Months Before Flame Is Lit, Atlanta Burns Over Face Lift : Olympics: Games have already begun for residents. They’re jumping construction hurdles and tossing barbs.

In barely eight months, some 2 million huffing, sweating sports fans will surge into Atlanta for the 1996 Olympic Games. But if Louis Bottoms can swing it, he’ll be far away when the happening billed as “the largest peacetime event in the history of the world” unfolds in his hometown.

“I’m looking for a mountain in Tennessee to sit on for three weeks next summer,” drawls the 47-year-old mail carrier.

Like many Atlantans who have endured months of hype, inconvenience and construction detours, Bottoms already is tired of the Olympics, which don’t start until July 19.

City fathers and business leaders hope hosting the centennial Olympic Games will put Atlanta on the world map, and many Southerners view it as validation of the region’s symbolic rise to prominence. But to many Atlantans, the event is shaping into an Olympic-sized pain.

“Everybody is complaining,” groused Menbere Haile, who owns a grocery store on the city’s historic Auburn Avenue, which is getting a massive, disruptive face lift. “We can’t get merchandise [delivered]. People don’t come to the shop like they used to. There is no parking. The traffic is bad. . . . It’s a problem really--a very big problem.”

Even the complainers admit that all the street widening, sidewalk repairs and other construction projects will enhance the city. “It is going to be beautiful, no question about it,” Haile said. “We’ve got to be patient.”

Still, some, like Bottoms, gripe that “the citizens of Atlanta are having to suffer for several years for the convenience of international visitors for a couple of weeks.”

Indeed, this city is in the middle of a building boom the likes of which it probably has not seen since it was rebuilt after the Union Army burned it down on its march to the sea.

More than $500 million in stadiums, gymnasiums and other athletic venues are being built, a portion of the more than $2 billion in public and private funds being spent on myriad projects slated to open before the Olympics. While a bond referendum was held to finance most of the infrastructure improvements, the venues are being funded largely by corporate sponsorships, television fees and merchandising.

Parks are being built, overhauled and replanted. Streets and highways are being repaved and rerouted. Bridges have been replaced. Poor neighborhoods are getting face lifts, new housing and amenities.

Twelve miles of sidewalk are being rebuilt downtown and near Olympic venues. Five million dollars is being spent on new trees. Abandoned buildings are being rehabilitated and turned into luxury apartments downtown.

The airport recently got a new $330-million international terminal, and work soon will be completed there on $170 million in other improvements. The region’s largest shopping mall, located in north Atlanta, just got a $60-million make-over. The arts center that houses the symphony and the city’s theater company has been redesigned.

Compare this to the much more laid-back approach Los Angeles took to the 1984 Olympic Games. The Los Angeles Olympic events were spread out over long distances, with nearly all of the competition taking place in existing structures. In Atlanta, most of the venues will be built especially for the occasion. Eighteen of the 29 venues will be concentrated within a 1 1/4-mile radius of downtown.

According to a study released earlier this year by the University of Georgia, the 17-day event will have an estimated $5.1-billion economic impact on the state, will add $1.9 billion in earnings to Georgia’s economy and will result in the creation of over 77,000 full- and part-time jobs.

Still, Atlantans who just want to get to work on time are having to ask themselves if all the disruption is worth it. “They repaved all the highways that, from my point of view, were fine to begin with,” said Cathy Sindos. “They tore them all up and repaved them this summer.” Sindos, an AT&T; worker who commutes daily to midtown from her home in an eastern suburb, said it takes her an hour to get to and from work now, whereas it used to take 45 minutes.

To be sure, not everyone has a sour reaction to the disruptive make-over. Some choose to take the long view. “It’s all going to enhance the city for the future,” said Debi Hayes, who manages a downtown travel agency and lives in a northern suburb. “We’re moving into the next century, and it’s time to enhance the city. It needs to grow. It’s going to compete with the New Yorks and the Los Angeleses.”

But back on Auburn Avenue, some question whether the city’s priorities are in order.

The street, once the vibrant heart of the African American community and now the city’s biggest tourist attraction because Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s crypt and birth home are there, is getting $5.5 million in street improvements, including street lights and sidewalks. A three-block section of the street currently is closed to through traffic while the Corporation for Olympic Development in Atlanta installs colored asphalt blocks in a geometric pattern.

Even with all this, however, and despite the recent opening of some restaurants and small businesses, much of the street still has a shabby look.

“I’ve not figured out why they’re improving the sidewalks when we have abandoned buildings across the street,” said Janet Saboor, who owns the Diaspora Arts Gallery.

As she spoke, crews were outside breaking up the sidewalk. Orange plastic netting was strung to ward off pedestrians. Heavy equipment toiled in the street.

“If the money that is used for sidewalk construction was used to renovate these abandoned buildings, then we would have businesses and activities downtown for visitors to come to,” she said.

One of the most disruptive projects is the 60-foot map of the world that has been shaped from colored asphalt blocks and inlaid in the middle of a busy downtown intersection. To implant the mosaic, which has colors so muted that it is easy to overlook, the city shut down downtown’s main thoroughfare for two weeks.

Because of the project and massive sidewalk reconstruction nearby, suburban-based businesswoman Lisa Thomas recently had to park a block away from a popular restaurant and walk in high heels down the middle of the rubble-strewn, closed-off street past massive craters, barricades and mounds of dirt and construction equipment. She compared the scene to war-torn Sarajevo.

And, in the view of Bottoms, the mail carrier, it’s all been a big, expensive joke.

“They closed the busiest intersection in the city--Peachtree Street and International Boulevard--for two or three straight weeks, causing massive traffic problems for hundreds of thousands of people, just to put a silly depiction of the world in the middle of the street that nobody even recognizes when they walk by it,” he said in disbelief. “The colors are so passive. It’s one of the most expensive jokes they’ve pulled off so far.”

A Planet Hollywood restaurant opened at the intersection shortly before the road was closed. Carolyn Sloss, spokeswoman for the restaurant, said it didn’t hurt business, in part because the restaurant was new and people wanted to check it out. Still, all the construction has been an inconvenience. It takes her 15 minutes just to make a right turn at a downtown intersection to get to work, she said.

She also called the world mosaic “a letdown.” “You can’t see it from the street level,” she said. “I would have to stand on the top of the parking garage to see it. I expected it to be something you could enjoy as you passed by, and a reminder of the Olympics coming.”

For Bottoms, the moment most emblematic of the disruption the Olympics are causing occurred a few months ago when he got a parking ticket on his mail truck while he was stopped--for five minutes, he said--to drop off mail at a spot where he’s been parking for 12 years.

“It seems to me that the Olympics Committee has more say-so about what’s going on around town than City Hall,” he complained. “It seems that everything is being done for the sake of the Olympics.”