One of Atlanta’s favorite sons – Ted Turner – got 11 blocks of Spring Street named after him at an official unveiling ceremony on July 21.
As someone who has admired Ted Turner for decades, I believe that we as a city can and should do so much more to honor our hometown hero.
Mixed emotions surround the possibility of the Metro Atlanta Chamber selling its headquarters overlooking Centennial Olympic Park.
A host of issues – and a myriad of views – are wrapped around the proposal by the Georgia World Congress Center to buy the building, tear it down and replace it with green space.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on July 10, 2015
This is where Kevin Cantley, president and CEO of the Cooper Carry architectural firm for the past 20 years, remembered the first time he became aware of the Urban Land Institute.
It was in the 1970s when he was at the College of Architecture at Georgia Tech working on land-use maps. He was told to use the ULI coloring system — residential was yellow; office was blue; retail was red; institutional was purple and park land was green.
“That pretty well established in my mind that ULI was important since they had control of the colors,” Cantley said. “I have come to know ULI as the recognized authority of responsible land-use planning.”
A giant oak in Atlanta’s education forest has fallen.
Dr. Wood Smethurst, co-founder of the Ben Franklin Academy – and its headmaster until July 1, passed away Tuesday morning of pneumonia.
Smethurst was a quiet yet powerful force in Atlanta’s education circles – pushing the envelope in ways to teach students who may have faced a myriad of challenges in their lives.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on July 3, 2015
Several top members of Atlanta’s consular corps will be moving or have already moved on to new posts, bringing a new wave of foreign leaders to the city’s global scene.
The dean of the consular corps, Paul Gleeson, is returning to Ireland in July. He has served as Ireland’s Consul General in Atlanta since the consulate opened in August 2010. It was Ireland’s first new consulate in the United States since the 1930s.
By Guest Columnist DAVID MARTIN, executive director of the Georgia Council on Economic Education
In June, our family traveled to Rwanda to “negotiate” the marriage of our son, Joshua, a Berry College graduate who teaches economics at Roswell High, and Anne Mugisha, who has an undergraduate degree from Shorter University and an MBA from Southern Poly.
We read today — with heartbreak — of ISIL’s destruction of some of the world’s most important cultural sites in civilization’s “Fertile Crescent,” a few of which date back to the beginnings of known civilization.
Our connections with places and their names around the world are reminders that the past is always present, and the distant is always nearby. Nothing is more revealing of these ancient truths than the poetry of the Persian mystic Rumi, the most widely read poet in the United States.
I’m in awe of how Charleston, S.C. has responded to one of the worst crimes of hate and racism that the South has experienced in decades.
Instead of responding with hate, violence and vindictiveness, the fine people of Charleston responded with grace, forgiveness, tolerance and a belief in the ultimate good in the human race.
As the world has flattened and become more interconnected, we can no longer afford to approach global health with an “us” and “them” mentality.
Less than a mile separates the end of the Atlanta Streetcar tracks on Edgewood Avenue and the Atlanta BeltLine.
The City of Atlanta is applying for a $29.3 million grant in federal TIGER to connect these two magnets of economic activity by extending the Atlanta Streetcar to the Irwin Street entrance of the Atlanta BeltLine.
The TIGER 7 grant application outlines a project that would add 1.8 miles of track (round trip) to the existing Atlanta Streetcar at a total cost of $65.4 million.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on June 5, 2015
A major new initiative to dramatically increase the number of Atlanta high school students who enter and graduate from college and technical schools is being launched — thanks to a $20 million investment from the Joseph B. Whitehead Foundation.
Georgia is likely to provide money in the future to support transit, in addition to the $75 million the Legislature provided this year, Jay Roberts, the governor’s recently appointed transportation planning director, said Wednesday.
The clock is ticking on Fort McPherson.
The next board meeting of the McPherson Implementing Local Redevelopment Authority (MILRA) is scheduled for Wednesday, June 17 as all-day work session.
It appears unlikely that the sale of 330 acres of Fort McPherson’s 488 acres to Tyler Perry will close on that day.
But MILRA officials say the closing should happen shortly thereafter.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on May 22, 2015
(Editor’s note: A group of more than 100 Atlanta business and civic leaders visited Toronto, Canada, in early May on the LINK trip coordinated by the Atlanta Regional Commission. The trip’s aim is to learn how other cities are dealing with issues and challenges like those facing Atlanta. Atlanta Business Chronicle reporter Maria Saporta traveled with the group.)
Toronto is a city on steroids.
Although metro Atlanta is almost as large as Toronto (which has a population of 4.25 million compared to Atlanta’s 6 million), everything feels magnified in Canada’s largest city.
Leadership Atlanta has selected 55 community leaders to join its 2016 LEAD Atlanta Class – a program that empowers young leaders early in their careers.
The LEAD Atlanta program seeks to teach the young professionals the skills and knowledge they will need to create enduring positive change in the community.
Three Atlanta mayors – three different legacies.
Their stories now are being captured in documentaries that will provide three varying perspectives on a pivotal era that catapulted our city from a small Southern town to the biggest city in the Southeast.
The three mayors – Ivan Allen Jr., Maynard H. Jackson Jr. and Andrew Young – all left an important signature on our city – all mayors who passionately cared about being strong stewards of Atlanta during their tenure.
They are Washington’s new odd couple: Curly and Mo, companion senators from the Bluegrass State with conflicting ideas about what, in political terms, defines red. Last week, the tense relationship between Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and presidential candidate Rand Paul came under new strains.
Beach season alert: The persistence of marine debris, carried by enormous ocean currents, inspired the provocative sculptures and assemblages at the odd museum in CDC headquarters. If you swim in the ocean or admire its immense power, seek out “Gyre: The Plastic Ocean” before it closes June 16 at the David J. Sencer CDC Museum. GSU distinguished art professor Pam Longobardi fashioned a giant cornucopia titled “Dark and Plentiful Bounty,” the largest and most complex sculpture of her career. It features only a fraction of the tons of trash gathered from remote inlets in Alaska—garbage that became the palette for the 25 artists in this exhibit.
A few years ago while attending a gala at a Buckhead hotel, I noticed an elegantly framed bulletin in the women’s restroom. It provided a phone number to call if the reader was a victim of sex slavery.
One would think sordid, deviant behavior of that nature would take place in the hour motels far from the highbrow crowd. Yet, sex trafficking – a $9. 5 billion criminal enterprise – happens right under our nose.
By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on May 8, 2015
Purpose Built Communities, the Atlanta-based nonprofit that helps transform struggling urban neighborhoods, is undergoing a leadership transition and expanding its mission.
Former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, who has been serving as chair and CEO of Purpose Built, will now become the nonprofit’s executive chairman.
Taking her place as CEO of Purpose Built is David Edwards, who joined the organization in June 2014 as a senior vice president. Carol Naughton, who also has been serving as a senior vice president, is being promoted to president.
