While I fully understand we have a ways to go before the Braves play in the Platinum Triangle, it already seems time to let go of the past.
It is not as if the team and stadium were moving to Oklahoma City. It will take me an extra 10 to 20 minutes to drive to the new ballpark from my home near Piedmont Park. (For the record, I expect it will still take less time to drive than riding MARTA to the Ted.)
People get used to these big changes. I worked as a garbage boy at the Holiday Inn in Irving, Texas, across the freeway from where they were building Texas Stadium, the disposable home of the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys now play in Arlington, even farther from Dallas proper. The old stadium – iconic as it was – is gone. Dallas moved on, and so should we.
And it isn’t as if it was a wild pleasure to venture to Turner Field. The ballpark was fine – even better than fine. But after the games, the surrounding gloom and desolation was a disheartening buzz kill.
It’s a wonder that smart people still argue over whether these stadiums do any good for the neighborhoods that are induced to host them. Things were already pretty bad in the 1960s when the city’s storied fathers razed the remains of the once-proud Rawson-Washington neighborhood to make way for Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Never has the phrase “urban renewal” held more irony.
Atlanta’s leaders got what they wanted: major league baseball and validation as a major league city. But, despite the promises and happy talk, Atlanta’s disposable stadium did little to reverse the decline of the battered old neighborhoods. You could even argue that the stadium made things worse by eliminating the prospect of doing much else there.
A sense of betrayal still hung in the air in 1990 when Olympic organizers ventured into the same neighborhoods with fresh promises of better days. The discussions in the churches and neighborhood centers brimmed with suspicion and resentment. Shirley Franklin, then an Olympics official, soothed folks with promises that things would be different this time. I believe she meant it.
When Atlanta Olympic bidders decided where to build the centerpiece of the Centennial Games, they had taken these neighborhoods for granted. Consequently, no one had figured on the time-killing chore of neighborhood appeasement. (Happily, the new Braves stadium has few neighbors, appeased or otherwise.)
As the heat from the neighborhoods rose and politicians demanded ever more, Olympics organizers prepared secretly to decamp to a more hospitable site to the north. In the eleventh hour, a deal was done, promises were made, and the stadium built. The world came and left; the Braves remained. All the while, the neighborhoods continued their descent.
You could argue that it wouldn’t have been so bad if the Olympics folks had abandoned this benighted quadrant. Twenty years of doing just about anything else with those neighborhoods couldn’t possibly have ended much worse. Maybe an end to the broken promises could be a good thing.
There is also something sweet and satisfying in the sound of an Atlanta Braves stadium standing north of the bridge that carries the name of Lester Maddox. The devoutly segregationist governor was elected the same year Hank Aaron and the Braves debuted in Atlanta. Maddox personified an old and unhealthy desire by many in Cobb to stop Atlanta – often code for blacks – at the Chattahoochee River.
If Cobb builds it, Atlanta will come. I see no downside.
For Cobb, there’s a genuine growth opportunity. Cobb’s leaders are asking us all to entrust them with perhaps the only symbol that transcends these myriad cities and counties we call metro Atlanta.
The joy and suffering that comes from loving the Braves is all we really share – except, perhaps, for a loathing of shuffling down Hartsfield’s concourses. For the first time, Cobb County will own something we all care about. Suddenly, the Platinum Triangle really is a regional center. Sharing the weight Atlanta has borne as thankless metro crossroads can only broaden Cobb’s horizons.
So far, Cobb leaders have done little to engender confidence that they fully comprehend their new regional duties. They still seem clueless about the consequences of their little coup for regional mobility. But they will learn.
They will be forced to extend their thinking across the river, just as the rest of us will be forced to transfer our World Series dreams to a universe with a new center.
