PROUD ATLANTA : It Went After the 1996 Summer Olympics With Trademark Zeal. Will a New Wave of Visitors Catch the Feeling?

This, says local hotel owner Mit Amin, is “the only city I’ve been in that believes in itself.”

In an era of retrenchment, of lowered expectations, of making do with less, Atlanta shamelessly embraces a slicked-up version of old-fashioned boosterism. Banners and tape-recorded “welcome to Atlanta” messages at Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport began trumpeting the 1996 Summer Olympics even before last September, when underdog Atlanta beat out Athens for the Games. Now that the “candidate city” has officially become the “host city,” airport gift shops are already stuffed with Olympics souvenirs.

The initial public hysteria over the Olympics triumph has abated only slightly in the intervening six months. As Atlanta lawyer and newspaper humor columnist Robert L. Steed puts it, “The bloom isn’t off that rose a bit.”

Indeed, the civic mood has been so fevered that selection of Atlanta as the 1994 Super Bowl site has gone practically unnoticed.

Even a public struggle between the city and the local Olympic committee over control of the Games’ billion-dollar bank account (now resolved), a protest against building the tennis complex in an upscale neighborhood (successful), and objection to construction of the main stadium in a low-income neighborhood (still simmering) have failed to dim the euphoria.

The Olympics coup is quintessential Atlanta: a wildly ambitious, internationally oriented project that initially was greeted with skepticism, if not outright derision. In 1987, when former Mayor Andrew Young and local lawyers Billy Payne and Charles Battle started serious lobbying for the Olympics, even most Atlantans were amused.

They should have remembered 1980, when the television industry told Atlanta’s Ted Turner that he was nuts to start an all-news cable TV channel with bureaus around the world. People probably told him he was nuts to ask Jane Fonda for a date, too.

Atlanta loves to prove its doubters wrong. The city’s hottest tourist attraction these days amounts to three floors of “I told you so” celebrating the against-the-odds success of the city’s most famous consumer product, a would-be tonic called Coca-Cola.

The World of Coca-Cola, a three-story pop art edifice with an 18-foot neon-lit plexiglass Coke bottle anchoring one corner of the building, has drawn 400,000 people since it opened Aug. 3. Inside, countless Coca-Cola posters, banners, trays, coolers, dispensers, cans, bottles, wallets, calendars and TV spots numb the senses. Club Coca-Cola, the world’s glitziest soda fountain, jolts them back to life with gaudy lighting, video-game sound effects and free soft drinks, including 18 flavors not available in the United States.

The World of Coca-Cola is part of a growing downtown tourist district centered on Underground Atlanta, a kind of retail/entertainment catacombs now in its second incarnation.

In the 1920s, Atlanta built a whole new street level at city center, overpassing the railroad tracks--and entombing and preserving several blocks of old storefronts, many of which dated back to the rebuilding years following the Civil War burning of the city. In 1969, the city opened this “underground” area as a nightclub district.

It didn’t work. Crime and mismanagement closed the clubs one by one. In 1980, the whole area was shut down.

Atlanta didn’t give up. It brought in the Rouse Co. from Maryland, a specialist in managing retail centers, and Underground reopened in 1989 as a showy shopping/restaurant/night life attraction--with brighter lighting, wider public areas and much-increased police presence.

The result bears a strong resemblance to Miami’s Bayside Marketplace, Boston’s Faneuil Hall, New Orleans’ Riverwalk, and all the other Rouse “festival marketplaces.” It has been extremely popular with both tourists and locals. “If you like Rouse developments, it’s as good as any,” says lawyer/humorist Steed.

Steed claims to be “tourist attraction-averse,” but he likes the World of Coca-Cola. He also touts Atlanta as the home of “some of the most extraordinary golf clubs in the South.” Some favorite Atlanta-area golf courses are at Lake Lanier Island and Stouffer Pine Isle Resort, both at Lake Sidney Lanier; Callaway Gardens, and Georgia’s Stone Mountain. All are within an hour and a half of the city. Atlanta itself offers 41 public courses. Three of the best are Adams Park, North Fulton and Bobby Jones.

Of course, few tourists come to Atlanta just for the golf. The city drew nearly 2 million convention delegates last year, the fourth-highest total in the country, but Atlanta is not an attraction in itself, such as New Orleans is. Lacking a French Quarter to promote, the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau resorts to touting Atlanta as the site of the world’s largest suburban office park (Perimeter Center), the Southeast’s tallest escalator (in the Peachtree Center rapid-transit station--192 feet), the world’s largest 10-kilometer run (the annual Peachtree Road Race, with 25,000 runners) and the world’s largest toll-free dialing zone.

