Atlanta's 343 parks, nature preserves, and gardens cover 3,622 acres (14.66 km2), which amounts to only 5.6% of the city's total acreage, compared to the national average of just over 10%. However, 64% of Atlantans live within a 10-minute walk of a park, a percentage equal to the national average. In its 2013 ParkScore ranking, The Trust for Public Land reported that among the park systems of the 50 most populous U.S. cities, Atlanta's park system received a ranking of 31. The park, which underwent a major renovation and expansion in recent years, attracts visitors from across the region and hosts cultural events throughout the year. The Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, in the northwestern corner of the city, preserves a 48 mi stretch of the river for public recreation opportunities. Artist & Craftsman Supply, an employee owned company, has been providing artists with excellent materials at competitive prices since first opening in Yarmouth, Maine in 1985.
Our stores carry a wide variety of supplies for all types of arts and crafts that are on average 15-20% off of the manufacturer's suggested list price. If you can't find it in our store, we are happy to do special orders! Any questions can be answered by our helpful, knowledgeable staff of artists. Artist & Craftsman Supply, an employee-owned company, has been providing artists with excellent materials at competitive prices since first opening in Yarmouth, Maine in 1985.
Atlanta has a reputation as a "city in a forest" due to an abundance of trees that is rare among major cities. The city's main street is named after a tree, and beyond the Downtown, Midtown, and Buckhead business districts, the skyline gives way to a dense canopy of woods that spreads into the suburbs. The city is home to the Atlanta Dogwood Festival, an annual arts and crafts festival held one weekend during early April, when the native dogwoods are in bloom.
The nickname is factually accurate, as vegetation covers 47.9% of the city as of 2017, the highest among all major American cities, and well above the national average of 27%. Atlanta's tree coverage does not go unnoticed—it was the main reason cited by National Geographic in naming Atlanta a "Place of a Lifetime". As of 2010, Atlanta is the seventh-most visited city in the United States, with over 35 million visitors per year. Although the most popular attraction among visitors to Atlanta is the Georgia Aquarium, the world's largest indoor aquarium, Atlanta's tourism industry is mostly driven by the city's history museums and outdoor attractions.
Atlanta contains a notable number of historical museums and sites, including the Martin Luther King Jr. President Jimmy Carter's papers and other material relating to the Carter administration and the Carter family's life; and the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum, where Mitchell wrote the best-selling novel Gone with the Wind. In the 1920s, the black population began to grow in Southern metropolitan cities like Atlanta, Birmingham, Houston, and Memphis. In the 2010 Census, Atlanta was recorded as the nation's fourth-largest majority-black city. The New Great Migration brought an insurgence of African Americans from California and the North to the Atlanta area. It has long been known as a center of African-American political power, education, economic prosperity, and culture, often called a black mecca.
Some middle and upper class African-American residents of Atlanta followed an influx of whites to newer housing and public schools in the suburbs in the early 21st century. From 2000 to 2010, the city's black population decreased by 31,678 people, shrinking from 61.4% of the city's population in 2000 to 54.0% in 2010, as the overall population expanded and migrants increased from other areas. Located on a 38-acre campus in Vermont's Mad River Valley, the Yestermorrow School began about 30 years ago as a reincarnation of the nation's first design/build program at the now-defunct Godard College, an original hotbed of Whole Earth activism. It has since become a crossroads of eco-conscious building arts and engineering led by professional ecologists, architects, and students. In addition to its design/build programs for ultra-green, sustainable dwellings, Yestermorrow's curriculum teaches woodworking, masonry, and metalsmithing.
To better understand how design/build relates to traditional craft, we signed up for a weeklong course in Rumford fireplace construction. Renowned for the heat-producing efficiency of its shallow depth, the Rumford fireplace is based on an 18th-century design popular throughout the American colonies until after the Revolutionary War. New England's premier Rumford expert, Buzz Fervor, has built or converted hundreds of fireplaces according to this design. We were joined in the class by Tyler Kobick, a young architect, and Gerald Marchildon, who journeyed from Saskatchewan to learn how to build a Rumford in his own home.
