Whatwuzit?: The 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics Reconsidered
S Zebulon Baker (compiler), Emory University
Illustrations by Kerry Soper, Brigham Young University
Illustrations by Kerry Soper, Brigham Young University
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While the Olympics were an ephemeral
moment in Atlanta's history, many changes enacted on the city's
landscape for the two week event remain. The destruction of black
Atlanta neighborhoods for Olympic sites changed the city's layout
and racial demographics. Techwood
Homes, the first public housing project in the nation, was demolished
for the Olympic
Village (now part
of the Georgia Institute of Technology). Construction of the
Centennial Olympic Stadium, now Turner field, displaced residents
of the Mechanicsville,
Peoplestown
and Summerhill
neighborhoods. See Map |
Musing on the commercial atmosphere of the Atlanta Games, Gary Smith
of Sports Illustrated wrote, "When you select, for cash
and convenience, a landlocked city with little vestige of its past,
one whose identity is tied to the mega-corporations it has enticed,
in a country full of enterprising scrappers-over, say, Athens, which
just happens to be the birthplace of the Olympics, not to mention
of Western civilization, and the locale where one might look to
plant the Centennial Games if ideals were what was at stake-well,
then, don't you deserve all the plywood and tent poles you get?"
(Source: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/events/1996/olympics/weekly/960729/opencer.html)
(Source: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/events/1996/olympics/weekly/960729/opencer.html)
In April 1996, Kevin Sack of The New York Times
reported that "as Olympic planning enters its final stages, virtually
every aspect of Atlanta's civic life has been transformed. Impressive
new
athletic structures dot the cityscape. Downtown sidewalks have been
widened. Parks and pedestrian plazas have been remade. Some of the poorest
neighborhoods have seen colorful town houses rise where tar-paper shacks
once stood." He gave special attention to Summerhill,
"a
devastated neighborhood adjacent to the stadium. Community
leaders there had threatened to make trouble for the new stadium if
they did not get a piece of the Olympic pie, and peace was bought with
city improvements, federal grants and risk-taking investments by developers
and bankers. Some 200 slum houses have been leveled, and clean, colorful
subdivisions have risen in their place." (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/specials/olympics/cntdown/0410oly-financial-construction.html)
Such optimism suffused both short-term and long-term projections for the Games' economic impacts on metro Atlanta. ACOG leadership continually argued that the anticipated $5 billion financial boon to the city and the state as a whole would provide enough ballast to lift Atlanta to its coveted international status and irrevocably reshape the city's urban landscape for the better. Economists Jeffrey Humphries and Michael K. Plummer forecasted before the Games opened that "the Olympics will showcase the state. The opportunity to foster long-term business relationships will be enormous. The long-term beneficial effects on decisions regarding investment, trade, corporate relocation, government spending, convention sites, the location of major sporting events, and vacation plans will likely be among the most enduring, yet statistically untraceable, legacies of the Games." More importantly, they averred, "many Olympic-related programs will have a positive effect on the quality of life within the community. Although the success of many of these programs will be difficult to measure in economic terms, their impact on individuals, groups and the community at large will be an important legacy of the 1996 Games."
(Source: http://www.selig.uga.edu/forecast/olympics/OLYMTEXT.HTM)
At the time that local real estate attorney Billy Payne began his nearly one-man push for an Atlanta Olympics in 1987, the success of the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games still hung sweetly in the air. A ninety million dollar surplus from those Games went to support the establishment of the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles, lending credence to the notion that the Olympics could galvanize a sustainable civic movement focused on a city's economic, cultural and athletic life. Writing about the Games in 1998, Elizabeth Vaeth of the Atlanta Business Journal commented on the optimism of such goals: "That money could go a long way toward improvements: Infrastructure! Facilities! Big bucks for local businesses! Programming dollars for arts organizations! In the end, it appears there will be only a little money remaining — as of spring 1998, the final accounting still remained to be done — and it's designated for the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) and amateur athletics. That's a far cry from Los Angeles."
