Sometimes it gets nasty
The inside-outside battle is waged on many fronts. Not long after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution moved outside I-285, the paper announced it was increasing its OTP restaurant reviews. The sniping began immediately.
“Great. Just what this place needs is reviews of TGI Friday’s, Applebee’s and Chili’s. Don’t forget Outback and Red Lobster for those special-occasion meals …” wrote one, presumably an ITPer
Oh, yeah, an OTPer shot back: “Up here in redneck Johns Creek we know nuttin about good eatin or any kind of money. Lucky for us [Country Club] of the South has outside bathrooms. I think most of the money IS in North Fulton, you morons.”
Atlanta and Cobb County by the numbers
ATLANTA
Size: 133.1 square miles
Population: 433,775
Demographics: 54 percent African-American; 38 percent white; 5 percent Latino
Median age: 32.9
Education level: 87.9 percent have at least a high school education
Median household income: $45,946
Poverty rate: 23.2
COBB COUNTY
Size: 339.6 square miles
Population: 707,442
Demographics: 62 percent White; 25 percent African-American; 12 percent Latino.
Median age: 35.4
Education level: 90.5 percent of residents have at least a high school education
Median household income: $65,423
Poverty rate: 11.3 percent
Source: U.S. Census
STORY SO FAR
- The Atlanta Braves announced the team would be leaving the city for a new stadium in Cobb, which will end a more than 50-year relationship with downtown Atlanta. The secret deal stuns metro Atlanta, as even members of the Atlanta City Council said Monday's announcement caught them by surprise.
- Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, conceding the Braves decision is irreversible, said the city will pursue plans to demolish Turner Field and build a "middle-class" development at the site.
- Cobb County Commission chairman Tim Lee discloses that the Braves deal began with a series of clandestine meetings that began in July. Those meetings were taking place at the same time the Braves were negotiating with the city of Atlanta. The Braves and Atlanta had been discussing more than $250 million in stadium upgrades and new development around Turner Field. The Braves Turner Field lease with the publicly owned stadium expires in 2016.
- Cobb released some financial details of the deal with the Braves. The county will raise taxes on hotels and car rental companies, will pay more than $300 million toward a $672 million stadium. The costs include 60 acres of land near interstates 75 and 285, site preparation, design and construction.
If this were a sea battle, then Cobb County last week blasted a hole in the hull of USS Atlanta.
The Atlanta Braves’ move to Cobb isn’t just a matter of a new company choosing to locate in Marietta over downtown, or a few hundred jobs heading across the river from Kennesaw to the city. It’s a direct hit, a seismic victory in the eternal conflict between OTP and ITP.
Cobb, Gwinnett, downtown, Midtown. It’s all Atlanta, right? Sort of and not really. I-285 represents a sharp division of worlds in collision, with mutually assured derision. But it began to feel last week as if Outside the Perimeter might be gaining the upper hand. For decades Atlanta’s center of gravity has shifted away from Atlanta’s center, moving inexorably northward — many believe it’s now about 10 miles north of Five Points — and dragging with it development, money, political power and, increasingly, cultural cachet. And now it is dragging away the Braves.
“The crossroads of Atlanta is now (Ga.) 400 and 285; that’s where the economic activity is,” said Rusty Paul, the incoming mayor of Sandy Springs, which, you guessed it, lies at the crossroads of 400 and 285.
He has a point. “Atlanta” has long been known as a business capital, with 14 Fortune 500 companies headquartered here. But 10 of them call the top end of the Perimeter and northern suburbs home. Another leading indicator: according to real estate research firm CoStar Group, the skyscrapers of downtown, Midtown and Buckhead housed about 48 million square feet of Class A (high-end) office space in mid-2012. Central Perimeter, Cumberland/Galleria and North Fulton/Forsyth: 53 million.
So maybe last week’s stunning announcement was not so stunning after all. Cobb’s ability to woo the Braves with $300 million to build a stadium just northwest of I-285 and I-75 says something about the bold, aggressive nature of the county’s leaders.
