"Fifty Years. One City Magazine" claims the slogan on promotional T-shirts handed out earlier this week as Atlanta magazine celebrated its golden anniversary by opening an exhibition at the Atlanta History Center.
But anyone expecting a vanity show in this day of ceaseless self-promotion will be surprised at how much "Atlanta Magazine 1961-2011: 50 Years of the Changing City" focuses on the city and how little, and how restrained, the magazine self-promotion is. It's a credit to co-curators Paul Crater, History Center vice president of research services, and former Atlanta magazine editor-in-chief Rebecca Burns that they keep the lens on Atlanta's amazing transformation over five decades, one that the exhibit acknowledges is continuing at warp speed.
The breezy show in Kenan Research Center, which guests can visit for free without paying History Center admission, is built around magazine covers and photos with detailed wall text, a timeline of the city's progress blown up from the May issue, and two video screens featuring thoughtful interviews with former and current Atlanta leaders and luminaries, including Andrew Young, Sam Massell, Shirley Franklin and Hank Aaron.
Though the gallery is small (additional material is offered to smart phone users via QR codes), it's a little surprising that the exhibit didn't borrow some artifacts from the History Center archives, the metro area's preeminent repository.
Even so, the show does a nice job tracing how smart political and community leadership helped keep black and white relations relatively harmonious during the stormy Civil Rights era that revealed ugly divides in other Southern cities, and how business titans reshaped the polite "City Too Busy to Hate" into a hard-charging capital of commerce.
Started as a Chamber of Commerce-run publication, Atlanta magazine was along for the dizzying ride. Still, as one wall panel soberly acknowledges, "The Atlanta portrayed in the magazine's first decade is certainly a man's world -- a white man's world." Diversity would come quickly, however.
Perhaps there's something in the water -- or maybe it's one the ingredients in that secret Coca-Cola formula -- that has caused the city to produce so many distinct personalities. In pictures and/or words, there's a gallery of Atlanta characters represented here: William B. Hartsfield (and the TV-watching silverback gorilla named for him at Atlanta's zoo, Willie B.), Martin Luther King Jr., Lester Maddox, Jimmy Carter, Gladys Knight, Dominique Wilkins, "Miss Daisy," Newt Gingrich, Usher, Tyler Perry. Even the much-lamented Centennial Olympic Games mascot Izzy gets a nod.
For the magazine's 25th anniversary in 1986, a panel of experts was asked what the metro area would be like in 2011. "There will be at least 3 million people," then-Fulton County Commissioner Michael Lomax estimated in what proved to be a too-modest-by-half prediction.
Former Mayor Young, one of the first to push the notion of Atlanta as an international city, unblinkingly addresses the challenges of that growth in the best of the video interviews. "We're a great city for 4 million people," he says. "To become a great city for 6 [million] to 8 million people, there has to be a lot more cooperation between the city and suburbs.
"The central city is the goose that lays the golden egg. If it wasn't for what Atlanta was doing right for the last 100 years, we wouldn't even have suburbs."
On view
"Atlanta Magazine 1961-2011: 50 Years of the Changing City"
10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday–Saturday. Through Sept. 18. Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center, 130 W. Paces Ferry Road N.W., Atlanta. Free. 404-814-4000, www.atlantahistorycenter.com.
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
