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NORTH-SOUTH: CITIES DIVIDED |
Frank Pizarro stood on the north side of I-20, gesticulating southward.
"Friends and comrades," he shouted above the din of rush-hour traffic, "on that side are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion, and death; on this side ease and pleasure."
Actually, Pizarro never described Atlanta's north-south divide in such stark terms. In fact, Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador, never quite made it to Georgia. He died 400 years before I-20 was built. In Peru.
Yet Pizarro's prescient (and purple) prose might well have described the economic, social and racial distinctions between the slow-going south Atlanta region of today and the ever-burgeoning Northside. The disparity recently prompted muckety-mucks from a Washington think tank to warn of "a stark divide" between the two Atlanta regions, which, if left unchecked, threatens the entire 10-county area's well-being.
Yet prognostications of doom aside, Atlanta is really no different than most major American cities divided by some unofficial, socio-geographic equivalent of the Mason-Dixon line.
Think about it: What do Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles have in common? What trait do cities like Seattle, San Diego, Indianapolis, Dallas and Houston share?
They're all split somewhere through their municipal midsections, with their southern halves weighing down their northern counterparts.
It's Southside Chicago with its steel yards, meat-packing plants and White Sox fans vs. the North Shore and its tony suburbs filled with Cubs fans.
It's south Philly and Rocky on one end, the Main Line and Katherine Hepburn on the other.
It's south-central L.A. vs. Beverly Hills. Bronx-Harlem vs. Westchester County. South Bah-stin vs. Beacon Hill. Hapeville vs. Buckhead.
"I can certainly think of a lot of U.S. examples where the north side is better and the south side is more industrial and working class," says Carl Abbott, a professor of urban studies at Portland State University. "There's a very strong tendency that once one sector of a city is defined as a good side of town, it creates a huge momentum --- and huge inertia on the other side of town. Reputations get built up."
Of course, no newly minted theorem would be complete without its pesky detractors. Washington, Denver and Birmingham come to mind, as do those burgs split along an east-west axis. But the distinct topographies of many towns help explain away their unwillingness to join the north-south fraternity of Dysfunctional Metropolitan Regions.
Reasons for the divide are as manifold as professors willing to expound upon it.
There's the Excrement Flows Down River Dictum. The Rocky Top (as in "you'll always be home sweet home to me") Principle. The Migration Postulation. The Train-Kept-A-Rollin' Premise. And more.
Membership in the not-so-special club is large; the divides grow starker. It began in colonial days, picked up steam with the 19th century Industrial Revolution, and zoomed through the auto-dependent 20th century. What does the new century promise? And should people care?
"They should care for a lot of reasons," says geography professor Larry Ford of San Diego State University. "From a social standpoint, people get isolated. Then you've got all the other problems associated with cities, especially traffic congestion which is going to become much worse. The fact that everybody wants to be in the same end of town just makes the problems more difficult.
"It can't go on this way," the professor admonishes, "or we'll just grind to a halt."
Atlanta falling and rising
That is the fear of many an Atlantan who spends an inordinate amount of time in traffic, or reading weighty public policy tomes promulgated by Washington. Entitled "Moving Beyond Sprawl: The Challenge for Metropolitan Atlanta," the report issued by the venerable Brookings Institution weighs the consequences between the northern "haves" and the southern "haves-not-as-much."
Not only does this breach endanger the region's socio-economic and racial well-being, the eggheads say, it threatens to further pancake North Georgia's unstoppable growth and development pattern.
Last decade, more than 650,000 people and 350,000 jobs were added across a 10-county Atlanta region. Three-fourths of the jobs went north of the not-so-imaginary I-20 barrier, mainly to Gwinnett, Cobb and north Fulton counties.
Much of south Fulton and DeKalb counties floundered, with age-old industries, low-rent housing, poor schools and large pockets of economically disadvantaged African-Americans. College Park, East Point and Hapeville lost population from 1990 to 1998.