But you can have a good time in Atlanta even if you don’t make a single phone call. Both to orient yourself and to locate a number of worthwhile attractions, start with a drive up Peachtree Street, the spine of the city. If you’re without wheels, you can make the same journey via the MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) train. MARTA’s north-south line, which starts at the airport, follows Peachtree.

Just don’t look for any peach trees. They’re indigenous to southern Georgia, not Atlanta. The city probably contains more streets named Peachtree (32, many of which intersect each other) than actual trees. The name came from a local Indian village that was called Standing Peachtree after a solitary hilltop peach tree that the Indians apparently had planted there.

Peachtree Street--the big Peachtree, which follows a ridge top through the core of Atlanta--starts at the southern edge of downtown in the government district. Atlanta is Georgia’s state capital, but the only real government-related tourist attraction is the capitol building, its gold dome gleaming near the tangled intersection of interstates 20 and 75-85. That’s real gold, by the way, mined in Dahlonega, Ga.

Peachtree heads north past Underground and the street peddlers in front of the Five Points MARTA station, into a canyon of skyscrapers. The 1976 opening of the Georgia Congress Center, a 640,000-square-foot exhibit and convention hall, triggered a frenzy of downtown hotel-building. The Atlanta Hilton Hotel and Towers opened that year, as did the Westin Peachtree Plaza, a 73-story cylinder that looks like a giant glass mailing tube. (Check out view at night from revolving rooftop lounge.)

The Convention and Visitors Bureau says that the Westin Peachtree is the tallest hotel in the Western Hemisphere. The nearby Atlanta Marriott Marquis, which is shorter but contains 1,674 rooms, has to content itself with being the largest hotel in the Southeast.

Past this land of the mega-hotels is the fabulous Fox Theatre, a gloriously overwrought, pseudo-Moorish 1929 movie palace where fake stars still twinkle in the fake sky. The theater now plays host to theatrical touring companies, but the Fox is a show in itself. And, say the Convention and Visitors folks, it boasts the country’s second-largest theater organ.

As you continue north, you’ll hit a second thicket of high-rises. This is Midtown, and virtually none of these big buildings were here 10 years ago. That means Atlanta’s growth spurt, particularly in Midtown, came after the national shift away from the sterility of glass-box architecture toward the playfulness of post-modernism. “It’s like castles,” says Lynne Siler, a free-lance photographer and Atlanta native. “It’s one of the few skylines I can look at and say, ‘Isn’t that pretty!’ ”

Midtown also contains the Woodruff Arts Center, the gleaming white complex on Peachtree that houses the well-regarded Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Alliance Theatre, the Atlanta Children’s Theatre and the High Museum of Art. The Alliance is a solid regional theater, but the High may be more renowned for its architecture--semi-cylindrical shape and spiral staircases--than for its collections. The Fay Gold Gallery, a big commercial gallery in Atlanta’s emerging yuppie principality of Buckhead, mounts more adventurous shows. Recent exhibits have featured photographs by controversial Andres Serrano and avant-garde William Wegman.

As you leave Midtown (not before visiting Petrus, Atlanta’s most chic dance club, where restroom attendants have been known to offer career counseling along with the standard array of grooming products), make sure to be careful out there. For the past two years, Atlanta’s crime rate has topped the FBI’s major-cities list. That’s misleading, says the Convention and Visitors Bureau’s Meg Beasley, because unlike most cities’ statistics, Atlanta’s don’t include the suburbs. She adds that this year’s figures will show Atlanta’s crime rate down 14%. Nevertheless, Atlantans advise being cautious in downtown and Midtown, and not leaving valuables in your car in Little Five Points, a funky area of shops, bars and ethnic restaurants east of downtown.

Meanwhile, back on Peachtree, head north to Buckhead, where the smart young moderns--the ones who drive Miatas and never drink anything domestic--hang out. Siler, who grew up here, remembers when it was just a neighborhood--”when I used to say ‘I live in Buckhead,’ and it didn’t mean you had money.”

That was before the massive invasion of hip shops, hip bars (most with second-floor outdoor decks) and hip restaurants. Now, says Siler, “I feel like I’m in Miami Beach at spring break when I go down there.”

