‘80s Cityscape : Atlanta Apes L.A.: Many Downtowns

When the Sun Belt began to boom in the late 1960s, there was no place like downtown Atlanta for work or play.

Downtown Peachtree Street introduced Atlantans to high-rise office towers, the nation’s first atrium hotel, glass-bubble elevators and the revolving rooftop restaurant--Peachtree Center’s blue-domed Polaris Lounge was the highest point in the city and Atlanta’s best-known trademark next to Coca-Cola.

“I used to love to come downtown just to ride up and down in those elevators,” said one long-time Atlantan. “Back then, downtown was everything.”

Not any more. As Atlanta has continued to grow and prosper, a dramatic transformation has taken place in the far-reaching urban landscape. Now, the metropolitan area has at least half a dozen other “downtowns” that rival the old central district as focal points of business and pleasure.

A Postcard Skyline

Downtown remains a strong center of finance, law and government, and its Emerald City skyline is still unbeatable as the “postcard fix” for Atlanta. Like a Blanche DuBois, the old district depends heavily on the kindness of strangers--the millions of conventioneers and tourists who are the mainstay of the downtown economy.

Meanwhile, the rest of Atlanta flocks to the new “downtowns,” many of which were sleepy suburban business strips, peach orchards or pine forests a decade or so ago.

Call it the Los Angelesization of Atlanta. This self-styled capital of the New South has become fragmented into what urbanologists call “urban villages” or “urban realms” They are self-sufficient, automobile-oriented, largely suburban enclaves, each anchored by its own distinctive commercial core of office buildings, hotels, shopping centers, restaurants and night clubs.

‘L.A. of the South’

“Atlanta is becoming the L.A. of the South,” said a newcomer who lived in Southern California for three years before moving here last September. “Downtown is alive and well, but it’s no longer the center of Atlanta. In fact, there is no one center any longer, but centers plural--that kind of schizoid quality that L.A. has.”

Just two miles north of downtown on Peachtree Street, for example, the Midtown neighborhood is now the heart of Atlanta’s cultural life. Among its attractions are the High Museum of Art and the Woodruff Arts Center, home of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, two theaters and an art college.

Midtown also is booming as an office location. One of several buildings under construction there is the $170-million, 50-story IBM Tower, which will surpass the downtown Peachtree Plaza Hotel as Atlanta’s tallest structure.

Five miles farther up Peachtree is the Buckhead section, nicknamed the Beverly Hills of Atlanta because it has replaced downtown as the shopping mecca. Its vast Lenox Square mall is the largest retail shopping center in the Southeast and the most profitable, with annual sales more than double those in downtown Atlanta.

With its wealth of elegant restaurants, chic bars and night spots, Buckhead also has become the place to go at night. On a typical Saturday evening, Buckhead’s main streets are filled with couples in designer fashions heading for their favorite haunts in their Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs and Volvos.

Buckhead also is developing its own skyline. Among the latest additions is the massive Buckhead Plaza, a $360-million complex, still under construction, that will have four copper-crowned office towers, a 400-room hotel and 100,000 square feet of retail space.

“We’re just murdering them downtown,” said Herbert Reese, president of North Atlanta Progress, a private organization that fosters commercial development in Buckhead.

‘Perimeter’ at Crossroads

North of Buckhead and beyond the city limits, in suburban Fulton and DeKalb counties, is yet another urban concentration: the Perimeter Center-Georgia 400 business district, now the premier business address of the Atlanta area.

The complex, on the north-central arc of Interstate 285, the beltway Atlantans call the Perimeter, is home to a majority of the Fortune 500 companies that have regional or national corporate offices in the area.

One of the most striking commercial developments here is the Ravinia project. It features two black, 18-story, pagoda-style office buildings and a high-rise hotel with a three-story atrium featuring streams of water cascading onto a wooded terrace.

This also is the site of the Northpark Town Center, notable as the first major suburban project of John Portman, the Atlanta architect and developer who shaped much of modern downtown Atlanta’s skyline. Northpark will have garden office suites, a luxury hotel and a two-acre rooftop park with a waterfall and red maples.

Perimeter Center also offers a glittering array of shops, restaurants and night spots.

“I haven’t gone downtown by choice in the past seven years,” said Bonnie Bennett, who lives in nearby Dunwoody, one of Atlanta’s most prestigious suburbs. “Perimeter Center has everything I used to have to go to downtown or even to Buckhead for. You can live in Dunwoody and feel very self-contained.”

Factors of Change

Urbanologists view Atlanta’s multiple “downtowns” as the natural outgrowth of a variety of interacting factors: the area’s booming economy, explosive population growth, the ever-expanding interstate highway system and “white flight.” Not least important are innovations in telecommunications and technology that permit many businesses to operate from almost anywhere.

“I’m involved in a work arena where 90% of my business is done over the phone, and it doesn’t much matter where I am or whether my clients are here or in Philadelphia,” said Zane Major, a stockbroker with the Atlanta-based brokerage firm of Robinson-Humphrey, which moved its headquarters from downtown Atlanta to Buckhead in 1982.

