Democrats, Media, Protesters Due : Doubts Cloud High Hopes for Convention in Atlanta

Glenn Phillips can see it now--the hordes of hungry delegates and reporters beating a path to his restaurant when the Democratic National Convention comes to town next Monday. He’s putting on 15 temporary workers to augment his regular staff of four, and he’s planning to keep his doors open around the clock.

The only thing disturbing that vision is the parking lot between his 124-seat restaurant, the Beef Station, and the main entrance to the sprawling Atlanta convention complex.

City officials have designated the 2-acre parking lot as a “free-speech area” for the thousands of protesters expected to descend on Atlanta along with the official convention crowd. With everyone from white supremacists and anti-abortionists to advocates for the homeless and gay liberationists competing for space and attention, the potential for disruption--if not for outright disaster--is something Phillips doesn’t like to think about.

“What if 80,000 protesters show up the way they did in San Francisco?” he moans. “What if I can’t get my deliveries in? What if my employees can’t get in? I’m hoping this convention will bring me some money. . . . But I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Phillips is not the only Atlantan plagued with doubts about what will take place when the Democrats convene here for their 41st national nominating convention--the first such gathering by a major political party in the Deep South since just before the Civil War. As the hour draws near for the opening gavel of the four-day affair, fear and trepidation gnaw at the hopes of nearly everyone for a profitable and problem-free convention that shows Atlanta in the best light.

As the nation’s No. 3 convention center, Atlanta routinely hosts far bigger gatherings than the anticipated 35,000-strong Democratic bash. The annual Super Show of Sporting Goods, for example, draws more than 80,000 visitors and has an economic impact proportionately greater than the projected $60 million expected to be generated by the Democrats.

What gives Atlantans the jitters about the Democratic convention crowd, however, is the army of 15,000 editors, reporters, broadcasters, photographers and camera operators from around the world. Together with the untold legions of Atlanta-bound protesters, publicity-seekers and Democratic camp followers who are eager to make headlines, they pose what many Atlantans deem the worst threat to the city since Sherman’s troops stood at the gates with torches ablaze.

“If Atlantans survive this summer, we will have earned any clever T-shirts we can contrive to memorialize our triumph over malign elements and perverse hordes,” Tom Teepen, editorial page editor of the Atlanta Constitution, wrote in a recent column, noting that Atlanta has been plagued by severe drought and heat even before the Democrats arrive.

Atlanta got a taste of what it sorely fears recently at the hands of a national news magazine. Under the headline, “Not Ready for Prime Time?” the magazine reported that convention planning was beset by a series of bad judgment calls on the part of Democratic and city officials, resulting in a cramped convention hall, a scarcity of downtown hotel accommodations for the press and a still-unfinished expansion of the interstate leading from the airport.

Mayor Young Responds

“I don’t know what (the magazine is) talking about,” fumed Mayor Andrew Young. “This is a building and growing city, and it will be for some years to come; but whatever we need for the convention is going to be ready by the time the convention gets here.”

What is more, he added: “Anybody who doesn’t like Atlanta can go somewhere else.”

Ever since it was picked over Houston in February of last year as the site for the quadrennial Democratic powwow, Atlanta has spared no effort to ensure that everything runs smoothly during the convention and that Atlanta receives rave reviews for its role as host city.

Downtown streets and parks have been spruced up, a $30-million rapid transit railway link to the airport has been opened and Atlanta’s taxi drivers--once denounced by City Council President Marvin Arrington as “the worst in North America, bar none”--have been sent to etiquette school.

Police have even relocated homeless indigents from their makeshift shelters under the viaducts around the convention complex, and vice squad officers are cracking down on the prostitutes, hustlers and dope dealers in the seamy Midtown area just north of downtown.

The Omni convention hall is being fitted with a “high tech”-look podium, 38 sky boxes and four anchor booths for the major television networks. To handle the convention’s enormous telecommunications needs, a futuristic 1,063-mile network of hair-thin, optic-fiber cable has been laid, linking the Omni with the adjacent Georgia World Congress Center, where the news media work spaces will be located, as well as with the downtown hotels.

“This is an event of much moment here,” Franklin Garrett, Atlanta’s official historian, said of the convention, comparable to the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition that was held here to show off Atlanta’s progress since the Civil War.

Attracts Attention

“That exposition attracted national and even international attention,” Garrett said. “Booker T. Washington, the great black educator, delivered a famous speech there, and there was not only a ‘Negro Building’ devoted to the accomplishments of blacks but a ‘Women’s Building’ as well. John Philip Sousa even composed a special march for the occasion, the ‘King Cotton March.’ ”

During this convention, Atlantans are especially eager to have attention focused on the city’s assets as a place to do business and as a good spot for the 1996 Olympic games, which the city has put in a bid to host.

But the city already has gotten off to a bad start with the press.

Last May, for example, representatives of the national news media who were in Atlanta for a final walk-through of the convention facilities were miffed by their inability to get straight answers from party spokesmen to their many questions.

“Nobody seemed to have any answers to anything,” said Thayer Illsley, superintendent of the House of Representatives press gallery in Washington. Charles Lifton, systems editor of the Boston Globe, said: “Compared with the Republican Party, they’re light years behind.”