The owner of a two-story house in nearby Waitsfield had agreed to donate his residence and materials for this project. All that was necessary, besides Fervor and Kobick's skills and tools and our labor, were a few hundred dollars' worth of cement, cinder block, fire brick, a ceramic flue, and some large slabs of soapstone. Operating from a collaborative sketch of how the fireplace and mantel would look in the living room, we began construction in the basement and worked up to the fireplace, flue, and chimney. Despite the autumn chill and constant rain, it was an exhilarating experience of craft at its improvisational best. Although cosmetically still incomplete, the fireplace was burning a warming fire within a week's time.
Not wanting to abandon the quest altogether, we countered with a proposal to create and endow a faculty chair in Low Country basketry at the College of Charleston. The foundation would provide an annual salary for a position, to be filled on a rotating basis by peer-selected basketmakers in consultation with Rosengarten and the Avery Center. We would also build a basketmaking studio open to all students at the university. This formula, we hoped, would function as a direct grant to the craftswomen and satisfy the mechanics of grant administration and reporting through the agency of the university. The one-year rotating appointments would help basketmakers qualify for faculty benefits, thereby guaranteeing each recipient and her family nearly three years of health care coverage. Finally, we hoped that by offering a course in Low Country basketry to the entire student body, we might spark a demand for more courses in Gullah culture.
Given our limited resources, we thought this was an economical plan designed to address the basketmakers' basic needs while satisfying our mission. Surrounding Atlanta's three high-rise districts are the city's low- and medium-density neighborhoods, where the craftsman bungalow single-family home is dominant. The eastside is marked by historic streetcar suburbs, built from the 1890s–1930s as havens for the upper middle class. These neighborhoods, many of which contain their own villages encircled by shaded, architecturally distinct residential streets, include the Victorian Inman Park, Bohemian East Atlanta, and eclectic Old Fourth Ward. Atlanta was selected as the site for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. While the games experienced transportation and accommodation problems and, despite extra security precautions, there was the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, the spectacle was a watershed event in Atlanta's history.
For the first time in Olympic history, every one of the record 197 national Olympic committees invited to compete sent athletes, sending more than 10,000 contestants participating in a record 271 events. The related projects such as Atlanta's Olympic Legacy Program and civic effort initiated a fundamental transformation of the city in the following decade. While Atlanta in the postwar years had relatively minimal racial strife compared to other cities, blacks were limited by discrimination, segregation, and continued disenfranchisement of most voters.
In 1961, the city attempted to thwart blockbusting by realtors by erecting road barriers in Cascade Heights, countering the efforts of civic and business leaders to foster Atlanta as the "city too busy to hate". Atlanta played a vital role in the Allied effort during World War II due to the city's war-related manufacturing companies, railroad network and military bases. The defense industries attracted thousands of new residents and generated revenues, resulting in rapid population and economic growth. In the 1950s, the city's newly constructed highway system, supported by federal subsidies, allowed middle class Atlantans the ability to relocate to the suburbs. As a result, the city began to make up an ever-smaller proportion of the metropolitan area's population.
The Research Building was expanded, and a $300,000 (equivalent to $3,000,000 in 2020) Westinghouse A-C network calculator was given to Georgia Tech by Georgia Power in 1947. In 1953, Van Leer assisted with helping Lockheed establish a research and development and production line in Marietta. Later in 1955 he helped set up a committee to assist with establishing a nuclear research facility, which would later become the Neely Nuclear Research Center.
Van Leer also co-founded Southern Polytechnic State University now absorbed by and made part of Kennesaw State University to help meet the need for technicians after the war. Van Leer was instrumental in making the school and Atlanta the first major research center in the American South. The building that houses Tech's school of Electrical and Computer Engineering bears his name. During the first decades of the 20th century, Atlanta enjoyed a period of unprecedented growth. In three decades' time, Atlanta's population tripled as the city limits expanded to include nearby streetcar suburbs. The city's skyline grew taller with the construction of the Equitable, Flatiron, Empire, and Candler buildings.
