City on the Verge: Atlanta and the Fight for America's Urban Future

by Mark Pendergrast

Overview

What we can learn from Atlanta's struggle to reinvent itself in the 21st Century

Atlanta is on the verge of tremendous rebirth-or inexorable decline. A kind of Petri dish for cities struggling to reinvent themselves, Atlanta has the highest income inequality in the country, gridlocked highways, suburban sprawl, and a history of racial injustice. Yet it is also an energetic, brash young city that prides itself on pragmatic solutions.

Today, the most promising catalyst for the city's rebirth is the BeltLine, which the New York Times described as "a staggeringly ambitious engine of urban revitalization." A long-term project that is cutting through forty-five neighborhoods ranging from affluent to impoverished, the BeltLine will complete a twenty-two-mile loop encircling downtown, transforming a massive ring of mostly defunct railways into a series of stunning parks connected by trails and streetcars.

Acclaimed author Mark Pendergrast presents a deeply researched, multi-faceted, up-to-the-minute history of the biggest city in America's Southeast, using the BeltLine saga to explore issues of race, education, public health, transportation, business, philanthropy, urban planning, religion, politics, and community.
An inspiring narrative of ordinary Americans taking charge of their local communities, City of the Verge provides a model for how cities across the country can reinvent themselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465054732
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Mark Pendergrast is an independent scholar who brews a fantastic cup of coffee. He is the author of many books, including For God, Country and Coca-Cola. He lives in Vermont.

Table of Contents

Introduction Atlanta's Livable Future ix

Part I Building the Beltline

Prologue Walking the BeltLine 3

Chapter 1 Ryan Gravel's Epiphany 13

Chapter 2 City on the Move 31

Chapter 3 First Bumps Along the BeltLine 47

Chapter 4 Two Atlantas: The Racial Divide 63

Chapter 5 Learning to Fly While Building an Airplane 85

Chapter 6 Mansions and Cat Holes 105

Chapter 7 A Stake in the Ground 121

Chapter 8 The Public's Health 137

Chapter 9 Impossible but Inevitable 155

Part II Neighbors

Chapter 10 East BeltLine: Chic, Walkable Neighborhoods 173

Chapter 11 South BeltLine: A Slow Dance to Better Communities 189

Chapter 12 West BeltLine: Trouble and Promise 203

Chapter 13 North BeltLine: Easy Streets 225

Chapter 14 Outside and Inside the BeltLine 243

Chapter 15 The Future of Atlanta 267

Epilogue: Georgia on My Mind 291

Acknowledgments 295

Glossary 299

Photo Credits 301

Note on Sources 303

Index 311

Editorial Reviews

03/13/2017
Pendergrast (For God, Country, and Coca-Cola), an Atlanta native, devotes this detailed study to how the city might be revived and reimagined for the 21st century. Mixing planning, history, and personal anecdotes, he describes an urban renewal project’s path from grassroots idea to $4 billion project, slated for 2030 completion. The BeltLine, a collection of abandoned rail lines ringing Atlanta, could reconnect wildly disparate elements of a city that “sold its soul to the automobile” and has long been equated with urban sprawl riven with racial and economic inequality. The key: connected light rail, trails, pedestrian paths, and improved accessibility. Pendergrast has an obvious love for both the city and the energy behind the BeltLine project, but the level of neighborhood-by-neighborhood detail may be daunting for nonresidents. At the conclusion, the scope widens as he invokes similar projects, but this section touches only lightly on broader planning principles. More tellingly, his most powerful anecdote involves a beloved African-American maid who worked for his family for decades and lived less than eight miles away. He first saw her house nearly 40 years after her death in 1975, while doing research for the book. Agent: Lisa Bankoff, ICM. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"City on the Verge is a deeply researched effort to capture [the city's] history and, along the way, paint a portrait of Atlanta's neighborhoods, from the still elite area where the author spent his childhood to bustling zones of gentrification and immovable pockets of desperation."
—Douglas Blackmon, Wall Street Journal

"A lively urban history, charting Atlanta's growth and linking it to political developments over time... [Pendergrast] is generally optimistic, even in a time when taxpayers are reluctant to shoulder the burden of improving the commonweal: 'Change is in the air in Atlanta,' he writes, 'mostly for the good.'... A welcome look at a city-a mass of cities-not often heard from in the urban-studies literature and of wide interest well beyond the I-95 corridor."

