During the Civil Rights Movement, Atlanta stood apart from southern cities that supported segregation, touting itself as "The City Too Busy to Hate." The city's progressive civil rights record and existing population of blacks made it increasingly popular as a relocation destination for black Americans. Blacks soon became the dominant social and political force in the city, though today some measure of demographic diversification has taken place.[12] Along with St. Louis and Los Angeles, Atlanta is one of three cities in the United States to have hosted the Summer Olympic Games. During the American Civil War, Atlanta served as an important railroad and military supply hub. In 1864, the city became the target of a major Union invasion. The area now covered by Atlanta was the scene of several battles, including the Battle of Peachtree Creek, the Battle of Atlanta, and the Battle of Ezra Church. On September 1, 1864, Confederate General John Bell Hood evacuated Atlanta after a four-month siege mounted by Union General William T. Sherman and ordered all public buildings and possible Confederate assets destroyed. The next day, Mayor James Calhoun surrendered the city, and on September 7 Sherman ordered the civilian population to evacuate. He then ordered Atlanta burned to the ground on November 11 in preparation for his punitive march south, though spared the city's churches and hospitals.[18] The rebuilding of the city—immortalized in the city's symbol, the phoenix—was gradual. From 1867 until 1888, U.S. Army soldiers occupied McPherson Barracks in southwest Atlanta to ensure Reconstruction era reforms. To help the newly freed slaves, the Federal Government set up a Freedmen's Bureau, which helped establish what is now Clark Atlanta University, one of several historically black colleges in Atlanta. With the entry of the United States into World War II, soldiers from around the Southeastern United States went through Atlanta to train and later be discharged at Fort McPherson. War-related manufacturing such as the Bell Aircraft factory in the suburb of Marietta helped boost the city's population and economy. Shortly after the war, the Communicable Disease Center (CDC) was founded in Atlanta. The latter is via the Chattahoochee River, part of the ACF River Basin, and from which Atlanta and many of its neighbors draw most of their water. Being at the far northwestern edge of the city, much of the river's natural habitat is still preserved, in part by the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area. Downstream however, excessive water use during droughts and pollution during floods has been a source of contention and legal battles with neighboring states Alabama and Florida.[27][28] The city's highrises are clustered in three districts in the city—Downtown, Midtown, and Buckhead.[36] (there are two more major suburban clusters, Perimeter Center to the north and Cumberland/Vinings to the northwest). The central business district, clustered around the Westin Peachtree Plaza hotel – the tallest building in Atlanta at the time of its completion in 1976 – also includes the newer 191 Peachtree Tower, SunTrust Plaza, Georgia-Pacific Tower, and the buildings of Peachtree Center. Midtown Atlanta, farther north, developed rapidly after the completion of One Atlantic Center in 1987. The city's northern section, Buckhead, is consistently ranked as one of the most affluent communities in the United States.[44] Since the opening of the intown segment of the Georgia 400 tollway, which linked the district to the city superhighway system in the early 1990s, Buckhead has developed a dense commercial district, clustered around the high-end retail centers at Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza and including a growing number of office buildings and residential highrises, some in the 40+ story range. The Mansion on Peachtree, a 42 Story Luxury Hotel and Condominium tower will open in Early 2008 and the 50 story 3344 Peachtree/Sovereign, planned to reach 660�feet (201�m), is due for completion in late 2007.[45] The edge cities clustered around Perimeter Mall and Cumberland Mall have distinct skylines of their own. The Concourse at Landmark Center, located near Perimeter Mall in Sandy Springs, includes a pair of buildings called the King and Queen that each measure 570�feet (174�m) in total height. The Architecture of Atlanta has seen works by most major U.S. firms and some of the more prominent architects of the 20th century, including Michael Graves, Richard Meier, Renzo Piano, and soon, Santiago Calatrava and David Chipperfield. Atlanta's most notable hometown architect may be John Portman whose creation of the atrium hotel beginning with the Hyatt Regency Atlanta (1968) made a significant mark on the hospitality sector. A graduate of Georgia Tech's College of Architecture, Portman's work reshaped downtown Atlanta with his designs for the Atlanta Merchandise Mart, Peachtree Center, the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel, and SunTrust Plaza. Atlanta hosts a variety of museums on subjects ranging from history to fine arts, natural history, and beverages. Prominent among them are sites honoring Atlanta's participation in the civil rights movement, including the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site. Other history museums and attractions include the Atlanta History Center; the Atlanta Cyclorama and Civil War Museum (a huge painting and diorama in-the-round, with a rotating central audience platform, that depicts the Battle of Atlanta in the Civil War); the Carter Center and Presidential Library; historic house museum Rhodes Hall; and the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum. The arts are represented by several theaters and museums, including the Fox Theatre. The Woodruff Arts Center is home to the Alliance Theatre, Atlanta Symphony, and High Museum of Art. The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center is the city's home for challenging contemporary art and education geared toward working artists and collectors of art. Museums geared specifically towards children include the Fernbank Science Center and Imagine It! Atlanta's Children's Museum. The Atlanta Opera, which was founded in 1979 by members of two struggling local companies, is now one of the fastest growing opera companies in the nation and garners attention from audiences around the world.