Cityscape

Not much is going down in Buckhead since the neighborhood purged its nightlife, but plenty is going up. Atlanta hasn’t skyscraped this feverishly since the downtown/Midtown boom in the late ’80s and early ’90s. By the end of the year, the title “Buckhead’s Tallest Building” will have changed hands twice in 2007. Come ’08, the title will belong to SOVEREIGN. Inside a curving, 635-foot-tall exterior that kind of looks like a giant Ionic Breeze, Sovereign will offer office, retail, restaurants and 93 condos that will cost up to $12 million. Here’s hoping the mixed-use monolith encourages more centralized living, working and playing — and thus less driving, driving and driving.

Tower Place 200, 3348 Peachtree Road, Suite 1095. 404-266-3344. www.sovereignbuckhead.com

After work and every weekend, THE PATH TRAIL connecting Freedom Parkway to downtown Decatur fills up. Joggers jog it. Pet owners empty their dogs along it. Parents push their high-performance strollers on it. Cyclists cruise it. The paved trail, maintained by the nonprofit PATH Foundation, goes from Freedom Park through Candler Park, Lake Claire, East Lake and into Decatur. The only section of trail where you’ll have to get on the street or the municipal sidewalk is in ped-friendly Candler Park. Readers with especially capacious lungs, take note: The trail continues past Decatur to Stone Mountain.

www.pathfoundation.org

If America is addicted to oil (as even President Bush admitted in 2006), then Atlanta is a jittery crack whore for petro. Our sprawl and the state’s dearth of leaders willing to go to bat for regional mass transit or smart growth make the metro area’s prosperity especially vulnerable to spikes in oil prices or dips in supply. Enter ROB DEL BUENO. With help from the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and a corps of volunteers, the former Man or Astro-man? bassist makes and sells biodiesel — a clean alternative to petroleum diesel made from used cooking oil. Del Bueno’s fuel powers a small fleet of cars and buses around town. And unlike our country’s oil titans, he doesn’t receive gazillions in government subsidies. 250 Arizona St.

www.refuelbiodiesel.org

Last year, we dubbed AJC Editorial Page Editor Cynthia Tucker “best columnist”; six months later she won the slightly less prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Coincidence? We think not. This year, we’re granting CL’s honor to Tucker’s deputy editorial page editor. JAY BOOKMAN attacks his topics with a strong sense of justice, well-aimed wit and even wisdom, as he did with a July column slyly protesting the hypocrisy of the district attorney who prosecuted teenager Genarlow Wilson for having sex with another teenager. Over the years, Bookman has particularly distinguished himself with fair-minded, powerful columns on the Iraq fiasco and Georgia’s disastrous transportation policies — both of which he saw coming with painful clarity. We can’t say this will lead to a Pulitzer, but there is a precedent.

www.ajc.com

Few hints of the Battle of Atlanta have survived the city’s bulldozers and steamrollers. Just north of the city, Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park offers a more complete, and scenic, view of the battle that preceded Atlanta’s fall. But if you really want to feel the scope of the last war fought on Southern soil, head about 100 miles north to CHICKAMAUGA AND CHATTANOOGA NATIONAL MILITARY PARK. The Chickamauga part of the park, which is in Georgia, looks and feels like a hallowed old battlefield: rolling fields, idle cannons, somber memorials. It was the site of one of the South’s last big victories. U.S. troops retreated north to Chattanooga, Tenn., regrouped there, broke out of the city, and then, under the leadership of William Tecumseh Sherman, marched on to Atlanta. Parcels of the park commemorate clashes in and around Chattanooga, including Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge.

www.nps.gov/chch

Political junkies are surprisingly nonpartisan when it comes to getting the latest scuttlebutt. You could have Ted Kennedy’s face tattooed across both ass cheeks and you’d still have to check PEACH PUNDIT several times a day to see what fresh dirt Erick Erickson and his crew of mostly conservative busybodies and gossipmongers have dug up. You only have to open a blog thread to see that readers of all political stripes have entered the fray, resulting not only in lively debate, but a much more fruitful exchange of viewpoints than you get on single-blogger sites. PP’s stable of insiders also occasionally scoops the news wires and dailies, especially during the General Assembly. Simply put, if it involves politics in Georgia, someone’s talking about it — and you can, too — on Peach Pundit.

www.peachpundit.com

Mac Thomason started his BRAVES JOURNAL blog in 1998 before he even knew what a blog was. A librarian by trade, Thomason started out writing about all of Atlanta’s sports teams, but quickly settled on his favorite: the Braves. Thomason’s observations on all things Braves are often funny and usually insightful. And his rants can be provocative, such as his rebuke to Slate.com when the web magazine framed Hank Aaron as a slow-and-steady “good player,” as opposed to a great one. The blog has become a gathering spot for hardcore Braves fans, and it’s not unusual to see Thomason receive 300-plus comments on a single post where fans critique every move Bobby Cox and John Schuerholz make … and didn’t make.

www.bravesjournal.com

It takes personal courage to challenge authority in the Atlanta Police Department. Former Deputy Chief Lou Arcangeli suffered retaliation when he went public with substantiated accusations that former Mayor Bill Campbell and Chief Beverly Harvard had manipulated crime statistics to make the city look safer before the ’96 Olympics. In the last year SGT. MICHAEL SCOTT KREHER, president of the Atlanta chapter of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers union, and some of his colleagues have exposed the APD’s deepening morale problems, as well as revealed the city’s touted war on crime as a quota-driven exercise in meaningless statistics. Without Kreher, the public wouldn’t know much of what’s gone wrong with the APD. Chief Richard Pennington has responded by transferring Kreher and other union officials to graveyard shifts and lower-status jobs.

