the dirty south

My week in Atlanta was mostly a culinary tour of the city. I was more interested in hanging out with friends that I hadn't seen since well before I left the country, so I didn't feel a need to hit up all the tourist sites.
I did do a fair bit of driving around the city, though, and I was struck by the very different character of different spots in the city.
Here's how Atlanta appeared to me: islands of new, wealthy, trendy or commercial areas surrounded by seas either of wooded residential neighborhoods or the grit of the poorer, urban, mostly black Atlanta.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Atlanta. The stories about its rapid growth over the last decade or so rang true - it seemed much of the city was either under construction or had obviously been built recently. The interstates were strained by the traffic load even at 2 p.m. It is spread, or sprawled, out but this also seems to lead to several different neighborhood areas carving out their own identity.
Riding around Atlanta I found it difficult to keep my bearings; every trip from one area of the city to another seemed to require driving through winding, wooded streets before popping out at whichever business district we were looking for.
Downtown is a big more straight-forward, but once you get out of the high-rise corridor, you run across the gritty underbelly of the South's population hub.


I didn't completely miss out on Atlanta's sights - we spent time at the High Museum of Art, caught a baseball game at Turner Field and walked along the street where Martin Luther King, Jr. was born, now a National Historic Site. The houses on the block are generally well-kept and newly painted, although even here the processes which have led to the blight of the inner city and explosive growth of the suburbs are at work; the house next door to MLK's childhood home is abandoned.