The Buckhead Diner personifies the spirit of contemporary Buckhead. Think chrome and neon on the outside, Italian marble and polished woodwork on the inside. Think up-to-the-minute, beautifully prepared California/Southwest grazing menu and fabulous desserts. Think friendly, unintimidating service. Think less expensive than you imagine. Think long wait, because the place does take American Express (and other major credit cards), but it doesn’t take reservations. One Atlantan advises beating the lines by going for a late lunch and spending the afternoon sampling one item after another from the appetizer menu.

If your expense account is unlimited, then The Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead is your destination. It swept the Zagat Atlanta Restaurant Survey’s No. 1 rankings for food, decor and service. This Ritz (there’s another downtown) stands in north Buckhead between Atlanta’s two premier shopping malls, Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza, where platinum-card-equipped shoppers browse at Saks, Neiman Marcus, Tiffany, Louis Vitton, Polo, Abercrombie & Fitch and other emporiums.

The nearby Beverly Hills Inn serves only continental breakfast in its little dining room, but has its own charms. Each of the 17 rooms comes with balcony access and a half-bottle of good California red wine, and most have kitchens.

Mit Amin, a working-class lad from the north of England, bought the converted apartment house last year after growing restless running a hotel in the Carolinas. “It was just too quiet and too deadly for me.” He likes Buckhead because “it’s like home. Buckhead is so much like England it’s unbelievable.”

Those who like things quiet spend their Buckhead Saturday nights at the Oxford Book Store, with its Cup & Chaucer snack bar, in the Peachtree Battle shopping center on Peachtree Road. Oxford is open till 2 a.m. on weekends, and the nearby--and equally vast--Oxford Too displays its used and discount books till midnight on weekends.

Two more areas of Atlanta are worth special mention. Virginia-Highland combines handsome old residential neighborhoods and a nice collection of shops, bars and restaurants. The commercial areas cluster around three North Highland Avenue intersections. South to north, they are at St. Charles Avenue, Virginia Avenue and University Drive. The University Drive concentration contains two extremely popular sister restaurants: Indigo Coastal Grill (seafood) and Partners Morningside Cafe (casual American). Expect long waits at both.

Many believe that the soul of Atlanta is downtown at Auburn Avenue, known as Sweet Auburn in its 1930s-to-’60s heyday, when it was “the richest Negro street in the world.” Even today it remains a middle-class mixture of homes, small businesses and historic sites, and a vibrant part of Atlanta’s black community. The APEX Museum, in a poorly marked red-brick building at 135 Auburn Ave. N.E., details the street’s history.

Auburn Avenue was a critical gathering spot for the activists who helped shape Atlanta’s civil rights movement in the 1960s. Integration came with little of the violence and official resistance that was common elsewhere in the South. Atlanta boasted that it was “the city too busy to hate.”

Today, the mayor, Maynard Jackson, is black, the majority of the population within the city limits is black, one of the men who led the Olympics effort (former Mayor Andrew Young) is black, and the city’s second biannual National Black Arts Festival drew 608,500 visitors last summer.

The most towering figure in Atlanta’s, and America’s, civil-rights successes lies in his final resting place on Auburn Avenue, little more than a block from his birthplace. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came into the world on Jan. 15, 1929, in his parents’ bedroom on the second floor of a two-story, Queen Anne-style house at 501 Auburn Ave. Visitors touring the house see the bedroom King shared with his younger brother Alfred (“always in disarray,” according to their sister, Christine), and the bathroom where he liked to hide to avoid washing dishes.

Just a little west, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, his simple white marble crypt sits in the middle of a reflecting pool. Nearly a million people a year visit the tomb. Inscribed on it are his name, the years of his birth and death (1929-1968), and the words “Free at last, Free at last, Thank God Almighty I’m Free at last.” If luck is with you during your pilgrimage into King’s life, you’ll hear the choir singing in the nearby Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King was co-pastor with his father.

As Atlanta dreams brashly of the future, a visit to Martin Luther King’s grave serves as a reminder that he, too, had a dream. Like the eternal flame that marks his tomb, that dream flickers in the shifting winds of the times but has not gone out. The city has risen from the ashes of the Civil War and the shame of segregation to become the capital of the New South. The dream is far from realized, but Atlanta seems to have good reason to believe in itself.

GUIDEBOOK

All About Atlanta

Getting there: Delta flies nonstop daily from Los Angeles to Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport. Nonrefundable fares with 14 days’ advance reservation begin at $453 round trip. The unrestricted round-trip coach fare is $1,200. Budget-minded travelers might consider flying into Birmingham, Ala., a 2 1/2-hour drive west of Atlanta on surprisingly scenic Interstate 20. The unrestricted round-trip fares between LAX and Birmingham (with one to three stops) on discount-oriented Southwest Airlines begin at $528.

