Contrivance not best path to creativity

Whatever happens to the moribund shell of a mall we call Underground, I hope we’ve learned a lesson about grand plans to revive a downtown that really never was.

I also hope that we’ve learned to appreciate the power of serendipity.

The original and very successful Underground was pure serendipity. In the 1960s, City Hall sent out no RFPs for the original Underground. No one sold any bonds or seemed burdened with the mission of saving downtown. Instead, some entrepreneurs peered into a dank section of buried streets and saw what might be a fun place to party.

Four decades earlier, the city had entombed about 12 acres of the old central city beneath bridges and viaducts that had been constructed to ease — you guessed it — gridlock. Alabama Street, the prime thoroughfare to the bustling Georgia Railroad Freight Depot, had become impassable in the city’s boom.

Buried and preserved Pompeii-style, the buildings along the street retained the ornate architecture with its marble carvings, brickwork, archways and gas street lamps. In 1967, the entrepreneurs called the new district Underground Atlanta.

By the early 1970s, it provided the heat to Hotlanta. Whenever possible, we would brush out mullets and pile into our Camaros, Mustangs and Firebirds to make the long trek down Peachtree. Music echoed off the concrete viaduct walls: Ruby Reds with its Dixieland bands and Muhlenbrink’s with the legendary Piano Red, who counted among his fans Gregg Allman, the Rolling Stones and me. The sailing ship at Dante’s Down the Hatch offered fondue and “intelligent jazz.”

Sadly, the original Underground ran its course. It faded as the Central Business District emptied. MARTA’s construction of the Five Points station also hit hard.

Moreover, the metro boom was rapidly pushing outward making central Atlanta more and more remote. Crime began as perception and ended as reality. The death knell came in 1981 when Dante Stephensen, Underground’s heart and soul, shuttered his Down the Hatch after three years of losses. He moved to Buckhead – where he remained until last summer.

Underground Atlanta reopened in 1989 as a fussy mall planned and financed by the city. It was a perfectly nice mall with the usual array of perfectly nice mall stores. And, at first, its contrived novelty attracted huge crowds. Its opening represented the culmination of the decades-long campaign to revitalize downtown – an effort driven by a desire to restore a central city that was never all that grand.

Dante even tried again. But as nice as Underground 2.0 was, it utterly lacked the original’s authenticity and cool. It offered little incentive for shoppers to bypass their local malls and no reason for young folks to trek to the central city. By the early 1990s, entertainment districts were beginning to sprout up where people lived. For young people, Virginia Highland and Buckhead trumped Underground.

The sugar rush of the 1996 Olympics helped for a while, but that ended when the flame left town. Dante departed forever in 1999. The specter of crime returned as the restaurants and bars slowly disappeared. Its decline has been unrelenting.

So, at long last, we are looking for a way forward. The city prudently wants to unload the $142 million mortgage – which saps about $8 million a year – and sell Underground’s remnants. With luck, it can be absorbed in Georgia State University’s stunning remaking of downtown. Maybe it can be lifted by the nascent resurgence downtown — even though it’s happening on the other side of the central city at Centennial Olympic Park.