James Howard Kunstler’s Smackdown Tour of Atlanta
Decatur Metro | June 11, 2010On his recent stop in Atlanta for the Congress for the New Urbanism conference, author James Howard Kunstler took a time to hit the streets of downtown Atlanta for a little walking tour. The resulting picture diary he created HERE gives renewed meaning to the phrase “brutally honest”. (Get it? Because of all the Brutalist Architecture??)
You probably won’t ever hear these sorts of descriptors on the Atlanta Segway Tour…
- “The Soffit terminates at the HVAC vent. Nice for wino shelter in wintertime.”
- “Overhead, gerbil chute. Ahead to left, WTF??? A giant tape measure suspended over an escalator???”
- “Ingress / Egress for cars. Humans need not apply.”
- “Forensic pathology lab? Fuhrerbunker? No. Main Atlanta Library”
Only Broad Street gets any love. The rest is relegated to the scrapheap of 1970s concrete.
h/t: Fresh Loaf
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JH Kunstler and David Byrne both deserve our thanks for saying it like it is! The biggest disservice they could have provided after their visit for the CNU would be to keep their mouth shut about what a dump most of this city, and especially downtown, really is. Truly, it is an embarrassment! And it won’t be fixed until we get more than our share of national-level shaming.
Now, I’m sure that people will chime in about all of the nice places that these two did not visit/blog about. But if the center of our city is not a nice place for residents and visitors alike to walk through, ride a bike to, and generally just hang out in, then I think that says very poor things about the city as a whole. Just think of all of the other conventioneers walked away with the exact same impression, but didn’t take the time to blog about it. How many of those folks might have moved themselves or their businesses here if they didn’t get such a horrible impression of our city?
We need to stop deluding ourselves. This city’s a rat-hole (Decatur excluded, of course).
Here’s Bryne’s reflections on Atlanta after CNU where he calls much of the downtown architecture – and John Portman’s specifically – “the architecture of racism.”
Was there supposed to be a link to what Byrne said somewhere?
Whoops! There now.
I agree with you that it’s not a warm happy place downtown, but the only thing that’s going to change it is $$$$$$. Lots and lots of it. Who’s with me?! Let’s demo and rebuild the whole thing!
I’d be tickled to death if we could just finish Shirley Franklin’s work and replace the dissolving and deteriorating plumbing… or maybe we can continue to ignore the infrastructure until a REALLY BIG GUATEMALA SIZED SINKHOLE opens up downtown and swallows up all the ugly buildings…
Yes, fixing downtown will take money. But so too does building and maintaining all of the infrastructure to ferry suburban commuters into and out of Atlanta as quickly as possible, at the expense of those actually living here. For whatever reason, this has been the priority for decades.
If we promote the idea of making Atlanta a livable city to the top of the priority list, it would at least be feasible to make improvements. If we continue to prioritize the construction and widening of freeways (or city streets that function like freeways, such as Spring St and West Peachtree), then this place will continue to be a desolate pit. We really do have a choice.
Me, I can’t wait to move. But it sure would be nice to see some positive change in the meantime.
Yes, it may be possible to change development trends so downtown and surrounding neighborhoods become more livable. In my opinion that will take a major change in the political arena, mainly City Hall and especially the State Capital. So let’s get out there and vote this fall!
What a smug little teenage girl he is…! And how does he propose we improve it to his taste? If he’ll pay for it, I’m sure everyone would LOVE to make it look like Klickitat Street.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of many tenets of new urbanism…it just seems as though all of it’s most vocal proponents are such arrogant jerks…
While not defending downtown Atlanta, I have to agree — especially after a brief gander at his blog, “Clusterf__ Nation,” that this guy is smug beyond belief.
It’s his shtick.
Kuntsler is a bit long in the tooth to still need a schtick. It undermines whatever credibility he might have had…
Of course, Brutalist or not, the central library is widely considered to be an architecturally significant work by Marcel Breuer.
Truth hurts.
And meanwhile we’ve got an exhibition going on at the High Museum celebrating the nearly criminal architecture of Portman. The whole Mart area downtown is anti-human.
As it should be. But no one should expect that all art improves the public space.
Art is ultimately individual expression. And we know what happens when individual freedom is taken to the extreme when it comes to public spaces.
I find the odd tension between art and the public street an relatively unexplored area of urbanism…and art for that matter. There seems to be a line that can be crossed. It would be interesting to see someone attempt to determine what/where that line is.