Getting around: MARTA trains are clean, comfortable and safe. Trains and city buses link in a single system with free transfers. Fare anywhere is $1. Call (404) 848-4711 for schedule and route information.

If you take a cab, be warned of the $5 surcharge if some of your luggage overflows the trunk and must go into the back seat.

What to do: Studio tours at CNN (Marietta Street and Techwood Drive) have been suspended because of security concerns related to CNN’s coverage of the Persian Gulf War. Normally, admission is $5 ($2.50 for those over 64 or under 13). Call (404) 827-2300.

The World of Coca-Cola, 55 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, (404) 676-5151. Children love the hands-on experiences at Scitrek, the science and technology museum, 395 Piedmont Ave. NE, (404) 522-5500.

Foodies will swoon over the DeKalb Farmers Market in suburban Atlanta, an international bazaar of edibles from around the world. Address is 3000 E. Ponce de Leon Ave., Decatur, Ga., (404) 377-6400. Open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Stone Mountain, a massive loaf of granite with a bas-relief of Confederate generals carved into the side, is worth the half-hour trip. The park (Highway 78, Stone Mountain, Ga. 30086, 404-498-5600) offers everything from golf to ice skating.

Manuel’s Tavern (pronounced MAN-yulls), 602 N. Highland Ave., (404) 525-3447, is the best neighborhood bar in town, a hangout for journalists and Democratic politicos.

Catch a performance at the Center for Puppetry Arts, 1404 Spring St., (404) 873-3391. Both children’s and adults’ series are delightful.

At Petrus dance club, 1150 Peachtree St., (404) 873-6700. Beautiful people mingle in a former theater.

For comprehensive listings of Atlanta night life, pick up a free copy of the paper “Creative Loafing.”

Where to stay: Atlanta has more than 55,000 hotel rooms covering practically every price category. At the top end of the scale, the two Ritz-Carltons, one downtown (181 Peachtree St., N.E., Atlanta 30303, 800-241-3333) and one in Buckhead (3434 Peachtree Road, N.E., Atlanta 30309, 800-241-3333), are generally considered the best. The Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau offers a complete hotel guide.

Zoning restrictions practically ban bed and breakfast inns, but there are a few. The Shellmont (821 Piedmont Ave., N.E., Atlanta 30308, 404-872-9290; rates from $65 to $95) cradles you with slightly worn Victorian warmth and ultra-friendly service. The Woodruff (223 Ponce de Leon Ave., Atlanta 30308, 404-875-9449; rates $50-$95) retains some fixtures from its day as perhaps Atlanta’s best-known brothel. The Beverly Hills Inn is a small, European-style hotel in the Buckhead area at 65 Sheridan Drive, N.E., Atlanta 30305, (404) 233-8520; rates $59-$90.

Where to eat:

The Dining Room, Ritz-Carlton Buckhead, 3434 Peachtree Road, (404) 237-2700.

LaGrotta, 2637 Peachtree Road, (404) 231-1368, for superb Northern Italian food and wonderful service.

Mary Mac’s Tea Room, 224 Ponce de Leon Ave., (404) 876-6604, for old-fashioned, no-ambience Southern cooking; try the fried chicken.

McKinnon’s Louisiane Restaurant, 3209 Maple Drive, (404) 237-1313, features Creole-style cooking popular with Atlanta’s establishment.

Nikolai’s Roof, Atlanta Hilton and Towers, 255 Courtland St., (404) 659-2000, is very Russian, very expensive; if you haven’t reserved days in advance, call anyway and hope for a cancellation.

Partners Morningside Cafe, 1399 N. Highland Ave., (404) 876-8104.

Pleasant Peasant, 555 Peachtree St., (404) 874-3223, a romantic Midtown landmark, originally country French but somewhat Americanized now.

The Varsity, 61 North Ave., (404) 881-1706, a grease-pit Georgia Tech hangout that grew and grew.

For other establishments, see Taste of Travel, page 13.

Olympics: Olympics information is available from the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, 1201 W. Peachtree St., Suite 3450, Atlanta 30309. Tickets are scheduled to go on sale in the summer of 1995.

For more information: Contact the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau, 233 Peachtree St., N.E., Suite 2000, Atlanta, Ga. 30303, (404) 521-6688.

--S.M.

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