[46] Atlanta's classical music scene includes well-renowned ensembles such as the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Atlanta Opera, Atlanta Ballet, period-instrument ensemble New Trinity Baroque, Atlanta Boy Choir, and many others. Classical musicians include renowned conductors such as the late Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony's Robert Spano. The city has a well-known and active live music scene, though recently rapid gentrification and early venue closing times have hurt small clubs and other music venues. In the early 1980s, Atlanta was the home of a thriving new wave music scene featuring such bands as The Brains and The Producers, closely linked to the new wave scenes in Athens, Georgia and other college towns in the southeast. Historically there have been a variety of live music traditions going back to Cabbagetown country music pioneer Fiddlin' John Carson, also including a thriving scene in the 90's, also in Cabbagetown, centered around a bar called Dotties, now known as Lenny's and relocated a few blocks away. Video Concert Hall, precursor to MTV, was founded in Atlanta. The Atlanta Braves baseball team has been the Major League Baseball franchise of Atlanta since 1966. The team was founded in 1871 in Boston, Massachusetts as a National Association club, making it the oldest continuously operating sports franchise in North American sports. The Braves won the World Series in 1995 and had a recently ended unprecedented run of 14 straight divisional championships from 1991 to 2005. The Atlanta Falcons American football team plays at the Georgia Dome. They have been Atlanta's National Football League franchise since 1966. They have won the division title three times, and a conference championship once, going on to lose to the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXXIII. Super Bowl XXVIII and XXXIV were held in the city. In 1999 the Atlanta Thrashers hockey team became Atlanta's National Hockey League franchise. They replaced the Atlanta Flames which had departed for Calgary, Alberta in 1980, becoming the Calgary Flames. The Thrashers made it to their first playoffs in 2007. The Atlanta metro area is served by a wide variety of local television stations, and is the eighth largest designated market area (DMA) in the U.S. with 2,310,490 households, which is just over 2% of the national total.[55] All of the major networks have stations in the market, along with two PBS stations and some independent ones. Several cable television networks also operate from Atlanta, including TBS, CNN, Cartoon Network, Court TV, Boomerang, and TNT. These stations are owned by Turner Broadcasting System (now a subsidiary of Time Warner). The Weather Channel (owned by Landmark Communications) also broadcasts from the Atlanta area. According to Billboard, the first nationwide music video programming on cable television, Video Concert Hall was created in Atlanta. There are over 1,000 places of worship within the city of Atlanta.[3] A majority of Atlantans profess to following a Protestant Christian faith, the city historically being a major center for traditional Southern denominations such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the United Methodist Church, and the Presbyterian Church (USA). There are a large number of "mega churches" in the area, especially in suburban areas, with congregations numbering in the thousands; Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Buckhead is the largest congregation of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Atlanta serves as headquarters for several regional church bodies also. The Southeastern Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, consisting of churches in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee, maintains offices in downtown Atlanta; ELCA parishes are numerous throughout the metro area. A smaller but influential group is the Southeast Conference, United Church of Christ, headquartered in Midtown and serving churches in the states of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and central and eastern Tennessee. There are eight United Church of Christ congregations in the Atlanta metro area, one of which, First Congregational in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood, is noted for being the church which former mayor Andrew Young is affiliated with. The city is the headquarters of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Atlanta, with Annunciation Cathedral and Metropolitan Alexios presiding. There are at least eleven Orthodox parishes in Atlanta, including Greek, Russian, Carpatho-Russian, Orthodox Church in America, Antiochian, Serbian, Ukrainian and Romanian. The auto manufacturing sector in metropolitan Atlanta has suffered setbacks recently, including the planned closure of the General Motors Doraville Assembly plant in 2008, and the shutdown of Ford Motor Company's Atlanta Assembly plant in Hapeville in 2006. Kia, however, has broken ground on a new assembly plant near West Point, Georgia.