—Kirkus Reviews

"Pendergrast, an Atlanta native, devotes this detailed study to how the city [Atlanta] might be revived and reimagined for the 21st century. Mixing planning, history, and personal anecdotes, he describes an urban renewal project's path from grassroots idea to $4 billion project.... Pendergrast has an obvious love for both the city and the energy behind the BeltLine project."

—Publishers Weekly

"An enchanting story of a Sunbelt city that will captivate both urban planners and the general public. An Atlanta native, the author brings an engaging and insightful voice to this work, and his research is meticulously thorough."
—Library Journal

"Offering both an account of Atlanta's tumultuous history and an anatomical breakdown of the BeltLine project so far, Pendergrast situates City on the Verge within the larger context of urban America's future. A must-read for urban-planning junkies, it should also appeal to those interested in community building and the oft-charged politics of the built environment."
—Seven Days

"City on the Verge is a must read for city-builders, urbanists, and anyone who cares about our future. Sunbelt cities like Atlanta are booming, attracting people from across the country and remaking themselves from sprawling suburban areas to more dynamic urban centers. With a journalist's eye for detail and a writerly knack for great story-telling, Mark Pendergrast takes us inside the forces and actors that are transforming Atlanta and the urban world we live in."
—Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and of The New Urban Crisis

"Atlanta colleagues used to joke that Atlanta was the "Public Health Capital of the US" because it had CDC, the Carter Center, and good hospitals. "No," I would argue, "There aren't enough sidewalks, scarcely anywhere to walk, and parks are too few and poorly accessible. The place seems built only for car drivers and country club members. In Mark Pendergrast's excellent book, we see how Atlanta is going from a fat city to a healthy one with the help of the BeltLine and good leadership."
—Dr. Richard Jackson, former Director, CDC National Center for Environmental Health, and author of Designing Healthy Communities

From the Publisher

05/01/2017
Pendergrast's (For God, Country & Coca-Cola) latest is an enchanting story of a Sunbelt city that will captivate both urban planners and the general public. An Atlanta native, the author brings an engaging and insightful voice to this work, and his research is meticulously thorough. Here, he chronicles the BeltLine: a greenspace network of over 1,300 acres girdling the city of Atlanta and connecting 45 neighborhoods through greenways, trails, and transit lines. Nestled within the framework of the BeltLine story is a tale of race relations fraught with failed urban policies. As Pendergrast writes, "Atlanta is on the verge of either tremendous rebirth or inexorable decline." However, the BeltLine has the potential to improve blighted neighborhoods and blur the rigid lines drawn by income inequality. Will it fulfill this promise? Will the Phoenix City rise once again, or will leadership blunders doom its future? VERDICT This work is appropriate reading for architects and city planners, but it will also pique the interests of general readers.—Jennifer A. Townes, Georgia Coll., Milledgeville

Library Journal

2017-03-15
Given enough political will and enough choice, we can save the world. Or, as this case study shows, we can let things continue to go to hell in a handbasket lined with peach blossoms.Atlanta, the titular center city, contains only some 7 percent of the 6 million inhabitants of the greater area called Atlanta. That metropolis, writes native son Pendergrast (Beyond Fair Trade: How One Small Coffee Company Helped Transform a Hillside Village in Thailand, 2015, etc.), constitutes a "vast world where most people who say they live ‘in Atlanta' actually reside" strung out somewhere on a beltway or endless avenue named, inevitably, Peachtree. The BeltLine is one, "a twenty-two-mile ring of mostly defunct rail lines, running through forty-five neighborhoods girdling Atlanta's downtown." Faced with this crumbling bit of infrastructure, Atlanta writ large has been trying to remake it to spur development and redevelopment, bringing life to an often ghostly downtown, and, with luck, easing the city's notorious gridlock. In all this, Atlanta has discernible options that may lead to better tomorrows in a nation not well known for long-term thinking. The author turns in a lively urban history, charting Atlanta's growth and linking it to political developments over time—not least of them Jim Crow laws that forged many of those wrong-side-of-the-tracks neighborhoods. He is generally optimistic, even in a time when taxpayers are reluctant to shoulder the burden of improving the commonweal: "Change is in the air in Atlanta," he writes, "mostly for the good." Where money and political will have been spent, that is, things have changed for the better, though the author also reckons, eyes open, that the possibility also exists that Atlantans will "continue to live segregated and unequal lives." A welcome look at a city—a mass of cities—not often heard from in the urban-studies literature and of wide interest well beyond the I-95 corridor.

Kirkus Reviews