Streetalk: What was the lasting impact of the Olympics in Atlanta?

Jessica: From someone who’s a Yankee, the ‘96 Olympics made people outside the Southeast actually care about Atlanta. It is now an international city. It wasn’t that at all before the Olympics. I never thought anything about Atlanta before except that my father worked here in the ’70s and the first day he was in Atlanta he got robbed at gunpoint. That was the only story I ever knew about Atlanta. Until the Olympics, I didn’t know anything and neither did my friends about Atlanta. I came here for school because I had seen what the city became and I stayed.

Bill:  As years have gone by, I don’t see any lasting impact outside the Olympic Park and that thing, the big torch, outside Turner Field. There’s no financial lasting impact. I thought they would have made enough revenue to make better improvements, MARTA, but they didn’t do anything. It’s the same old Atlanta. In other cities that hosted the Olympics, there’s been a much greater economic impact. As far as its stature, they spent millions of dollars chasing down a guy who had nothing to do with the bombing. Richard Jewell became the spotlight, not the Olympics.

Dahshi:  One: it established Atlanta as an international hub for commerce and business. Two: a lot of the facilities that were put in place are still in use today like Turner Field, Centennial Park. Three: they put in a tax allocation system that made it possible for a lot of the development downtown that would not had been possible beforehand. It specifically benefited Georgia Tech and Georgia State. Those two universities grew unbelievably. We had a long era of prosperity over a ten year period, and there was a massive infusion of federal funds which you don’t see today because we don’t have our act together.