much of his time working on philanthropic causes primarily focused on providing housing for the working poor.
It’s a given. The City of Atlanta will go to voters in November to propose an additional half-penny in taxes over the next 40 years for MARTA. That tax alone initially is expected to generate more than $50 million a year.
But the City of Atlanta also has the option to ask voters whether they want to approve another half penny for five years for general transportation projects.
Atlanta has a wonderful opportunity to lead the region by showing how to seize the future. It can become the model for the rest of the region. As Atlanta proves that transit is giving it a competitive edge, the rest of the region will find out the hard way that it’s a day late and a dollar short – and forced to play catch up.
Second column in a two-part series on the Chattahoochee River
Cities rise and fall on their ability to dream and implement “big” ideas.
For Atlanta, turning five miles of the Chattahoochee River into an easily accessible waterfront is one such big idea that could change the city’s profile.
But two pending projects could severely limit Atlanta’s ability to turn the Chattahoochee River into a linear park.
Remember 17 years ago when the Atlanta BeltLine was just a glimmer in Ryan Gravel’s mind?
Now imagine the Chattahoochee River as reinventing the western edge of Atlanta in the same way the BeltLine has transformed our communities.
The two stories are strikingly similar.
The Atlanta Dogwood Festival is celebrating its 80th birthday this year.
To mark the occasion, the festival has decided to give a gift to Atlanta. It has commissioned a bronze interactive sculpture of a dogwood branch with blooms to adorn the edge of Lake Clara Meer near the Charles Allen Dr. entrance.
Atlanta prides itself as being the birthplace of the civil rights movement and a place where people of different races can succeed.
But it’s hard to reconcile that truth with the harsh reality that Atlanta in the 21st Century has had the largest, most rapidly growing gap between rich and poor of any major American city.
