Atlanta in 4
Natasha Setiadi and Dustin Bonk
City Quadrants
Atlanta's streets are divided into quadrants—but unlike the city's importance, this doesn't extend past the city limits. The more important division is the metro's highways: Interstates 75, 85, and 20 divide all of our perspectives.
Atlanta as the New Silicon Valley
With major technology companies making their move to the city and local startups beginning to make millions of dollars, Atlanta is becoming the new Silicon Valley of the South. Google, Microsoft, Mailchimp, Accenture, and NCR are just an example of some of the major technology companies stationed in Atlanta, with Mailchimp being sold for $12 billion to TurboTax which is the largest deal for a homegrown tech company.
Why companies are going to Atlanta
It is important to view how Atlanta as a city is helping these companies grow. The city has shown its commitment to businesses with the slogan “too busy to hate” during the Civil Rights Movement, low taxes, right to work laws, and low living costs (McClinton). These paved the way for today, where technology companies to use these incentives to expand their businesses.
Atlanta is in a strong position to benefit these companies, as it also has the world's busiest airport, leading research institutions like Georgia Tech, and excesses of computer science and engineering talent. Additionally, with more technology companies coming into Atlanta, the city will only grow in the future with more companies and startups taking place.
Atlanta's Free Art Movement
Street Art is nothing new to any large city—most of the time it is viewed as a nuisance. Cue the Krog Street Tunnel: the closest thing to legally sanctioned graffiti Atlanta can offer is located on Krog St. between DeKalb Ave. NE and Wylie St. SE. As for the proper "Free Art Movement", Atlanta was an early adopter of "Free Art Friday" that has ballooned into a city-wide phenomenon. Artists announce drops on Facebook or Instagram of their works (which range from small wood carvings to stickers to paintings on traffic signal control
boxes), and whoever is first to find the piece gets to keep it. The movement has grown so much that it is no longer just a Friday phenomenon—some artists drop throughout the week.
Atlanta's Criminal History
No city is immune from crime, but Atlanta has a unique and rich heritage with criminal activity. 70s Atlanta suffered the common symptoms of urban decay, with the added consequences of a crack epidemic in the 80s and 90s. In 1995, Morgan Quitno Press (a ranking company) declared Atlanta the most dangerous city in the country. To the present, the city has relatively high rates of violent crime.One of the most gruesome crime sprees was the 1979-1981 Atlanta Child
Murders, where 29 mostly black children and young adults were killed. Children were reported missing, and later their bodies were found at locations ranging from abandoned schools to wooded schools.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons operates United States Penitentiary Atlanta in the southeast part of the city. As of March 2022, it holds 821 inmates—a significant rise from August 2021 (where it was nearly empty due to an internal investigation into corruption). The prison has a very distinct architecture and does not look like contemporary prisons (it was completed in 1902). The prison has a reputation for lax security: there are reports that inmates were able to use a hole in the prison's fence to walk out and visit local restaurants, and drugs were routinely found on the premises.
A police handout of some of the victims of the Atlanta Child Murders
Atlanta's Global Community
Atlanta is home to people of various cultures and ethnicities, and this fact is shown through the different sights, sounds, and tastes in the city. Since the 1900s, Atlanta experienced various movements with black migration and various immigration from Latino and Asian populations making the population ethnically diverse compared to other cities. Statistics show that Atlanta has a diverse population, with more than half of the population being different African America, Asian, and Hispanic communities.
This plays a factor in the culture of Atlanta as there are various cultural events and different types of cultural food; The Atlanta International Market is an example of this as people would bring food from their different cultures and show their artistic traditions whether performance or visual at the Atlanta International Night Market.
There are over 100 international communities who live in Atlanta, and their various traditions can be shown through these performances and food. For food, there is a variety of different supermarkets that show different spices and foods such as in the Buford Farmer’s Market and Ponce City Market. With the different cultures being present in Atlanta, the future of Atlanta will continue to be diverse in its food and traditions.
Work Cited
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