[72] The city is a major cable television programming center. Ted Turner began the Turner Broadcasting System media empire in Atlanta, where he bought a UHF station that eventually became WTBS. Turner established the headquarters of the Cable News Network at CNN Center, adjacent today to Centennial Olympic Park. As his company grew, its other channels – the Cartoon Network, Boomerang, TNT, Turner South, CNN International, CNN en Español, CNN Headline News, and CNN Airport Network – centered their operations in Atlanta as well (Turner South has since been sold). The Weather Channel, owned by Landmark Communications, has its offices in the nearby suburb of Marietta. Atlanta is also home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Adjacent to Emory University, with a staff of nearly 15,000 (including 6,000 contractors and 840 Commissioned Corps officers) in 170 occupations, including: engineers, entomologists, epidemiologists, biologists, physicians, veterinarians, behavioral scientists, nurses, medical technologists, economists, health communicators, toxicologists, chemists, computer scientists, and statisticians. Headquartered in DeKalb County, CDC has 10 other offices throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. In addition, CDC staff are located in local health agencies, quarantine/border health offices at ports of entry, and 45 countries around the world. Originally established in 1946 as the Communicable Disease Center, its primary function was to combat malaria, the deep southeast being the heart of the U.S. malaria zone at the time. According to a 2000 daytime population estimate by the Census Bureau,[77] over 250,000 more people commuted to Atlanta on any given workday, boosting the city's estimated daytime population to 676,431. This is an increase of 62.4% over Atlanta's resident population, making it the largest gain in daytime population in the country among cities with fewer than 500,000 residents. Atlanta is also home to the fastest growing millionaire population in the United States. The number of households in Atlanta with $1 million or more in investable assets, not including primary residence and consumable goods, will increase 69% through 2011, to approximately 103,000 households.[79] As the state capital, Atlanta is the site of most of Georgia's state government. The Georgia State Capitol building, located downtown, houses the offices of the governor, lieutenant governor and secretary of state, as well as the General Assembly. The Governor's Mansion is located on West Paces Ferry Road, in a residential section of Buckhead. Atlanta is also home to Georgia Public Broadcasting headquarters and Peachnet, and is the county seat of Fulton County, with which it shares responsibility for the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System. Atlanta has more than 30 institutions of higher education, including the Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia State University. The city also hosts the Atlanta University Center, a consortium of prestigious, historically black colleges and universities. Its members include Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Spelman College, and the Interdenominational Theological Center. Adjoining the AUC schools, but independent from them, is the Morehouse School of Medicine. The Savannah College of Art and Design opened a Midtown Atlanta, campus in 2005 and shortly thereafter acquired the Atlanta College of Art. Also in the city are the John Marshall Law School (Atlanta) and the Reformed Theological Seminary. Suburban Atlanta contains several colleges, including Emory University, an internationally prominent liberal arts and research institution; Oglethorpe University, named for the founder of Georgia; Agnes Scott College, an all-women's college; and several state-run institutions such as Kennesaw State University and Georgia Perimeter College. Other notable private schools near Atlanta include Marist School (Dunwoody in unincorporated DeKalb County), Wesleyan School, Greater Atlanta Christian School, St. Pius X Catholic High School (Chamblee), The Epstein School (Sandy Springs), Holy Innocents' Episcopal School (Sandy Springs), the Weber School (Sandy Springs), The Walker School in Marietta, Whitefield Academy in Smyrna/Vinings/Mableton, and neighboring the airport Woodward Academy (College Park). With a comprehensive network of freeways that radiate out from the city, Atlantans rely on their cars as the dominant mode of transportation in the region – a fact that leads some to call the city "the Los Angeles of the South."[94] Atlanta is mostly encircled by Interstate 285, a beltway locally known as "the Perimeter" which has come to mark the boundary between the interior of the region and its surrounding suburbs. Terms such as ITP (Inside The Perimeter) and OTP (Outside The Perimeter) have arisen to describe area neighborhoods, residents, and businesses. This strong automotive reliance has resulted in heavy traffic and contributes to Atlanta's air pollution, which has made Atlanta one of the more polluted cities in the country.[96] In recent years, the Atlanta metro area has ranked at or near the top of the longest average commute times in the U.S. The Clean Air Campaign was created in 1996 to help ease congestion in metro Atlanta. In 2001, a group of transit riders joined to form Citizens for Progressive Transit, an organization dedicated to improvement of local public transportation. Notwithstanding heavy automotive usage, Atlanta's commuter heavy rail system, operated by Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), is the seventh busiest in the country. MARTA also operates a bus system within Fulton, DeKalb, and Gwinnett Counties. Clayton, Cobb, and Gwinnett counties each operate separate, autonomous transit authorities, using buses but no trains. Atlanta has a reputation as being one of the most dangerous cities for pedestrians,[97] as far back as 1949 when the Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell was struck by a speeding car and killed while crossing Peachtree Street. Atlanta began as a railroad town and it still serves as a major rail junction, with several freight lines belonging to Norfolk Southern and CSX intersecting below street level in downtown. It is the home of major classification yards for both railroads, Inman Yard on the NS and Tilford Yard on the CSX. Long-distance passenger service is provided by AMTRAK's Crescent train, which connects Atlanta with many cities. The AMTRAK station is located several miles north of downtown - and it lacks a connection to the MARTA rail system. An ambitious, long-standing proposal would create a Multi-Modal Passenger Terminal downtown, adjacent to Philips Arena and the Five Points MARTA station, which would link, in a single facility, MARTA bus and rail, intercity bus services, proposed commuter rail services to other Georgia cities, and AMTRAK.
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