What is happening in Atlanta is happening in many other Sun Belt cities that have seen rising prosperity and rapid growth in recent years, according to a study conducted by the U.S. Economic Development Administration.

Houston as Example

For example, the City Post Oak development in suburban Houston has become the third-largest business center in Texas and the ninth largest in the nation--after those of the eight largest cities.

The trend also is affecting many older metropolitan regions, the study found. For instance, the suburban commercial complexes of King of Prussia, Pa., and across the Delaware River in Cherry Hill, N.J., are rapidly replacing downtown Philadelphia as centers of economic activity.

“The American metropolis today no longer consists of a dominant central city surrounded by a ring of dormitory suburbs,” said Truman Hartshorn, chairman of Georgia State University’s geography department and co-author of the federal economic development study. “That residential belt of the recent past has been swiftly transformed during the last 10 years into a curvilinear outer city, which is now home to an ever-increasing majority of the urbanized area’s economic activities.”

Atlanta represents a clear example. The process began in the 1950s, with the rise of “bedroom communities” such as Sandy Springs and Tucker in the unincorporated residential areas of north Fulton and northeast DeKalb counties.

Residents of these communities depended on the city for jobs and for services such as shopping, health care, cultural activities and entertainment. The only locally based services were grocery stores, fast food restaurants, dry cleaners, gasoline stations and such, usually clustered along major thoroughfares.

By the early 1970s, however, as the migration to the suburbs continued, a network of radial and perimeter highways had been developed, and dramatic changes took place. Regional shopping centers began to spring up to serve the expanding suburban market.

In what has become a classic pattern of suburban commercial development, three of the earliest of these centers--Northlake Mall in northeast DeKalb County, Perimeter Mall in north Fulton County and Cumberland Mall in east Cobb County--all were built at major arterial junctions with the I-285 beltway.

The next stage of development saw industrial and office parks go up near the shopping centers. This, in turn, was followed by the boldest step to date: addition of the mammoth, mixed-use developments that turned these expanding commercial areas into full-fledged “downtowns.”

One of the most impressive of these projects is the Galleria complex, built on 85 lavishly landscaped acres framed by U.S. 41, I-75 and the I-285 beltway in east Cobb County. It has two office towers with marble exterior facings, a shopping center and a luxury hotel that was the first of its kind in suburban Atlanta.

sh Indisputable Success

The success of these new “downtowns” is indisputable by almost any measure.

The Lenox Square-Buckhead area leads the metropolitan region in retail sales, with the Cumberland-Galleria area a close second. In 1982, the latest year for which U.S. Census figures are available, retail sales in Lenox Square-Buckhead totaled $597 million and in Cumberland Galleria, $547 million. Either figure is more than double the $246 million registered by the central business district downtown, which was in third place.

The Cumberland-Galleria area--often called the Platinum Triangle--is second only to the central business district for office space, according to a 1986 year-end report of Carter & Associates, an Atlanta-based commercial realty firm.

The shift toward a decentralized business community is not without problems, however, both for the suburbs and the city. The old urban center is left with a growing number of disadvantaged workers, mostly residents of the predominantly black south side, who suffer from downtown’s diminishing share of jobs.

From 1970 to 1980, downtown employment fell from 31% to 21% of the metropolitan market and, according to a recent estimate, has hovered at that level since.

“Atlanta is a tale of two cities,” said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who represents Atlanta’s 5th Congressional District, “one that is wealthy and prospering, and one that is poor and not doing so good. We have to work harder to integrate the wealth in this city.”

Georgia State’s Hartshorn says that the new suburban districts offer many blue-collar and service jobs that disadvantaged inner-city workers could fill if they could get to them.

“The lack of mass transit connections between the central city and the suburbs in many cases cuts off access to the jobs for the inner-city labor pool,” he said.

Plans are afoot to bring more jobs downtown. Chief among them is a $135-million renovation of “Underground Atlanta” a six-block district of 19th-Century buildings huddled below viaducts built in the 1920s to elevate traffic above adjacent rail lines. The new “Underground” is envisioned as a festival-style marketplace with offices, shops, restaurants, cafes, bars, flower stalls and food markets.

A $1.4-billion expressway-restructuring project also is expected to stimulate economic growth by improving access to the central district.

“Downtown’s turned the corner,” said Dan Sweat Jr., president of the business group Central Atlanta Progress. “There has already been a number of company relocations downtown, including the return of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance, which was one of the first to leave.”

At the same time, the suburban “downtowns” are seeing familiar urban problems. Traffic is a major headache.

Overloaded public services are another problem. Suburban Gwinnett County (fastest-growing county of more than 100,000 people in the nation), recently imposed a moratorium on sewer hookups because of the madcap pace of commercial and residential development.

Still, suburban residents generally are willing to put up with such problems because, however frustrating they may be, they are signs of economic vitality.

“Yeah, the traffic is terrible sometimes and sometimes you wonder if the developers are going to take over everything eventually,” said Kimberly Hall, 24, of the suburban north side.

“But you know, I wouldn’t live anywhere else. It’s a wonderful place for economic and professional opportunities.”