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Hospitality to the Homeless ˜ 115
culture. In addition, you might be led to question Mayor Campbell’s sense of
beauty.
Perhaps the opening ceremony was somewhat premature, and more trees,
shrubs, and plantings are yet to come. But for now there is much less greenery.
From the northeast corner the park looks like a fortress. And when the water is
turned off, the “cascading waterfall” actually resembles the exposed, barnacle-encrusted,
pocked, and rusted hull of an aging battleship. Beautiful this place
is not.
It could be that this “battleship,” this lifeless wall, is indeed a fitting monument
for the center of Atlanta. The city government and controlling business
interests have pursued a course of destruction in the central city for several generations
now, displacing people seen as undesirable. When these policies of removal
began in the 1950s, it was clear that race was the motivating factor. The
powers in Atlanta did not want African American people in the downtown business
district. So neighborhoods were broken up and gave way to interstate highways;
housing was destroyed, little shops and businesses were forced out, and a
stadium, a civic center, and countless parking lots rolled over the poor. These
practices, which began thirty years ago, resulted in much of the poverty and
homelessness in the African American population we see in our city today.
This pattern of destruction has been repeated, and there is little beauty, culture,
or humanity left. What we have instead is precisely what the powers say
they want: a “sanitized zone,” “vagrant-free,” and deserted enough to appear
safe, devoid of the color of a rich, urban culture whose life has never been antiseptic,
colorless, cold, and heartless.
Eight years ago, the rebirth of Underground Atlanta brought a similar enthusiasm
for displacement and destruction to this current renovation of Woodruff
Park.
Plaza Park, once a lively place filled with street vendors, preachers, homeless
folks, and pedestrians on their way to the Five Points MARTA station, was
razed to make way for the cement, light tower, glitz, and security guards at Underground.
A large number of people made homeless by the destruction of their
neighborhoods were once again displaced from Plaza Park.
Within a stone’s throw of Woodruff Park, thousands of units of single-room
occupancy housing have been demolished since the late 1970s. These SROs were
places where many who would now like to rest in the park could have lived, and
where some of them probably did at one time. Where was the outcry when the
Avon and Capital Hotels were destroyed and replaced with parking decks
Where were the protests when the Francis Hotel was closed, mysteriously
burned, and replaced with John Portman’s latest gleaming tower Where now is
the outcry from any Atlanta government or business leader for housing for Atlanta’s
homeless Their silence is deafening. Instead, editorials and columns