Buildings are the worst culprits purely because of their size. But other forms of art can also certainly detract from the public spaces if created in the vacuum of individuality.
Renzo Piano does a pretty good job of “humanizing” Modern architecture and urban design.
Wow. I work downtown, but you block it out after a time.
I had the exact same feeling!
This guy takes a lot of pleasure in being mean about downtown ATL, but he’s depressingly accurate with the general point of his criticisms. So sad, too. Downtown is the original heart of the city and is the location of many significant historical events not only for the city but for the southeast. It’s a shame that the last couple of generations have lost much of a sense of stewardship toward maintaining the area’s history and building an attractive, livable urban environment downtown.
The area Kunstler references here has mostly been rebuilt to serve commuters, their cars, and their insular habits that do nothing to promote a vibrant streetscape. That’s why this part of downtown is stuck with so many surface lots, parking decks, service entrances and blank walls — it doesn’t make economic sense to build much of anything else there when so much of its use is based around car commuting.
Man, I love me some David Byrne and often read his blog, but where is this lily-white Atlanta he speaks of? One of my favorite things about Atlanta is its diversity, as Andre Braugher said on Homicide, “It’s a brown town.” And don’t get me started on my love for the Brutalist Breuer library. Different strokes for different folks… There is a lot wrong with downtown, but architecture is certainly not its biggest problem. And what about great urban living spaces like the Healey Building downtown? When Carl Patton was president of GSU, he asked the University to sell its Buckhead mansion and bought a loft on top of the Healey building.
Gaaa! I moved from the D.C. area to Atlanta six years ago, and pined for home for at least five years, thought downtown Atlanta ugly, read Christopher Alexander’s A PATTERN LANGUAGE and redesigned my home… but seeing this from fellow author Kunstler… well, I am ready to defend my new hometown.
I agree with Darin about this particular area of downtown being based around car commuting — I have been to enough conventions at the Hyatt and Sheraton to know. But there is beauty in downtown Atlanta. There is. I’m surprised to hear myself saying it, as homesick as I’ve been… maybe I’m learning my history in a new hometown and beginning to acclimate.
Downtown occasionally veers towards the tipping point of success but never quite makes it despite all the wishful thinking on the part of folks who live, work, or visit there. I don’t think it will hit the tipping point until the panhandlers and idle folks have less of a presence. Being a rabid liberal, I want shelter for the homeless, food for the hungry, and medical services for the needy but I don’t like hanging out in a place like Woodruff Park where most of the benches are taken up or walking where every fifth person asks me if I could spare some money. The quarter mile circle around the Five Points MARTA station just makes me feel unwelcome.
Picking on Downtown ATL is like making fun of a really fat kid. It’s not very difficult it’s certainly not thoughtful, and it doesn’t do a lot of good. What’s next, is he going to compliment the urban fabric of Amsterdam or Prague?
Don’t get Brad Steel wrong. Brad Steel used to live in the building at the corner of Fairlie and Poplar in the same building as Carl Patton (which isn’t the Healy building). Downtown is lacking. But stating that it is lacking is like calling that fat kid “fat boy”.
Wow! The folks on this blog sure like to pile on the poor guys over at Decatur Diner or the Fish House for bad paint decisions, but when some “new urbanism expert” comes down and points out the shortcomings of a less than spectacular downtown, we seem to think he should keep his mouth shut.
This guys job is to discuss the flaws in these past designs, and to look for better ways to do it moving forward. He’s snotty, sure. But I could find a few quotes here that rank up there.
Kind of sensitive, ain’t we?
Word
It may be a bit of sensitivity, but comparing the dubious artistic merit of 90 linear feet of wall space at the Diner to the $100s of millions of dollars in rebuilding downtown until the next popular movement comes along is disingenuous. It’s not the same thing at all…
SOMEONE HAS TO PAY FOR IT. And it will be us. This year I can’t afford it…
Portman’s downtown is a prime example of function taking over form. Sure, his buildings have made money and kept downtown somewhat relevant to the convention/hotel industry, but God are they dehumanizing! It’s going to take a lot to rectify all that barren ugliness, and I don’t see it happening anytime soon. The people with all the money never criticize these buildings for what they really are; Portman only receives praise for “saving downtown.” Until they decide they want to do anything about it, we will be left with a downtown district that resembles a moon colony (tubes and all).
