Now that the Paris 2024 Host Organization is winding down its existence as a functioning entity, we start looking at the legacies the Games will (hopefully) leave behind. However, it can take years–or even decades–to realize the impact of these two months.
However, we can look at some of the things that are possible, thanks to our interview with Randal Roark and Michael Dobbins, who worked for the City of Atlanta during the planning and execution of Atlanta 1996. They, along with Leon Eplan, wrote the book Atlanta’s Olympic Resurgence: How the 1996 Games Revived a Struggling City, which details the efforts of city workers to make Atlanta a world-class city and welcome guests from every country to its door.
Our interview took place on June 24, 2021, ahead of the 25th anniversary of Atlanta 1996, and it shed a lot of light on the little projects a city can accomplish thanks to the deadline of the Olympics.
The book is an interesting read, and you can find it on our Bookshop.org site (affiliate link). Books purchased through that link support the show’s operating budget.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive!
TRANSCRIPT
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372-Rekindled: Randal Roark and Michael Dobbins on Atlanta 1996
Theme Music
Jill Jaracz:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Keep the Flame Alive, the podcast for fans of the Olympics and Paralympics. If you love the games, we are the show for you. Each week we share stories from athletes and people behind the scenes to help you have more fun watching the games. I am your host, Jill Jaracz, joined as always by my lovely co host, Alison Brown.
Alison, hello, how are you?
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Because the World Cup season started, and I was like, wait, that is a familiar voice on the commentary team, and it is one Shad Samala, back to Biathlon, back bringing the good stuff, and, It’s free to watch online. We are starting to watch a biathlon and we are having a good time.
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Rekindled: Randal Roark and Michael Dobbins on the Legacy of Atlanta 1996
So. This is the last episode of 2024. Can you believe it? The end of the Olympic year. End of the Olympic year. End of a quad for us as a show. Yes. So we’re going to close out the year with another rekindled episode. This time we’re going to go back to July, 2021.
When on the 25th anniversary of Atlanta, 1996, we looked at the legacy of those games and how they affected the city. We talked with Randall Rourke and Michael Dobbins, who wrote a book called Atlanta’s Olympic Resurgence, How the 1996 Games Revived a Struggling City, which they co wrote with, Leon Eplon.
We went to Atlanta this fall. and got to drive around a little bit and see some of the things that happened in the city. Even if we hadn’t been there before, a listener, Nicholas, drove us around. Nicholas is a writer behind Olympic rings and other things blog, and he was kind enough to drive us around and, and hang out with us in Centennial Park.
And, and, See the evolution of what happened in the city. Thanks to a lot of these city planning efforts and, uh, at Paris contributor, Ben went to a press conference that talked about some of the legacy that Paris wanted to put in and how it was starting to come to fruition in some ways, like some of the efforts that they had done around accessibility were starting to manifest themselves, but it’s going to take a while to see what other efforts they’ve done. I know they did a lot of planting of trees and cleaning up of stuff. What will that look like in the future? And we won’t know that for a couple of decades, basically. So I thought, oh, it’d be nice to go back to this interview and see what these gentlemen said about Atlanta and how the city changed because they hosted the games and get some ideas of what we can see from Paris in terms of games legacy, take a listen. today is the 25th anniversary of Atlanta, 1996. So we are talking about the legacy of those games from the city planning perspective.
We are joined by Randall Rourke and Michael Dobbins, who along with Leon Wrote the new book, Atlanta’s Olympic resurgence, how the 1996 games revived a struggling city during the games. Randall was the director of planning and design for the corporation for the, for Olympic development in Atlanta for the design of public projects in preparation for the 1996 centennial Olympic games.
Michael Dobbins was Atlanta’s commissioner of planning, development and neighborhood conservation. From just before the games and for the following six years. We talked about the legacy of those games and how the city fared. Take a listen. Randall and Michael, uh, thank you so much for being here. Your book, Atlanta’s Olympic resurgence, how the 1996 games revived a struggling city just came out.
Let’s talk a little bit. First, you were both involved in the planning of the games. What were your roles? In before, during and after the games. Randall, we’ll start with you.
Randal Roark: Okay, let me start first. As you know, there’s a 3rd author who tragically passed away. Leon Eplin, all 3 of us had planning positions in different capacities before, during and after the game.
