Editor’s Note - The real Underground
‘Alley of broken dreams’
In 1975, Dad took the sis’ and me down to Underground for an evening of debauchery. It was like a family vacation in a bawdy 1890s railroad town. Street musicians. Oil lamps. Public drunkenness. All manner of people sharing cobblestone streets to create the cacophony that makes a place exciting to a 15-year-old.
The image that sticks is standing outside former Gov. Lester Maddox’s gift shop. Maddox was a genial segregationist who’d used pick-ax handles, and a gun, to chase away three African-Americans who’d tried to desegregate his Northside Drive restaurant.
Now, the recently retired governor was a tourist attraction. I peered through the window while he signed souvenir pick handles for tourists. A couple of black kids, just a bit older than me, were laughing and waving to try to get his attention, and I joined in. The goober governor waved back, with a plastic smile, as he shifted stiffly from foot to foot. “Oh, Lester, you’re my hero,” one of the kids said, laughing.
[]Despite the candy stores, despite the goober-governor-as-cigar-shop-Indian, despite the tourist-trap tawdriness, the old Underground felt real. But it fell on hard times. Shops closed. The smell of toffee wafting from shops was replaced by the smell of urine rising from dank, dark corners. Soon, the place shut down.
I was disappointed when Underground reopened in 1989. Ever a fan of sweeping character aside if it stood in the way of progress, Mayor Andrew Young had ordered up a “festival marketplace” — an antiseptic mall, complete with fast-food court, air conditioning and security. It was still a tourist attraction — only it was stripped of the character that made the first version fun.
Underground is near failure again. And there’s another tourism-oriented scheme being pushed as the silver bullet: a casino. That’s a bad idea. Put a casino on some cheap land next to a big, tour-bus parking lot in a rural area, where gambling addicts can ensconce themselves while they throw away their savings. Don’t land it like an alien blob on top of downtown’s nascent residential revival.
As Scott Henry’s cover feature this week demonstrates, some very smart people see greater opportunities than ever in Underground’s current decline. But this time, they basically argue, don’t make it a tourist attraction. Make it part of the fabric of downtown. Make it a functioning part of the neighborhood. Make it something real.