By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on March 21, 2014
Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank wants to build a world-class football stadium for the city, yet he believes that revitalizing the surrounding communities is an even more important calling.
But now the stadium project is literally at a crossroads, threatening to poison the relationship between the Falcons, the city and the community for years, if not decades, to come.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on March 14, 2014
Less than three months since she’s been in her new role, Metro Atlanta Chamber President and CEO Hala Moddelmog is beginning to put her team in place.
A series of staff moves are being announced on Friday, March 14, to help the business organization emphasize its strategic focus areas.
Forty years ago, Atlanta faced its biggest preservation battle in its history.
The telephone company — Southern Bell — wanted to build a new headquarters building on the site of the Fox Theatre. They claimed the neglected theatre had outlived its usefulness and needed to be demolished to make way for a fancy new skyscraper.
And so Atlanta’s preservation movement was born with the passionate “Save the Fox” movement that began at the grassroots with students from Georgia Tech and other young activists to progressive business leaders who worked behind the scenes to come up with a solution that saved the Fox and permitted Southern Bell to build its tower next door.
One of those activists was Beauchamp Carr, a young banker who quit his job to volunteer full-time for the Save the Fox campaign by raising funds for the effort. Carr went on to become campaign coordinator for the annual Woodruff Arts Center campaign, a role he had for about 35 years – raising $177 million for the organization.
But throughout the decades, Carr has always had a passion for preserving Atlanta’s history.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on March 7, 2014
The Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta could adopt the song “Old Friends” by Simon & Garfunkel as its soundtrack.
It is the “old friends” who have come together to raise $6.8 million of the Center’s $7.5 million campaign since November 2012 to reinvest in the 52-acre facility that serves about 55,000 individuals a year.
Second part of a two-part series on current plans for the Atlanta BeltLine. Looking at the proposed phases of the Atlanta Streetcar
It was Friday, Nov. 15, 2002 at the annual meeting of the Midtown Alliance when guest speaker Andres Duany, the father of new urbanism, challenged Atlanta.
“Peachtree Street was created by the Streetcar,” Duany told the hundreds sitting at the Fox Theatre. “If you restore that pattern, it will restore the area immediately.”
Duany went on to say that Atlanta was unique because of Peachtree Street — no other city has such a well-recognized commercial corridor only a couple of blocks away from “pastoral” neighborhoods.
That simple challenge sparked a decade-long effort by hundreds of Atlanta’s civic and business leaders to establish a streetcar up and down our city’s signature street.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on March 7, 2014
The Atlanta Braves are so convinced they will meet their ambitious schedule of building a new stadium in Cobb by April 2017 that they have no Plan B.
“We have not thought about it,” said Mike Plant, executive vice president of business operations for the Atlanta Braves. “A hundred percent of our focus is building that stadium and playing there in April 2017. We are going to do what we said we are going to do. We said we are going to build a great ballpark and destination.”
On Nov. 11, 2013, the Atlanta Braves shocked both the city of Atlanta and the metro area when the baseball team announced it would be building a new $672 million ballpark in Cobb County with $300 million of it in public funds.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on February 28, 2014
Just six months after the opening of Junior Achievement of Georgia’s successful Discovery Center in downtown Atlanta, a second center is being planned for Gwinnett County.
The new Discovery Center, which likely would open in August 2015 at the new comprehensive Gwinnett high school campus, would include a Finance Park and BizTown — similar to the real-world simulations at the Chick-fil-A Discovery Center at the Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on February 28, 2014
Atlanta is campaigning to become one of a handful of cities to be designated a Global Smart City for Mobility — a move that it hopes will catapult it among the world’s technology capitals.
A contingent of Atlanta mobility executives and economic development leaders were in Barcelona, Spain, from Feb. 24 to Feb. 27 attending the GSMA Mobile World Congress, the largest mobility summit in the world, attracting more than 70,000 people.
First of a two-part series on current plans for the Atlanta BeltLine. This week: the Southwest leg.
Just for the record, I’m a huge fan of the Atlanta BeltLine and I’m a huge fan of transit.
That said, I also become somewhat irrational when I become aware of plans to cut down a significant number of trees in our city. It goes without saying that Atlanta is a beautiful city largely because of our extensive tree cover — an asset that is threatened on a continual basis.