Leon was commissioner planning for the city. Actually, actually, in the 70s, and the original 2 Maynard Jackson administrations, but. Uh, came back in the 90s and was the primary author of the Olympic Development Plan for the city, uh, leading up to the Olympics. So, he’s the before. And, uh, I was hired in 1993, three years to go as the planning director for the Corporation for Olympic Development, which was the corporation that Citi set up to do most of the improvements outside the Olympic venues.
And we did that up through implementation. Until that corporation CODA dissolved in 1997, and I’ll, it might take it from there.
Michael Dobbins: Yeah, so I, I, uh, came to Atlanta in, in 1996 in June, uh, about two, two and a half months before the Olympics. I was hired as the Commissioner of Planning, Development and Neighborhood Conservation in the Bill Campbell, uh, uh, administration.
So I picked up and sort of. Took up the role of Leon. I, I supplanted Leon and I, he and I dovetailed very nicely in the transition between all the work that he was doing and his advice and guidance on where things were and how to get things done. And that was very instrumental in the period that I had served as commissioner, which is about six years after that.
And the department just just by that time, you should be aware that the my department included the planning and zoning and building permitting and inspections and code enforcement and housing and community development and human services. So, I had a, I had a big, expansive kind of a role.
Randal Roark: So, that means we went from about 1990 to about 2005.
Incapacity in one way or another, and that’s the period we cover in the book that we loosely refer to as the Olympic period in
Jill Jaracz: Atlanta. Which is interesting because the Olympic period really kind of is a lot longer than people think. Oh, people might remember the run up to the Games, and then the Games happens, and then people kind of forget until they go, Oh, what happened at those Games?
But the plans that get set in place really have a long ways after the games to really realize some of them, correct?
Michael Dobbins: Yes,
Randal Roark: correct. And really, the book is, is really about that, uh, the legacy that was left. And, and the period we cover is a little bit longer after the games than the run up. And, uh, City receives a bid about five years ahead of the game.
So there’s a full five year, uh, period of preparation for any city that, that wins a bid for the Olympics, for the Summer Olympics. I think that’s true for Winter Olympics too.
Jill Jaracz: You know, in reading some of these plans that the city had, I don’t know how you did some of this stuff in the amount of time that you had, to be quite honest, but, but that’s going to get ahead of ourselves.
I’m really curious, what was Atlanta, the city, like? When it won the bid, so we’re talking late 80s, 1990s, what was the city like for somebody living there, or even in the surrounding area?
Randal Roark: I’ll take a shot. Mike probably has comments too, and we do start out covering that. That’s the first chapter really trying to introduce the city at that point and covering a lot of time leading up to it, because.
The city really was at a nadir of disinvestment, white flight and problems, actually had lost 20 percent of its population. And when I say city, I mean the center city jurisdiction, City of Atlanta. The region is another animal which we should include in our discussion, but the City of Atlanta itself had lost 20 percent of its population.
And most of that you could say it was due to white flight and that produced a lot of disinvestment downtown. So there were, uh, there were problems and, uh, the Olympic bid, the award could not have come at both a worse time and a better time because it really provided a leverage point to begin to think about turning, uh, turning that around in a number of ways.
Thank you very much. Mike, you want to add to that?
Michael Dobbins: Yeah, I think what is what it was like was a city with broken sidewalks, empty storefronts, no trees, no attention to sidewalks or or any travel modes other than and no white people riding on Marta, that kind of thing. And it was, uh, so, and as Randy said, we lost 100, 000 people from 1970 to 1990.
500, 000 to 400, 000. And it was a, it was a pretty rough place. A lot of empty storefronts. Uh, Georgia State University was basically a walled bastion. Georgia Tech was a walled bastion. There was no interconnectivity between them and the city they lived in. And I think as Randy and I have talked about, I think it’s hope it comes out clearly in the book.
What was interesting was that ACOG, which is the private sector initiator of the Olympics, Basically saw this as a series of venues, whether they were hotels or sports events or whatever, they really didn’t have a concept about connecting these venues together, how to get people to them, what that experience would be like, and so on.
And so starting with, uh, with Leon’s Olympic development plan, there was a lot of attention given. Okay. We’re planners. We’re about connectivity. We need to figure out how all these things that hadn’t really been thought about are going to connect. And as I agree with you wholeheartedly sort of reviewing all this, it was stunning that Randy and Claire Axum, his boss and Coda, Were able to accomplish what they were able to accomplish in a, in a, in a city governmental structure that was not particularly smooth or functional at the time somehow got that done and got it done for a remarkably small amount of money.