Yet prosperous communities and business parks flourish south of I-20 in Fulton and DeKalb counties. Fayette and Henry counties too are largely immune to the center-city meltdown, as super-sized subdivisions leapfrog further and further from Atlanta.
Therein lies the rub: A region that abandons its core might one day succumb to an outward-spreading cancer.
"When we talk about an area of uneven development, it means we have to address urban sprawl at the same time we address inner-city core neglect," says Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Research Center at Clark Atlanta University. "It's two sides of the same coin."
It's not like Atlanta didn't see this north-vs.-south, boom-vs.-bust split coming a long way off.
As far back as 1850 --- well before Gen. Sherman decided three-fourths of the town's homes should be remodeled from the ground up --- the pattern for this city's present-day predicament was set.
"It was believed in the early days," wrote city planner extraordinaire Warren H. Manning in 1922, "that the business houses would go northward."
Manning, who helped lay out the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition (now Piedmont Park) and the Druid Hills neighborhood, witnessed those halcyon days of unbridled, unplanned and unresponsive (to those less fortunate, at least) growth as Atlanta's business and residential core stretched north along Peachtree Street.
He noted that early Atlanta bunched around the downtown railroad terminus and expanded outward until thwarted by West End and Inman Park. Manning also pointed out that greater Atlanta grew without much attention to planning, following the ridge lines of Peachtree and other main thoroughfares, and hopping the 15 or so creeks which piffled through town.
"Even now," he wrote in an otherwise bullish State of the City report, "the co-ordinates of all the factors that must be considered to bring about a well-balanced growth for the city as a whole are not being considered, for there is as yet little attention being given to the relation that the city must have to plan for the state, the region, or to a national plan study."
Effects of Jim Crow
Atlanta didn't heed Manning's advice, as the city continued its higgledy-piggledy growth. Like today, modes of transportation dictated where the various classes and races would end up.
Trolley lines initially carried the wealthy and middle-class families (read: white) in all directions, but particularly north from Five Points. Rail lines attracted cotton- and wood-processing factories and warehouses, and the poor families who worked in them, primarily south and east of the business district.
The post-war era of auto mobility allowed newly middle-class white families to push further from the city's core. The lower classes (read: black) moved in, as they did into many of the newly constructed public-housing apartments scattered around center-city Atlanta. Cars flooded Atlanta's inadequate street system.
"Can you imagine driving your automobile in Atlanta in a steady flow of traffic without snarls and kinks, without getting caught behind a street car or a big truck, without getting into traffic jams that last, seemingly, for hours?" a Constitution reporter wrote in October 1945.
The article went on to praise the just-released Lochner Report, which promised salvation from gridlock via tens of millions of dollars worth of four-lane expressways and road-improvement projects. The Downtown Connector was born; the importance of I-20 became clear.
The final piece to Atlanta's transportation puzzle firmly took hold in the 1950s, as Hartsfield Airport continued its jet-age expansion. Hapeville was one of Atlanta's three-fastest growing industrial districts. No longer would south Atlanta be considered as desirable a residential address.
Jim Crow, with his legally enforced patterns of housing, education and transit discrimination, ensured blacks would continue to bear economic and social inequities.
"The problem of how to locate 90,000 additional colored people in the next 25 or 30 years is serious," wrote the authors of the February 1952 land-use plan prepared for Atlanta's Metropolitan Planning Commision.
They had a brainstorm: "Plans might be devised in connection with works programs, such as expressway construction, to make wholesale shifts of former white homes for colored occupancy at one time --- with the consent and participation of all residents involved."
Of course.
"Interstate 20 divided the region in half with African-Americans, for the most part, living below I-20 and whites living above it," notes Bullard of Clark Atlanta. "To this day, we're still seeing those large concentrations and patterns established more than five decades ago."
Nationwide pattern
Atlanta's development and division are fairly typical of most auto-dependent cities in the South, Southwest and Northwest which boomed in the latter half of the 20th century. Yet even the industrial giants of the Northeast and Midwest, whose development patterns were largely set before the auto age, couldn't all escape the doughnutization --- a hollow middle surounded by a fatty ring --- of their regions.