Chuck Clay, a former Republican state senator from Marietta, sees the power play as an epic moment in Atlanta history.
“It’s a time and place when you can’t get a bigger exclamation point that the burbs are coming into their own financially, economically, socially,” said Clay. “The fact that Cobb County negotiated it, that it put the finances together, speaks volumes of the economic clout of this area. Twenty-five years ago, this would have never happened.”
Twenty-five years ago, getting a dose of high culture, live music, hot nightlife, great restaurants or big-time sports meant penetrating deep inside the Perimeter.
But nowadays, Atlanta residents wanting to see top acts often must drive up I-75, Ga. 400 and I-85 to, respectively, The Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, the Gwinnett Arena.
Author Joel Garreau featured Cobb’s Galleria area in his 1991 book, “Edge City: Life on the New Frontier,” a look at suburban city centers that had assumed economic dominance.
“The Braves made a move based on demographics of class, simple as that,” said Garreau, before borrowing a line from “The Godfather” concerning unemotional murder. “Like they say in the mob: ‘It’s not personal; it’s business.’”
The decision was actuarial. Team president John Schuerholz said the move was into “the heart of Braves country.” The team released a map with red dots demonstrating ticket buyers. The clustered dots creates a crimson blob that appears to be devouring the top of metro Atlanta.
In this corner, ITP
This rivalry is nothing new: Atlanta and Cobb have been firing salvos across the Chattahoochee River for years.
The Atlanta Opera and the Atlanta Ballet move from town to the Galleria a few years back. Blam!
Two thousand Coca-Cola workers move from Galleria back to town. Boom!
But this Braves thing is just wrong, say many ITPers. Intown is for living, working and playing, they say. Cobb is for shopping at Costco or schlepping the kids up I-75 to soccer matches.
“Baseball belongs in the city; it has a long, historic tradition,” said Grant Park resident Rachel Quartarone. She, her husband and their two boys are die-hard Braves fans who can’t fathom traveling to Cobb often for games. “Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. Why can’t we build on those traditions instead of starting from scratch in a place with no history?” she said.
Quartarone said she found herself last week defending the area over social media. Some blight festers around Turner Field, she said, but the perceptions of crime and violence are overblown.
“There’s a lot of good here,” Quartarone said. “To call it the slums because things look different than where you live and the people maybe look different is so short-sighted to me.”
The Braves are an emblem not only of Atlanta, but of the entire South. Their 81 home dates are the only connections many people have to downtown, said Kristi Cameron, who lives in Ormewood Park and walks to games with her husband and two kids.
Cameron’s father, who lives in Rome, was thrilled to see the Braves move to Cobb. “’(There’s) no reason to come to the city except to see you,’” Cameron said her father told her. “It seemed like it was a relief for him.”
Cameron’s family enjoys sitting in The Ted’s upper deck along the right field line.
“Another thing that makes me sad (is) there’s a beautiful moment at Turner when the sun sets from the cheap seats,” Cameron said. The light glances off the skyscrapers, she said, giving the city new life. “My worry about it being in Cobb County is it just becomes a place to play a game. It makes me sad to lose that identity.”
Writer and former Atlanta resident Tommy Tomlinson explained the ITP/OTP divide to Forbes readers using age-old geographic stereotypes: “You hear people talk about Inside the Perimeter or Outside the Perimeter as separate countries. Part of that is racial, but it’s also cultural and philosophical and a bunch of other -al words.
“Outside the Perimeter is a sea of Home Depots and brick houses with bonus rooms. Inside the Perimeter is where you find organic Thai food and you might have more than the average number of piercings. I know people Outside the Perimeter who never go Inside the Perimeter except for sports. Now the Braves are moving Outside the Perimeter. That’s a huge cultural shift.”
And in this corner: OTP
Atlanta Magazine’s Top 10 restaurants are all ITP, although an OTP gourmand would argue “Atlanta” is in the magazine’s masthead and old habits die hard.