Increased racial tensions led to the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906, when whites attacked blacks, leaving at least 27 people dead and over 70 injured, with extensive damage in black neighborhoods. In 1913, Leo Frank, a Jewish-American factory superintendent, was convicted of the murder of a 13-year-old girl in a highly publicized trial. He was sentenced to death but the governor commuted his sentence to life.
An enraged and organized lynch mob took him from jail in 1915 and hanged him in Marietta. The Jewish community in Atlanta and across the country were horrified. On May 21, 1917, the Great Atlanta Fire destroyed 1,938 buildings in what is now the Old Fourth Ward, resulting in one fatality and the displacement of 10,000 people.
The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority provides public transportation in the form of buses, heavy rail, and a downtown light rail loop. Notwithstanding heavy automotive usage in Atlanta, the city's subway system is the eighth busiest in the country. MARTA rail lines connect key destinations, such as the airport, Downtown, Midtown, Buckhead, and Perimeter Center. However, significant destinations, such as Emory University and Cumberland, remain unserved. As a result, a 2011 Brookings Institution study placed Atlanta 91st of 100 metro areas for transit accessibility.
Emory University operates its Cliff shuttle buses with 200,000 boardings per month, while private minibuses supply Buford Highway. Amtrak, the national rail passenger system, provides service to Atlanta via the Crescent train (New York–New Orleans), which stops at Peachtree Station. The streetcar's line, which is also known as the Downtown Loop, runs 2.7 miles (4.3 km) around the downtown tourist areas of Peachtree Center, Centennial Olympic Park, the Martin Luther King Jr.
The Atlanta Streetcar line is also being expanded on in the coming years to include a wider range of Atlanta's neighborhoods and important places of interest, with a total of over 50 miles of track in the plan. Tourists are drawn to the city's culinary scene, which comprises a mix of urban establishments garnering national attention, ethnic restaurants serving cuisine from every corner of the world, and traditional eateries specializing in Southern dining. Since the turn of the 21st century, Atlanta has emerged as a sophisticated restaurant town.
Many restaurants opened in the city's gentrifying neighborhoods have received praise at the national level, including Bocado, Bacchanalia, and Miller Union in West Midtown, Empire State South in Midtown, and Two Urban Licks and Rathbun's on the east side. In 2011, The New York Times characterized Empire State South and Miller Union as reflecting "a new kind of sophisticated Southern sensibility centered on the farm but experienced in the city". Visitors seeking to sample international Atlanta are directed to Buford Highway, the city's international corridor, and suburban Gwinnett County. There, the nearly-million immigrants that make Atlanta home have established various authentic ethnic restaurants representing virtually every nationality on the globe.
For traditional Southern fare, one of the city's most famous establishments is The Varsity, a long-lived fast food chain and the world's largest drive-in restaurant. Mary Mac's Tea Room and Paschal's are more formal destinations for Southern food. The Atlanta Botanical Garden, adjacent to Piedmont Park, is home to the 600-foot-long Kendeda Canopy Walk, a skywalk that allows visitors to tour one of the city's last remaining urban forests from 40 feet above the ground. Zoo Atlanta, in Grant Park, accommodates over 1,300 animals representing more than 220 species. Home to the nation's largest collections of gorillas and orangutans, the zoo is one of only four zoos in the U.S. to house giant pandas. Festivals showcasing arts and crafts, film, and music, including the Atlanta Dogwood Festival, the Atlanta Film Festival, and Music Midtown, respectively, are also popular with tourists.
With a GDP of $385 billion, the Atlanta metropolitan area's economy is the 10th-largest in the country and among the 20-largest in the world. Corporate operations play a major role in Atlanta's economy, as the city claims the nation's third-largest concentration of Fortune 500 companies. It also hosts the global headquarters of several corporations such as The Coca-Cola Company, The Home Depot, Delta Air Lines, AT&T Mobility, Chick-fil-A, and UPS. Over 75% of Fortune 1000 companies conduct business operations in the city's metro area, and the region hosts offices of over 1,250 multinational corporations.