Sensitive? Yes. This is our home, after all.
There’s an old saying…
Atlanta: Pretty Good for Georgia
moderate away, dm
it’s your house
Mr. Kunstler has never expressed much love for the concepts behind Atlanta’s growth so it’s not surprising that he would report negatively on this trip to the belly of his beast. He strikes me as some depressed freakishly prescient character in a sci fi movie that has returned from the ruins of our future distopia and is worn down trying to prepare us for it. Unfortunately for us, he has been way too right recently to ignore.
I’ve always enjoyed Kunstler’s grouchiness. I don’t think it’s a schtick really, it’s just who he is — a world-class curmudgeon. And if you believe what he believes about the state of American architecture and what’s happened to most of the world’s cities, you would be too. If you haven’t checked out his books on the subject, I think they’re wonderful — The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere, The City in Mind (which has a predictably scathing chapter on Atlanta). He’s intensely opinionated but really knows his stuff. Home From Nowhere was the first one I read, and it was a revelation. I felt like I understood, for the first time, why it always felt like there was something missing growing up in the Atlanta suburbs, and why urban spaces (or the right kinds of them anyway) are so much more attractive. Kunstler makes it clear that there are certain principles to how you set up a human community, that they were understood and widely practiced for centuries, and then were largely destroyed in the last 50 or 60 years. It’s hard to read without feeling a combination of grief and fury. But it also articulates and explains so much that before (for me anyway) was only dimly understood. And he does also talk about the ways we can begin to recover what’s been lost, and to recreate, in his words, “places that are worthy of our affection”.
Good thoughts Johnboy.
Perhaps “shtick” wasn’t the right word. I’m sure Kuntsler is a curmudgeon, but he certainly has created an image for himself as the pissed off everyman and he knows that’s what his readers expect. I’m not sure what you call that without the negative connotation of the word “shtick.” “Image” perhaps?
Hope this isn’t too much, but…. one of many quotes from Kunstler that I actually wrote out and saved at one time because I thought they summed it all up so well. From THE GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE…….
“Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy and spiritually degrading.
“The newspaper headlines may shout about global warming, extinctions of living species, the devastation of rain forests, and other world-wide catastrophes, but Americans evince a striking complacency when it comes to their everyday environment and the growing calamity that it represents.
“Modernism did its immense damage in these ways: by divorcing the practice of building from the history and traditional meanings of building; by promoting a species of urbanism that destroyed age-old social arrangements and, with them, urban life as a general proposition; and by creating a physical setting for man that failed to respect the limits of scale, growth, and the consumption of natural resources, or to respect the lives of other living things. The result of Modernism, especially in America, is a crisis of the human habitat: cities ruined by corporate gigantism and abstract renewal schemes, public buildings and public spaces unworthy of human affection, vast sprawling suburbs that lack any sense of community, housing that the un-rich cannot afford to live in, a slavish obeisance to the needs of automobiles and their dependent industries at the expense of human needs, and a gathering ecological calamity that we have only begun to measure.”
That’s the problem with downtown. It’s a tourist destination not a living space. Since white flight the only way to get money to develop Atlanta was. to cater to out of towners. Good luck changing that.
Frankly it’s not a particularly good tourist destination, either.
I tend to think that Atlanta’s awe over bigger, shinier, and uglier buildings has a lot to do with our past history, including the burning of Atlanta, our struggles with integration and civil rights, and our desire to be a “city too busy to hate” meaning we were all about the business, not about the beauty…. we’ve been a let’s get on with it city, which for better and for worse, wanted to tear down the memories and erect something “else,” something that might fix our inferiority complex – that might show the world that we were a “Real” city, not a southern backwater . that iconic skyline was a point of pride for so many cities as they grew up and shed the provincialism that small town feel that was thought to be so wrong…
we still haven’t really recovered over that type of thinking, but it was and is, a part of our history.
yell at portman all you want for his ugly landmarks but he did help put the city on the map in a way that was unique for its time …
I for one think that you can’t say Atlanta isn’t trying. At least in the last 20 years. They did build Centennial Park which, although not really beautiful during the Olympics, has grown into a very nice greenspace. Also, Georgia State just this year has done some very nice streetscaping along Marietta Street. At least that’s a step in the right direction. My husband has an elaborate plan in his head for all streets going thru the GSU campus to be undergound so that the above ground streets can be made into greenways. Yeah, he’s a bit of a dreamer.