One of the reasons I have been so enamored with the Atlanta BeltLine has been because it has been presented to us as an “Emerald Necklace” encircling our inner city — a linear park connecting larger urban parks.
So imagine my surprise, and dismay, when I recently walked the southwest corridor of the Atlanta BeltLine and realized that in one of the most forested parts of the 22-mile corridor, hundreds of trees — many of them mature trees — would be cut down to make room for a proposed transit line as well as the multipurpose trail.
The growing inequality among the rich and the poor is becoming the issue of our times — in the City of Atlanta, our region, our state, our nation and our world.
It’s a problem that we must face — once and for all.
A new study by the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution captured headlines last week when it disclosed that Atlanta is the most unequal city between rich and poor among the top 50 cities in the United States.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on February 21, 2014
The East Lake Foundation has accomplished a rare feat during an economic recession in Atlanta. It has raised more than $75 million in less than three years to build the Drew Charter School Senior Academy.
When one reviews who was on the campaign committee, then it’s easier to understand how they were able to raise that much money during a challenging economy.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on February 14, 2014
Thanks to an anonymous donor who made a record-setting $103.9 million gift at the end of the year, the Community Foundation was able to enjoy a record-setting year in 2013.
The Community Foundation received a total of $196 million in gifts in 2013 — the most it has received in its 63-year history.
You can travel back in time.
For our journey to the past, we went to 935 Crest Valley Drive in Sandy Springs to visit an 18-sided (virtually round) home that my father had designed 50 years ago.
Curbed Atlanta had posted a story on Feb. 11 about the house complete with a series of photos. A friend suggested we should try to get a tour of the home.
After a wonderful telephone conversation with real estate agent Jason Morris, we were invited to come to the house on Sunday. There was an added bonus — the owner Ann Jones — would be there.
Papa — better known to the world as Ike Saporta — had designed the house for Mrs. Jones in 1964. She had kept it suspended in time for five decades — barely altering Papa’s original vision.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on February 14, 2014
Two years after Southwest Airlines began flying into Atlanta, perhaps no entity has been more pleased with the results than Delta Air Lines Inc.
Southwest entered the Atlanta market by acquiring discount carrier AirTran Airways — an airline that had made Atlanta its key hub and had been going head-to-head with Delta in many markets.
My heart sank when Bernice King issued a statement last week that her two brothers wanted to sell their father’s Nobel Peace Prize medal and his traveling Bible. They had gone so far as to file a lawsuit to get possession of those priceless treasures.
One could almost hear a collective groan from Atlanta and beyond. Here we go again. Here are the King children squabbling among themselves, taking each other to court, showing the world that they are unable to resolve their differences.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on February 07, 2014
Atlanta-based ToolBank USA — and its nine ToolBanks across the country — is now ready within 72 hours to help any community in the United States struck by disaster.
The Atlanta nonprofit unveiled its new mobile disaster unit on Feb. 6 that it will be able to deploy to any community that has been ravaged by storms or hurricanes or earthquakes or any catastrophe requiring large-scale volunteer response teams working on the ground.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on January 31, 2014
Rhodes Hall, the home of the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation, needs some love (and money).
The Georgia Trust is launching the public phase of a $1.7 million campaign to fund the green rehabilitation and restoration of Rhodes Hall. It already has secured more than $1.5 million in grants and pledges.
Rhodes Hall is one of the last remaining grand mansions that used to line Peachtree Street at the turn of the last century.
Snow jam 2014 opened a window for us see ourselves through the eyes of how the rest of nation and the world sees us.
And what they saw was an Atlanta that did not have its act together.
What they could not see or understand was why. From the images of cars and trucks on highways that had turned into parking lots they did not see political dividing lines separating the multitude of counties and cities in our region.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on January 31, 2014
For the Atlanta Braves to break ground on a new stadium in Cobb County by Jan. 1, 2015, a “Herculean effort” will be required to get all the legal and financial agreements in place.
The Braves, in fact, will have to accomplish in less than a year what is taking the Atlanta Falcons, the Georgia World Congress Center Authority and the city of Atlanta more than two years to put together. And the new Braves stadium is supposed to open ahead of the new Atlanta Falcons stadium in time for the 2017 baseball season.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on January 24, 2014
Under the leadership of developer Mark Toro, the Livable Communities Council has selected an all-star group of 50 real estate professionals as members.