Many corporations are drawn to the city by its educated workforce; as of 2014, 45% of adults aged 25 or older residing in the city have at least four-year college degrees, compared to the national average of 28%. In southwest Atlanta, neighborhoods closer to downtown originated as streetcar suburbs, including the historic West End, while those farther from downtown retain a postwar suburban layout. These include Collier Heights and Cascade Heights, home to much of the city's affluent African-American population. Northwest Atlanta contains the areas of the city to west of Marietta Boulevard and to the north of Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, including those neighborhoods remote to downtown, such as Riverside, Bolton and Whittier Mill.
The latter is one of Atlanta's designated Landmark Historical Neighborhoods. Vine City, though technically Northwest, adjoins the city's Downtown area and has recently been the target of community outreach programs and economic development initiatives. Downtown Atlanta contains the most office space in the metro area, much of it occupied by government entities. Downtown is home to the city's sporting venues and many of its tourist attractions. Midtown Atlanta is the city's second-largest business district, containing the offices of many of the region's law firms. Midtown is known for its art institutions, cultural attractions, institutions of higher education, and dense form.
Buckhead, the city's uptown district, is eight miles north of Downtown and the city's third-largest business district. The district is marked by an urbanized core along Peachtree Road, surrounded by suburban single-family neighborhoods situated among woods and rolling hills. During the 1950s–70s, suburbanization and white flight from urban areas led to a significant demographic shift.
By 1970, African Americans were the majority of the city's population and exercised their recently enforced voting rights and political influence by electing Atlanta's first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, in 1973. Under Mayor Jackson's tenure, Atlanta's airport was modernized, strengthening the city's role as a transportation center. The opening of the Georgia World Congress Center in 1976 heralded Atlanta's rise as a convention city. Construction of the city's subway system began in 1975, with rail service commencing in 1979.
Despite these improvements, Atlanta lost more than 100,000 residents between 1970 and 1990, over 20% of its population. At the same time, it developed new office space after attracting numerous corporations, with an increasing portion of workers from northern areas. IYRS also offers courses in marine systems and composite technology, but it was the school's wooden-boat building and restoration component that led our foundation to solicit their proposals for annual tuition support grants. The refurbished Beetle Cats are simply beautiful, their reconstruction apparently flawless to the uninitiated eye. The school auctions them for about $17,000 apiece to raise money for the next class to follow their peers into the craft. No matter how skilled they are, boatbuilders can almost never accumulate the necessary capital to purchase their own workshop.
Instead, they become craftsman-laborers, maybe someday building their own dream boat over weekends and holidays. Always there will be more journeymen setting out, driving wages down to subsistence levels. Despite these boat builders' unparalleled expertise, they usually remain hired hands whose fortunes fluctuate to the syncopated rhythms of Wall Street's midwinter bonuses.
Nevertheless, the invigorating salt air, the sound of creaking wooden joints, the aroma of a freshly planed board, and other sensations continue to beckon young people to a quest of self-actualization through boatcraft. And today the Ddora Foundation is supporting those young people with tuition grants to the IYRS. "I hope people in New Orleans continue their strong support of local wine and liquor shops," says Brady. "We support locally owned wholesalers, who in turn strongly source from craftsman-run, family-owned operations all over the world.
Not surprisingly, buying local supports local operations up the supply chain, and it helps keep profits in our community, where they can be reinvested and spent at other local shops and small businesses. Thus, although traditional Southern culture is part of Atlanta's cultural fabric, it is mostly a footnote to one of the nation's most cosmopolitan cities. This unique cultural combination reveals itself in the arts district of Midtown, the quirky neighborhoods on the city's eastside, and the multi-ethnic enclaves found along Buford Highway.
