Atlanta [antikvár]

Introduction H. ,enry W. Grady said it first. Back in 1886, the young editor of the Atlanta Constitution went to New York to address the New England Society Bent on healing the wounds of the Civil War (he was credited with "loving a nation back to peace"), he had a message, he said, for General William T. Sherman, "an able man—though kind of careless with fire." The message: "From the ashes he left us in 1864, we have raised a brave and beautiful city that somehow or other caught the sunshine in the bricks and mortar of our homes, and have builded therein not one ignoble prejudice or memory." The litde city of which Henry Grady was so proud was burgeoning, no doubt about it. Seven thousand people had voted in its last municipal election. It had attracted to its still somewhat sooty center a grand total of 303 business enterprises with an impressive payroll of more than two million dollars. And a Confederate veteran named John Pemberton was tinkering with a formula for what he hoped would be "a palatable syrup," soon to be called Coca-Cola. Atlanta was on her way. The phoenix, the bird of Egyptian mythology which burned to ashes and rose again in youth and beauty, was flapping its wings. People of the little town of Atlanta had heard about something they were determined to create for themselves. A diarist of the day called it "the good life." A visitor in 1848 recorded in his journal that he had never seen "more beauty than there was in the springtime in the groves all over Adanta." He waxed poetic about the "lavish luxuriance" of flowering plants, great trees and crystal streams, and then he said it again: "I have seen few things so fair in this world of beauty as were the Atlanta woods in 1848." Atlanta's woods have receded somewhat before the march of building and growing, but the reverence for beauty abides. Atlantans liked that view of their town in 1848, and they ardently cherish it today. In the midst of spreading out in all directions with its subdivisions and office complexes, and reaching upward with its skyscrapers and the second busiest airport in the world, Atlanta is dotty about its trees and gardens. It stages annual festivals to celebrate the glory of the dogwood, which trims its streets with a ruching of starchy white and delicate strawberry pink lace in the spring. It fights to preserve its old trees with city ordinances and vigilant citizens groups, and it constantly plants new trees—along the sidewalks and roadways, in concrete boxes downtown, anywhere there is a patch of hospitable earth. Before the usually benign winter has passed, garden tours and flower shows have started. Camellias are blooming and azaleas girding up for that most flamboyant of early spring carnivals of color. Tulips are on the way, iris and roses follow, and the bounty of summer flowers fills humble dooryards and the grounds of great estates. Even after the tawny tide of chrysanthemum color has subsided in the fall, Atlantans are thinking or plaiming or dreaming of gardening. They study it in classes at the Atlanta Botanical Garden or in Piedmont Park. They take horticultural courses at Emory University or travel to Athens to the University of Georgia's world-famous school of landscape design to learn serious things about drainage and grading of gardens. The natural beauty of the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains was Atlanta's legacy at birth. But catching the sunshine in the brick and mortar of its buildings.