Atlanta

Atlanta is a city of contradictions—a hotbed of growth and business but steeped in a tradition of Southern hospitality. Its food is no different, and its chefs have everything to offer, including peaches, peanuts, fried chicken, and Coca-Cola. Features recipes from 56 of the best restaurants, including Watershed, Mary Mac’s Tea Room, Babette’s Café, Gravity Pub, Horseradish Grill, Wisteria, Busy Bee’s Café, The Pecan, and Cakes & Ale.

From the memories of everyday experience, Living Atlanta vividly recreates life in the city during the three decades from World War I through World War II--a period in which a small, regional capital became a center of industry, education, finance, commerce, and travel. This profusely illustrated volume draws on nearly two hundred interviews with Atlanta residents who recall, in their own words, "the way it was"--from segregated streetcars to college fraternity parties, from moonshine peddling to visiting performances by the Metropolitan Opera, from the growth of neighborhoods to religious revivals. The book is based on a celebrated public radio series that was broadcast in 1979-80 and hailed by Studs Terkel as "an important, exciting project--a truly human portrait of a city of people." Living Atlanta presents a diverse array of voices--domestics and businessmen, teachers and factory workers, doctors and ballplayers. There are memories of the city when it wasn't quite a city: "Back in those young days it was country in Atlanta," musician Rosa Lee Carson reflects. "It sure was. Why, you could even raise a cow out there in your yard." There are eyewitness accounts of such major events as the Great Fire of 1917: "The wind blowing that way, it was awful," recalls fire fighter Hugh McDonald. "There'd be a big board on fire, and the wind would carry that board, and it'd hit another house and start right up on that one. And it just kept spreading." There are glimpses of the workday: "It's a real job firing an engine, a darn hard job," says railroad man J. R. Spratlin. "I was using a scoop and there wasn't no eight hour haul then, there was twelve hours, sometimes sixteen." And there are scenes of the city at play: "Baseball was the popular sport," remembers Arthur Leroy Idlett, who grew up in the Pittsburgh neighborhood. "Everybody had teams. And people--you could put some kids out there playing baseball, and before you knew a thing, you got a crowd out there, watching kids play." Organizing the book around such topics as transportation, health and religion, education, leisure, and politics, the authors provide a narrative commentary that places the diverse remembrances in social and historical context. Resurfacing throughout the book as a central theme are the memories of Jim Crow and the peculiarities of black-white relations. Accounts of Klan rallies, job and housing discrimination, and poll taxes are here, along with stories about the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, early black forays into local politics, and the role of the city's black colleges. Martin Luther King, Sr., historian Clarence Bacote, former police chief Herbert Jenkins, educator Benjamin Mays, and sociologist Arthur Raper are among those whose recollections are gathered here, but the majority of the voices are those of ordinary Atlantans, men and women who in these pages relive day-to-day experiences of a half-century ago.

From the author of the Oprah's Book Club Selection An American Marriage, here is a beautifully evocative novel that proves why Tayari Jones is "one of the most important voices of her generation" (Essence). It was the end of summer, a summer during the two-year nightmare in which Atlanta's African-American children were vanishing and twenty-nine would be found murdered by 1982. Here fifth-grade classmates Tasha Baxter, Rodney Green, and Octavia Harrison will discover back-to-school means facing everyday challenges in a new world of safety lessons, terrified parents, and constant fear. The moving story of their struggle to grow up-and survive- shimmers with the piercing, ineffable quality of childhood, as it captures all the hurts and little wins, the all-too-sudden changes, and the merciless, outside forces that can sweep the young into adulthood and forever shape their lives. PRAISE FOR TAYARI JONES "Tayari Jones is blessed with vision to see through to the surprising and devastating truths at the heart of ordinary lives, strength to wrest those truths free, and a gift of language to lay it all out, compelling and clear." -- Michael Chabon "Tayari Jones has emerged as one of the most important voices of her generation." -- Essence "One of America's finest writers." -- Nylon.com "Tayari Jones is a wonderful storyteller." -- Ploughsharesspan

Poor Atlanta looks at the poor people’s campaigns in Atlanta in the 1960s and 1970s, which operated in relationship to Sunbelt city- building efforts. With these efforts, city leaders aimed to prevent urban violence, staunch disinvestment, check white flight, and amplify Atlanta’s importance as a business and transportation hub. As urban leaders promoted Forward Atlanta, a program to, in Mayor Ivan Allen Jr.’s words, “sell the city like a product,” poor families insisted that their lives and living conditions, too, should improve. While not always operating within public awareness, antipoverty campaigns among the poor presented a regular and sometimes strident critique of inequality and Atlanta’s uneven urban development. With Poor Atlanta, LeeAnn B. Lands demonstrates that, while eclipsed by the Black freedom movement, antipoverty organizing (including direct action campaigns, legal actions, lobbying, and other forms of activism) occurred with regularity from 1964 through 1976. Her analysis is one of the few citywide studies of antipoverty organizing in late twentieth-century America.

Atlanta's cuisine has always been an integral part of its identity. From its Native American agricultural roots to the South's first international culinary scene, food has shaped this city, often in unexpected ways. Trace the evolution of iconic dishes like Brunswick stew, hoecakes and peach pie while celebrating Atlanta's noted foodies, including Henry Grady, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nathalie Dupree. Be transported to the beginnings of notable restaurants and markets, including Durand's at the Union Depot, Busy Bee Caf , Mary Mac's Tearoom, the Municipal Market and the Buford Highway Farmers Market. With fourteen historic recipes, culinary historian Akila Sankar McConnell proves that food will always be at the heart of Atlanta's story.

Despite the rapid creation of jobs in the greater Atlanta region, poverty in the city itself remains surprisingly high, and Atlanta's economic boom has yet to play a significant role in narrowing the gap between the suburban rich and the city poor. This book investigates the key factors underlying this paradox. The authors show that the legacy of past residential segregation as well as the more recent phenomenon of urban sprawl both work against inner city blacks. Many remain concentrated near traditional black neighborhoods south of the city center and face prohibitive commuting distances now that jobs have migrated to outlying northern suburbs. The book also presents some promising signs. Few whites still hold overt negative stereotypes of blacks, and both whites and blacks would prefer to live in more integrated neighborhoods. The emergence of a dynamic, black middle class and the success of many black-owned businesses in the area also give the authors reason to hope that racial inequality will not remain entrenched in a city where so much else has changed. A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality

As Atlanta evolved from a sleepy, backwater, 19th-century frontier railroad town into a 21st-century international metropolis, Jewish men and women significantly contributed to the rich tapestry of the "Gate City of the South." The commercial infrastructure of the expanding city was greatly enhanced through numerous small businesses established by Jewish merchants, some of which became major players in various industries. Many of Atlanta's most recognizable icons--The Coca-Cola Company, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Atlanta Braves--originated, in part, thanks to support from visionary leaders in the Jewish community. While there are many success stories throughout Atlanta's Jewish history, there are also dark episodes of blatant antisemitism that traumatized the community and had national implications. The lynching of Leo M. Frank; the bombing of the city's historic synagogue, the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation; and the deliberate expulsion of Jewish students from Emory University Dental School marred Atlanta's self-proclaimed reputation as "The City Too Busy to Hate."

More than any other major U.S. city, Atlanta reinvents itself again and again. From the Civil War to the 1996 Olympic boom to the current housing crisis, its history is a cycle of ruin and resurgence. In Planning Atlanta, two dozen planning practitioners and thought leaders bring its story to life. Explore Atlanta, where change is always in the wind. Planning Atlanta continues the APA Planners Press series on how planning shapes American cities.