(Source: http://atlanta.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/1998/06/15/focus17.html?page=1)
But this optimism did not permeate every community in the metro Atlanta area. In the 1996 issue of Southern Changes devoted entirely to considering the social impacts and consequences of the Atlanta Games, Preston Quesenberry argued that "as for generalized depictions of an 'economic boom,' such talk obviously ignores a great many people who have not shared in the supposedly ubiquitous prosperity."
"While the Chamber of Commerce may boast that Atlanta was voted number two in Fortune's 1995 'Best Cities for Business' list, the city also ranks number two in the nation in income disparity between blacks and whites, number two in the percentage of the population living in public housing, number two in violent crimes per capita, number two in total crimes per capita, and number nine in the rate of poverty. While the voices for business say that the Atlanta metropolitan area leads the nation in in-migration because of its 'unmatched quality of life,' the population living in the city itself (now generously estimated at 424,300) has been shrinking for more than twenty years. An estimated fifteen to twenty thousand people in this urban-core population can't find any place to live, much less a place 'unmatched in quality,' and an additional fifty thousand live in public housing with seven thousand qualified applicants waiting to move in.
"The world of journalists descending on Atlanta for the Olympics will find it particularly difficult to ignore this poverty because so much of it is concentrated in and around what is known as the Olympic Ring - a three-mile wide circular area in Atlanta's downtown core which contains nine major venues holding sixteen of the thirty sporting events. According to data collected in 1990, ninety-two percent of the 52,000 people living in the Olympic Ring neighborhoods are African-American, and most of them are poor. The median household income in these neighborhoods is just $8,621, the median per-capita income is $5,702, and labor participation rates are no higher than seventy percent and as low as thirty-five percent. Does ACOG expect journalists not to address this obvious poverty in their descriptions of the city? As Reverend Austin Ford, who works in the neighborhood surrounding the new Olympic stadium, puts it, 'The Olympic stadium is in a very depressed community, and I don't know that the journalists will need for that to be pointed out to them. They might say, 'Well, I can see!'"
(Source: http://reagan.library.emory.edu/alice/schanges/article.php?id=sc18-2_002)
But such problems were, to the mind of Charles Rutheiser, crystallized by the construction and development of Centennial Olympic Park itself - Billy Payne's dream of an enduring landmark that the Olympics once took place in Atlanta. "Sold to the people of Atlanta as a state-of-the-art open gathering place," Rutheiser writes, "the park, in its Olympic manifestation at least, is neither all that open nor public, nothing more than an ephemeral simulation of a public open space of an earlier age. The failure to address the problems of adjacent poor neighborhoods, public housing projects, and the homeless raises the prospect of the park becoming as empty and objectionable to the business community as the current "void" is, if not more so given the heightening of expectations. Then again, the lack of linkage between specific projects and the surrounding urban whole is a general failing of virtually all ongoing efforts at urban redevelopment in Atlanta and elsewhere."
(Source: http://reagan.library.emory.edu/alice/schanges/article.php?id=sc18-2_004)
Such optimism suffused both short-term and long-term projections for the Games' economic impacts on metro Atlanta. ACOG leadership continually argued that the anticipated $5 billion financial boon to the city and the state as a whole would provide enough ballast to lift Atlanta to its coveted international status and irrevocably reshape the city's urban landscape for the better. Economists Jeffrey Humphries and Michael K. Plummer forecasted before the Games opened that "the Olympics will showcase the state. The opportunity to foster long-term business relationships will be enormous. The long-term beneficial effects on decisions regarding investment, trade, corporate relocation, government spending, convention sites, the location of major sporting events, and vacation plans will likely be among the most enduring, yet statistically untraceable, legacies of the Games." More importantly, they averred, "many Olympic-related programs will have a positive effect on the quality of life within the community. Although the success of many of these programs will be difficult to measure in economic terms, their impact on individuals, groups and the community at large will be an important legacy of the 1996 Games."