Ted Turner made a comment this past year…”Atlanta is turning into a form of hell.” I always think of that when I have to go downtown for an event. I can’t even imagine what the conventioneers think of our city.
Midtown is very nice and seems to be getting nicer.
Portman’s Peachtree Center complex has the largest outdoor public courtyard that I know of in downtown.
Many of Kuntsler’s photos were taken standing directly in front of street level shopping/dining. If he had simply turned around, his camera would have captured images of exactly the things he claims downtown Atlanta is devoid of.
Some of his photo descriptions are inaccurate to the point where I think it’d be fair to call them lies.
There’s plenty to dislike about downtown, but his photo essay is misleading, and I think it’s intentional.
Absolutely, it’s completely intentional–he uses his infantile reification as cover.
I’d be interested in seeing a counter-photo essay, visiting these sites and aiming the camera in a different direction.
Reminds me of the “ruin porn” photographers that go to Detroit to capture the abandoned buildings while cropping out any of that pesky urban renewal that’s getting in the way.
I’d do it myself if I had the time.
Here’s are two examples:
Photo #6: The photo of the ugly mediterranean restaurant ( which used to be a Steak & Ale): He’s standing in the doorway of a Benihana. Next to the Benihana is Gibney’s Pub and one or two fast food places.
Photo #13, Poplar Street. Kuntsler’s description says “no storefront activity.” Actually, on that block there are three street level shops on one side of the road (Hunky Dory Sandwich Shop, a hair salon and a clothing store) and GSU’s Aderhold Learning Center is on the other side of the road. That’s one of the most active blocks in the entire city, and there is a lot of storefront activity during the week. Kuntsler would know that if he hadn’t strategically taken his photos on a weekend.
I find it a little weird that on the weekend – namely, when people generally have more free time – that downtown would look abandoned. I think it kind of proves his point.
And if these are the views you get from the street-level dining, then it’s no wonder that downtown is empty on the weekends. Jeff, you’re complaining that Kunstler left out the pretty stuff by pointing his camera in the other direction. Well, if your only options are to sit somewhere nice and stare at horribly ugly stuff or stand in a parking lot and look at a nice place to sit, then there’s no question why Atlanta is empty when people have the free time to go where they please.
And btw, anyone talking up the urban renewal of Detroit may need to visit Detroit.
“Well, if your only options are to sit somewhere nice and stare at horribly ugly stuff…”
That’s not an accurate portrayal of downtown.
Everyone agrees that Atlanta made a lot of architectural mistakes in the past that we’ll have to live with for a long time. But where Kuntsler fails is that he willfully avoids the fact that vitually all of the development in downtown, from the buildup to the olympics to the present day, has been a huge step in the right direction. That’s 20 years worth of smart development. How can anyone who ignores that be taken seriously?
No pictures of the Centennial Park area. No pictures of the Ivan Allen Plaza area. No pictures of the new “Reading Room” at Woodruff Park. I guess he did not venture onto Auburn or Edgewood or Forsyth St or check out any of our newly renovated old hotels like the Glenn or the Ellis
Sure, downtown Atlanta leaves a lot to be desired. Lots of development mistakes have been made in the past 50 years.
But it looks like this guy went out of his way to make it look bad, when positive things have actually been happening over the past few years.
Actually, there is one photo of The Ellis. As we all know, the Ellis is in the old Winecoff building which sat empty for decades after a terrible fire. One would think Kuntsler would be thrilled that such a building would be brought back to life.
The photo also includes the Macy’s building, which is currently being transformed for reuse. One would think Kuntsler would be thrilled about that.
The photos also includes the Candler Building, one of Atlanta’s finest buildings.
Kuntsler’s caption reads:
“Down Peachtree Street, remnants of the Beaux Arts, circa 1900.
The center of Atlanta used to havre (sic) some charm and grace.
It has mostly been destroyed.”
WTF?
I could probably walk around downtown Decatur with a camera and take pictures of some of our more unattactive features like Church St. (from Ponce to Commerce), the stuccoed over Trust Building on the Square, the Holiday Inn, the CVS Strip Mall in the center of downtown, the Commerce Plaza office building or Dekalb Medical building, or just Commerce Drive in general, without taking pictures of some of our better features, and give a false imprpression of our Decatur as well.
Sure, downtown Atlanta has many, many flaws. But this was just unfair.