In both cases, cars and highways gave families the means to flee the increasingly rotted urban cores for the suburban dream of half-acre lawns and corner drive-thrus. What's striking is how many of those new-old cities and new-new cities split along a north-south axis despite their unique geographies and histories.
Take Philadelphia, for example.
Settlers founded the city along the banks of the Delaware River. Fine homes and businesses flowed west and north; gritty factories and oil refineries headed south. The rolling fields of suburban northwest Philly, like Chestnut Hill, are the places to be; flat and swampy townships like Chester are not.
"People with money like to be on hilltops because of the views and the better air circulation," says professor Abbott of Portland. "And a lot of the key rivers flow north to south, so that means the northern ends tend to be the higher land and southern sites tend to be lower. That also means better drainage (in the north), so you don't find yourself living in a swamp. The upscale people tend to capture the high ground."
Implied, but left unsaid, by Abbott is that the well-off burghers of Philadelphia and dozens of other towns didn't want to draw water which somebody upstream had sullied.
"People generally move upriver so they don't get the garbage and pollution," says Ford of San Diego who wrote "Cities and Buildings: Skyscrapers, Skidrows and Suburbs."
It should come as no surprise that America's migratory patterns so greatly influenced the urban divides of newer U.S. cities throughout the Midwest and West. Trains from the south carried legions of poor blacks and whites to the low-paying blue-collar jobs in south Chicago, south Indianapolis, and beyond. There, families filled the steel-bending and meat-packing communities, which too often lagged behind the wealthier enclaves found north of Chicago, Indianapolis and elsewhere.
Whites from New England and the Mid-Atlantic states settled in north and west Indianapolis; whites and blacks from the Carolinas, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee peopled the south side. Today, I-70 and the east-west train tracks split Indianapolis, much like I-20 and the rails do Atlanta.
"The south side is generally where you'll hear country music and where you'll eat more fried food and gravy," says Lamont Hulse, an urban development expert at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "The north side is where you'd find more symphony patrons, fern bars and nouvelle cuisine."
The more recent migration of Central and South Americans north to Texas, California and the Northwest mimics the migratory patterns of earlier American fortune-seekers. In San Antonio, for example, the upscale neighborhoods rise into the limestone hills north of town. Many Mexican-Americans live in the flats, on the south side of town.
Revitalization challenges
The pundits don't offer much by way of antidote. Resolve the inequities, they say, by bolstering the downtrodden cores of American cities. The billions spent on barrier-building, sprawl-inducing road projects should now be spent cultivating urban back yards.
In many cities, including Atlanta, downtowns and once-forgotten neighborhoods are revitalizating. Overcoming the stigma attached to downtrodden communities, though, may prove daunting.
"Capital follows profit, and not need," says Ford. "And everybody likes to glom onto a sense of moving upscale."
If only Francisco Pizarro were around.
Wrapping up his 16th century stemwinder, the conquistador again challenged his countrymen to decide in which direction their futures lay.
"For my part," Pizarro said, "I go to the south."
Dan Chapman is a staff writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
ON THE WEB: For more information about the Brookings Institution report: www.brook.edu/
Illustration of the city of Atlanta imposed on the face of a compass, showing distinctive north and south regions./ WALTER CUMMING / Staff
METRO ATLANTA'S GROWTH
The change in population and employment, 1980-1997:
East-Northeast
New residents: 258,406
New jobs: 161,162
East-Southeast
New residents: 101,391
New jobs: 36,076
South-Southeast
New residents: 88,891
New jobs: 43,938
South-Southwest
New residents: 91,230
New jobs: 69,217
West-Southwest
New residents: 35,654
New jobs: 27,276
West-Northwest
New residents: 50,110
New jobs: 21,712
North-Northwest
New residents: 267,724
New jobs: 204,773
North-Northeast
New residents: 243,237
New jobs: 281,616
Source: The Brookings Institution / ELIZABETH LANDT / Staff