(Source: http://www.selig.uga.edu/forecast/olympics/OLYMTEXT.HTM)
At the time that local real estate attorney Billy Payne began his nearly one-man push for an Atlanta Olympics in 1987, the success of the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games still hung sweetly in the air. A ninety million dollar surplus from those Games went to support the establishment of the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles, lending credence to the notion that the Olympics could galvanize a sustainable civic movement focused on a city's economic, cultural and athletic life. Writing about the Games in 1998, Elizabeth Vaeth of the Atlanta Business Journal commented on the optimism of such goals: "That money could go a long way toward improvements: Infrastructure! Facilities! Big bucks for local businesses! Programming dollars for arts organizations! In the end, it appears there will be only a little money remaining — as of spring 1998, the final accounting still remained to be done — and it's designated for the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) and amateur athletics. That's a far cry from Los Angeles."
(Source: http://atlanta.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/1998/06/15/focus17.html?page=1)
But this optimism did not permeate every community in the metro Atlanta area. In the 1996 issue of Southern Changes devoted entirely to considering the social impacts and consequences of the Atlanta Games, Preston Quesenberry argued that "as for generalized depictions of an 'economic boom,' such talk obviously ignores a great many people who have not shared in the supposedly ubiquitous prosperity."
"While the Chamber of Commerce may boast that Atlanta was voted number two in Fortune's 1995 'Best Cities for Business' list, the city also ranks number two in the nation in income disparity between blacks and whites, number two in the percentage of the population living in public housing, number two in violent crimes per capita, number two in total crimes per capita, and number nine in the rate of poverty. While the voices for business say that the Atlanta metropolitan area leads the nation in in-migration because of its 'unmatched quality of life,' the population living in the city itself (now generously estimated at 424,300) has been shrinking for more than twenty years. An estimated fifteen to twenty thousand people in this urban-core population can't find any place to live, much less a place 'unmatched in quality,' and an additional fifty thousand live in public housing with seven thousand qualified applicants waiting to move in.
"The world of journalists descending on Atlanta for the Olympics will find it particularly difficult to ignore this poverty because so much of it is concentrated in and around what is known as the Olympic Ring - a three-mile wide circular area in Atlanta's downtown core which contains nine major venues holding sixteen of the thirty sporting events. According to data collected in 1990, ninety-two percent of the 52,000 people living in the Olympic Ring neighborhoods are African-American, and most of them are poor. The median household income in these neighborhoods is just $8,621, the median per-capita income is $5,702, and labor participation rates are no higher than seventy percent and as low as thirty-five percent. Does ACOG expect journalists not to address this obvious poverty in their descriptions of the city? As Reverend Austin Ford, who works in the neighborhood surrounding the new Olympic stadium, puts it, 'The Olympic stadium is in a very depressed community, and I don't know that the journalists will need for that to be pointed out to them. They might say, 'Well, I can see!'"
(Source: http://reagan.library.emory.edu/alice/schanges/article.php?id=sc18-2_002)
But such problems were, to the mind of Charles Rutheiser, crystallized by the construction and development of Centennial Olympic Park itself - Billy Payne's dream of an enduring landmark that the Olympics once took place in Atlanta. "Sold to the people of Atlanta as a state-of-the-art open gathering place," Rutheiser writes, "the park, in its Olympic manifestation at least, is neither all that open nor public, nothing more than an ephemeral simulation of a public open space of an earlier age. The failure to address the problems of adjacent poor neighborhoods, public housing projects, and the homeless raises the prospect of the park becoming as empty and objectionable to the business community as the current "void" is, if not more so given the heightening of expectations. Then again, the lack of linkage between specific projects and the surrounding urban whole is a general failing of virtually all ongoing efforts at urban redevelopment in Atlanta and elsewhere."
(Source: http://reagan.library.emory.edu/alice/schanges/article.php?id=sc18-2_004)
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