Seating Capacity Shrinks

The news representatives also were dismayed by the seating capacity in the Omni. The Democrats had set a minimum requirement of 20,000 seats but settled for the 16,000 that Atlanta officials said the Omni would provide. But because of the space consumed by the massive podium and television gear, that figure since has been reduced to 11,000--more than 4,000 fewer than at San Francisco’s Moscone Center during the 1984 Democratic convention.

“The contrast between Atlanta’s no space and the broad vistas of the Superdome in New Orleans (site of the GOP convention in August) will be profound,” said Lane Vernardos, CBS-TV’s executive producer for special events. “The prospect of incipient gridlock is quite high in Atlanta,” he added, noting that “I wouldn’t want to be on the floor during this convention.”

More recently, news organizations have been up in arms over the scarcity of downtown hotel accommodations for their staffs and the snafus in the Democratic Party’s management of bookings.

Time magazine, for example, asked for a total of 120 rooms, according to Susanna Schrobsdorff, the magazine’s work space coordinator for the convention. “We got 12 to 14 rooms downtown, and 106 rooms were being held at a hotel near the airport,” she said.

But, she said, the Democratic National Committee never gave Time the reservation forms for the airport hotel because of the possibility that the space might be needed if a threatened strike by workers at the downtown Hilton forced the delegates slated to be lodged there to seek other quarters. For smaller news organizations with less clout and fewer resources, the situation is even bleaker.

Allocate Rooms

Mike McCurry, a Democratic National Committee spokesman, said only 6,700 of the total 19,000 rooms set aside by the city for the convention were in the downtown hotel district--and of those 6,700 downtown rooms only 442 have been allocated for the press. At the same time, he added, “there are 4,000 reporters from major organizations who want to sleep downtown.”

What effect all this may have on the press’ objectivity remains to be seen. Gerald Bartels, president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, recently summed up the fears of the business community, saying: “If the media are not getting what they want, then they have a chip of their shoulder . . . and they are more likely to write a negative story than a positive story.”

The chamber has been especially fretful over possible bad publicity. In a newsletter earlier this year, it listed what it considered 25 positive news stories about the city and 25 negative ones.

Articles about “Gone With the Wind” were all right, but not stories about the commercial development that has destroyed many of Atlanta’s historic sites and threatens several others--including the dilapidated apartment building where Margaret Mitchell wrote most of “GWTW.” Features on the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. center, where the martyred civil rights leader is buried, also were deemed appropriate. Not so, however, were profiles of Atlanta’s many lesser-known, living civil rights leaders.

The hordes of protesters and publicity seekers who are expected to converge on Atlanta for the convention are another anxiety-producing quantity. To begin with, nobody knows for sure just how many will turn up. Estimates have ranged upwards to as many as 20,000.

Protesters Outraged

Many protest groups also are outraged over the city’s plan to confine all demonstrations to the officially designated “free speech area” in the 2-acre parking lot across from the convention complex.

In an unsuccessful lawsuit filed in federal District Court here, a coalition of more than a dozen protest groups calling itself Alternative ’88 argued that the protesters want to be seen and heard by the delegates and that the demonstration area chosen by the city cannot be seen from the convention hall area.

Moreover, the suit contended, the area is so small that it would push many groups with competing political philosophies too close for comfort.

Consultant Testifies

“To me, it poses quite a risk,” Robert Klotz, a Washington-based security consultant testified on behalf of the protesters at a recent courtroom hearing on the suit. “The potential is just horrendous when you have different people with different viewpoints.”

But Rocky Pomerance, a security adviser to the Democratic convention committee who was the Miami Beach police chief when the Democratic and Republican conventions were held there in 1972, dismissed such arguments. Pomerance predicted that perhaps fewer than 3,000 will congregate at any one time in the designated demonstration area, thus posing little problem for security officials.

Some long-simmering local labor disputes also could disrupt convention activities. For example, a union-led “Justice for Janitors” campaign to organize the city’s 1,300 downtown building custodians hopes to make a special target of John Portman Jr., a world renowned Atlanta architect and developer.

Portman, who has shaped much of Atlanta’s modern downtown skyline with his 13-square-block Peachtree Center complex, is jointly sponsoring several convention events with the Democratic National Committee.

“We’ve put Portman on notice,” said Nancy Lenk, spokeswoman for the Service Employees International Union. Among other things, the union is urging convention officials and delegates to boycott any functions sponsored by Portman or held in his buildings or hotels.

Ironically, one of the usual sources of dissension and disruption at past Democratic conventions--the party officials and convention delegates themselves--is not expected to be much trouble this year. The Democrats, conscious of the wounds they have inflicted on themselves by such bloody brawls as at the tumultuous 1968 Chicago convention, are striving to come to Atlanta more united and less hostile to each other than ever before in recent decades.

“It’s quite apparent that the Democrats have been impressed by the tranquility of past Republican conventions and the ramifications that it has had for the November election,” said Claibourne H. Darden Jr., an Atlanta-based pollster and political consultant. “Consequently, the Democrats want a ‘Me Too’ convention in Atlanta.”

Researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.