“The top 10 restaurants will always be inside (285),” said Doug Spohn, a developer from Duluth. “But I assure you, I could bring you to four or five restaurants outside that you wouldn’t know the difference (from the top 10).”
Spohn specializes in the old-timey (and again popular) style of higher-density development that puts commercial and residential components together with greenspace. The burbs can be cool, Spohn insists.
Craig Kootsillas, a Cobb resident, said there is nothing wrong with the traditional suburban version of living.
“I’m a part of a group that call ourselves ‘suburbanists.’ We have big yards, and we like it,” he said.
He admitted to some mixed feelings about the Braves coming to Cobb. “In one sense, it’s a great sense of pride here. But no one’s looking forward to the idea of 80 days of two-hour commutes,” Kootsillas said.
Michael Krohngold opened the Tongue & Groove nightclub in the Buckhead Village in 1994 and stayed busy there until 2007 when the area was bulldozed to build a new village that was stymied by the recession.
His club reopened a year later near Piedmont Road, but he said no other bar scene has recreated the thumping, partying excess that made Buckhead infamous. That’s a shame, he said, because “a little sin city isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” It’s good for conventioneers and to draw young people to the city. The suburbs are OK and have some nice dinner scenes, like Roswell and Marietta, he said, they just aren’t naughty enough.
Still, he admitted that OTP has been coming hard on the culture front. “It amazes me the groups that go to the Gwinnett Arena — the Foo Fighters and all these alternative groups. You’d think they’d be at the Tabernacle or somewhere else downtown.
“It’s the suburbanization of America. That’s what Atlanta is. It’s the suburbs. There’s 5 million people here. Only 10 percent (it’s even less than that) live in Atlanta.”
He pointed out downtown Atlanta hasn’t improved substantially in the 34 years since he arrived here. New residents have moved to lofts and apartments, but there’s still not enough residential density or infrastructure to make it a scene.
‘They’re still the Atlanta Braves’
The spurt of growth after the Olympics demonstrated that ITP wasn’t dead – Centennial Olympic Park, growth at Georgia State University, the Georgia Aquarium and the renovated railroad line called the Beltline. All that and gentrifying neighborhoods showed that ITP didn’t just have a pulse. Indeed, it might be the wave of the future as the area digs out of the recession. “Sprawl” was supposedly passé, people were headed Intown. Atlanta recently celebrated locking down the Falcons and then suddenly…
Joel Babbit, the former marketing exec who worked on the Olympics and on an Atlanta branding slogan campaign, said the Braves’ move wasn’t a catastrophe.
“This is an internal issue for the most part; to a New Yorker, they’re still playing in Atlanta,” he said. “Bad news for Atlanta would not be moving to Cobb. It would be the Braves moving to Sacramento. This is keeping it in the family.”
Tad Leithead, chairman of the Cumberland Community Improvement District and the Atlanta Regional Commission, called the Braves’ move “without a doubt” the most significant flip of an intown institution to the suburbs.
“There are a lot more people in America who pay attention to Major League Baseball than the Fortune 500,” said Leithead. “It becomes national news because the Braves are America’s team.
“I don’t see this as Cobb’s gain (or the) city of Atlanta’s loss. It’s all one region, they’re still the Atlanta Braves.”
‘Creative destruction of the core’
Several people on boths sides of the Perimeter spoke about the “win-win” of the move or about regionalism. But most people, in their hearts, like to win and hate to lose.
“Every time I see some great business development going up on I-85 (in Gwinnett County) or up along 400 in Alpharetta, I always felt Cobb was a stepchild,” said former Marietta Mayor Bill Dunaway. “I’m excited because it’ll bring Cobb County to the forefront.”
The Braves pulling up stakes was not really a surprise, said Sandy Springs Mayor-elect Paul.
“This is the ongoing trend where you see the creative destruction of the core,” he said. “Communities are dynamic. What’s hot now will one day need renovation.”
Besides, tearing down a 20-year-old stadium shouldn’t surprise anyone, Paul said. “This has never been a city or a region that put much stock in old buildings. When your symbol is the Phoenix, you always making something new.”
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