www.ibpolocal623.com

Just when it seemed Atlanta was as likely to issue free personal jet packs to every resident as it was to make progress on THE BELTLINE, the city worked behind the scenes to team with a group of private investors to buy the proposed 22-mile loop’s northeast quadrant from Gwinnett developer Wayne Mason, who tried but failed to get approval for two huge condo towers on the Beltline overlooking Piedmont Park. Few details are known, but it appears Atlanta will get its transit right-of-way and parks, developers will get to put swank homes and retail on some of the city’s most desirable land, and Mason will make an eight-figure profit just for sitting on the land for three years.

www.beltline.org

The Inman Park Festival parade is best-known as home turf for the incredibly entertaining Kelly’s Seed and Feed Marching Abominable Band. The quirky Pride Parade in Midtown is Atlanta’s most honest celebration of freedom. We love them both. But Atlanta’s most original, entertaining and downright bizarre street march is the LITTLE FIVE POINTS HALLOWEEN PARADE. Where else does a 7-foot-penis swagger by a wholesome family in broad daylight, or a snarling, bare-chested madman gnaw on his bone and lunge at the crowd only to have his collar jerked by his masterful mistress?

www.l5phalloween.com.

We might just prefer to have fresh bamboo shoots driven under our fingernails than be forced to read another story about MEI LAN, the baby panda. After the wall-to-wall press coverage, the billboards, the nightly gushing and cooing by local TV anchors, the ads for panda posters in the AJC and the frickin’ panda cam, for God’s sake, we’re sick of hearing about the little beast. But, um, have you been over to the zoo to check her out? She’s actually pretty adorable in person, lounging on her log or playing with her mother. We don’t need to read any more about Mei Lan. Can we just take her home instead?

800 Cherokee Ave. 404-624-5600. www.zooatlanta.org

After a charmed debut year when it welcomed (and collected admission charges from) more than 3 million visitors, the GEORGIA AQUARIUM has experienced a bit of a sophomore slump. This year, two of its largest animals, whale sharks Ralph and Norton, went belly-up. The deaths drew scrutiny to the aquarium’s animal-care practices, as well as prompted questions about the wisdom of bringing enormous ocean creatures to Atlanta just for our viewing pleasure. Despite those setbacks, the Home Depot Memorial Fish Tank is and will likely remain the city’s finest tourist attraction. Its size, breathtaking visual presentation and novelty make it a no-brainer for entertaining out-of-town guests. It’s our Disneyland.

225 Baker St. 404-581-4000. www.georgiaaquarium.org

CRAIGSLIST is more than just a shopper’s mecca. Its “anything goes” posting policy has made it a repository for users’ deepest and weirdest thoughts. Though it pains us to say this since Craigslist has taken a huge chunk of newspaper revenues, we still have to give props. Whether you’re looking for a guitar, a couch, a car or a house, it’s a great place to browse. On a given day, you’ll also find things such as heartfelt letters penned to anonymous grocery-store clerks someone was afraid to talk to, invitations by men who want to “swap body rubs,” and obscene racist rants about problems with Mexican drivers. Craigslist is part shopping mall, part diary, part bathroom wall.

www.atlanta.craigslist.com

Whether seen as a defiant indulgence, kitschy novelty or unexpected projectile, it’s hard to deny the mysterious allure of the corn dog. No wonder David Railey has spent so much energy nurturing Atlanta’s CORNDOGORAMA. The indie-fried omnifest rocked through its 11th year in July, despite a somewhat sour relocation from the Earl to Lenny’s, and seems poised to keep growing in its new home. The 2007 edition was headlined by Atlanta metal rockers Mastodon, and featured local up-and-comers the Coathangers, the Selmanaires and Snowden. As with any festival that really cares about its congregation, there are gimmicks and games aplenty, including motorcycle stunts, a corn-dog-eating contest, the Queen Corndog pageant, a heavy-metal petting zoo and 40-yard flip-flop race.

www.corndogorama.com

TV news anchors aren’t reporters. They’re readers, tasked by TV stations with the job of lending authority and likability to the copy scrolling up their teleprompters. In Atlanta, no one does it better than MONICA PEARSON. Longtime Atlantans remember when she arrived in 1975 from Louisville, Ky., as Monica Kaufman to anchor the morning local-news breaks during “The Today Show.” Even then, it was obvious there was something about her that made you stop what you were doing to watch. Today, she’s a part of the fabric of the city. Pearson’s ace in the hole is her hard-to-categorize-yet-undeniable charisma. Maybe it’s her vaguely diva-esque bearing. Maybe it’s her adventurous hairstyle choices. We’re not sure what. All we know is that whatever “it” is, she has it.

www.wsbtv.com

Since starting Drifting Through the Grift in March 2006, GRIFTDRIFT has attracted a loyal following with his easygoing online persona and his trenchant commentary on important local news stories. His finest achievement: his posts this spring and summer that chipped away at the mountain of political, legal and media hypocrisy surrounding the Genarlow Wilson case. When the U.S. attorney in Atlanta ripped the Douglas County prosecutor for having distributed a video of Wilson and an underaged girl having sex, his statement was uncannily similar to the ones GriftDrift had been making for weeks.

www.griftdrift.blogspot.com