Talk of the Town - Absence of beauty October 14 2000

Hideous landscape is partly to blame for Buckhead’s woes

Living in Grant Park, about the only time I get to Buckhead is when my duties as author of the “Grazing” column require a trip to a restaurant there. My attitude, considering the awful parking there, is always to get in and get out as quickly as possible. Last week, however, I got a bit lost looking for a business I needed to visit, and found myself on a fascinating tour of the area. What I most noticed is how incredibly ugly Buckhead has become.
I know. Buckhead’s commercial area was never very attractive. But its “village” did, once upon a time, have a quaintness about it. As a high school student and book worm, I spent nearly every Saturday hidden in the stacks at the Ida Williams branch of the Atlanta Public Library. That comfortable brick building has been replaced by something that looks like an intergalactic mobile home. I lunched constantly on cheap burgers at a diner in the triangle. It’s gone. The Roxy, where I went to movies, is now a performance space. I remember Lenox when it was an open-air mall weirdly decorated with concrete figures from the Uncle Remus stories.
Once or twice a year as a kid, I was dispatched to the Buckhead Men’s Shop on Peachtree and properly outfitted by a woman named Fran. When I went to William and Mary, I promptly joined the anti-war movement. When I came home, my mother said: “I know you have to protest everything, but must you dress like Ralph David Abernathy?”
A few weeks after I returned to school, I received a package from my mother containing six shirts and a note. It said something like: “I asked Fran to help me pick out some nice shirts for that Silent Vigil for Peace in Vietnam you stand in every day. We are proud of you but there is no reason to look that way.” It was a kooky sentiment but represented, I think, what happens when you have several values operating simultaneously.
So, I’m owning my connection to Buckhead, its historic values and a certain quantity of nostalgia that is stimulated when I visit it now. To me — and I mean this quite seriously — one explanation for the violence that has come to plague Buckhead’s commercial area is its utterly hideous landscape.
I don’t know who’s in “charge” of Buckhead’s development. But I know that it exhibits the city’s usual priority: commerce without regard to the inherent human need for beauty. From Lenox Square south to Pharr Road, it is a hideous jumble of stores, clubs and restaurants that seem to pay no attention to one another in their design. You can’t really walk the area comfortably. I saw no places to stop and rest. Every inch is devoted to selling something and any beauty available is only inside a store for sale or in the homes bordering the area. Beauty as a public quality is absent.
People from all over the city come to patronize this entertainment district wrapped by neighborhoods only affordable to the very rich. It’s a kind of insult when you think about it: Come visit, spend your money, get the hell out ‘cause you ain’t livin’ here. The same principle rules in the horrible canyon of John Portman’s Peachtree Center in downtown Atlanta. Like Buckhead, it is inhospitable to the eye and the body except in the most commercial ways: Work, make money, get out. With a few growing exceptions (like the Fairlie-Poplar district), only tourists inhabit downtown Atlanta after dark. Buckhead’s nighttime visitors are essentially tourists too.
Beauty, as Elaine Scarry notes in her wonderful little book On Beauty and Being Just, has a moral quality about it. Beauty is hospitable. It invites us into a relationship with the world and other people. Where people have invested in architecture that respects human scale and the eye’s delight, where they have paid attention to the natural world in which the city was built, where they imagine cities as places of human gathering rather than just places of commerce, life is experienced very differently. Violence is a protest against the absence of beauty. Atlanta’s developers desecrated our city and now everyone’s shocked when violence of another type erupts in the landscapes of desecration.
Atlanta’s symbol is the Phoenix, that bird of mythology that burns itself every 500 years and then resurrects itself in a new body. We chose the symbol because we resurrected ourselves after the city’s infamous burning during the Civil War. But we have never given up living that story. We continue to destroy the old, the natural and the beautiful to build more commerce.
A couple of years ago I had it in mind to create something I called “The Phoenix Project,” a foundation to re-imagine the city. The Dallas Institute does the same thing in that comparatively new city. Architects, poets, scholars, businessmen, depth psychologists, artists and writers come together to imagine Dallas as a polis.
The institute has had a powerful influence on the city’s development. Dallas, as you may know, is not a city whose terrain or historical development make it “naturally” beautiful. That’s one important thing to understand. Beauty is not wholly contingent upon what we call “nature” or a long history of architectural embellishment and devotion to public space like you see in European cities. Beauty, in this context, is created though the operation of the aesthetic imagination with what’s available now. That’s why artists should be included in any development commission. Architects are not enough. Most of them have sold their souls to commerce.
I would like to invite persons interested in the Phoenix Project to contact me.
Cliff Bostock, M.A., is a doctoral candidate in depth psychology. Reach him at 404-525-4774.