I still, I was just getting here when that work was wrapping up and I, you know, having now been in Atlanta for what, 25 years. Uh, I would really amplify your comment somehow, uh, that, that basically what it did was transform the public canvas of our city from 1 that was really off putting and dirty and unpleasant and, and Sunday, no trees to 1 that began to.
Really transform the whole character of the downtown and as the book says, or later on midtown and on the East side, where the ripple effect of these of the attention that Coda and Randy were able to accomplish began to sort of have impacts that I think accelerated regrowth and redevelopment and taking advantage of the new demographics that were simultaneously coincidentally and.
Serendipitously occurring where people were getting to say, you know, it might be all right to live downtown. There were, there was no, I’m actually living in the one of only two buildings that house residents in the downtown of Atlanta at the time. It’s sort of across the board. Another aspect of that, which is in the book and Randy can speak a lot more to, is the, uh, a very robust, vigorous, reasonably well funded public arts program, uh, that really shifted, uh, people’s attitudes and ideas about what, what, what Atlanta could be.
Actually, it
Randal Roark: wasn’t funded at all. We stole money from every other pot we could find to make it work.
Alison Brown: I don’t know if there’s a spectrum of limitations on that. One of the things you both mentioned in your answer was race and the question of race, that white flight was an issue in Atlanta. And then within the bid itself, there was A large black community white business and government leadership.
So let’s talk a little bit about the racial tension, both in the city and in the economic development of the Olympic Park.
Randal Roark: Well, of course, there was always tension, but also was, as you might remember, called the city too busy to hate. And it did develop a loose and sometimes uneasy alliance between that white business structure and the black leadership.
Yep. Uh, to get, uh, some things accomplished, although a lot of times it was is difficult going and that black political leadership was in place since 1973 when Maynard Jackson was the first black mayor elected in a large city in the south. So, uh, that coalition was not. non existent, it just was loose and sometimes difficult.
But the communication was enough there for that process to begin to, you know, at least sit down in the same room and try to figure out how this was going to happen. And of course, the reality of a world event coming to your city and Five years helps that along pretty well. You’re, you’re really faced with, uh, with a deadline that that doesn’t change, you know, so everybody, everybody got busy.
That whole process, uh, a lot had been done in the 80s through the two administrations of Andy Young’s tenure, who was the, Mayor proceeding the Olympic bid, but that didn’t really stop the disinvestment and the flight from the city. And that was that was still, uh, still rather strong at the time. At the same time, you had a real explosion and in black arts and culture and as well as political leadership.
So those. Elements were all really quite strong in 1990 when we. We’re at a bad spot, so there was a lot to turn around, but there was also a lot in place, uh, which made it a little bit easier to get get going in that period of time.
Michael Dobbins: Yeah, I think it’s, uh, the, the racial history of Atlanta is, uh, racial disparities, the lack of racial equity and patterns that actually can lead toward racial equity.
Yeah. Uh, have been a, uh, a long story of fits and starts, probably more fits than starts, and that’s even true. I think now we still are uncovering and finding, uh, the depths of impacts. It isn’t just Atlanta. It’s it’s every city in the country has, uh, Has sort of whittened the very frankly and openly federal, state, and local, uh, uh, discriminatory practices in jobs and housing and lending and banking and all that kind of stuff.
One of the great things about what’s happened over the last year is all, gee whiz, we’re shining light on something that we turned the light off back in the 60s. And, and, and it hadn’t really come back and now we’re seeing all this Jim sort of revitalization of Jim Crow ideas and Jim Crow notions. And it’s a long way from over.
Uh, what Randy’s point I think is important is that the black business and and, and political leadership is very, very conscious of, uh, of, of what they need to do and, and, and are well organized to continue to press. Uh, you might recall that Georgia actually voted for Biden and Georgia also voted for Warnock.
So, and that, and that, you know, that’s on the, that’s on the TV every night. Stacey Abrams, Stacey Abrams, who actually was an assistant attorney in the law department when I was in city hall. And then, of course, she’s risen to be. She was the speaker of the house, the state house and so on. So very, very accomplished person.
And. You know, in my view, the way to break this stuff down, I, you know, I’m just speaking from my own perspective. Yes, there is white supremacy. And yes, there are people with a whole lot of money. They’re going to make sure that best. They can and it remains or even strengthens and that’s a struggle. We’re in.
We were in a struggle. Then we were coming out of the 60s and 70s stuff. And the city had made a lot of improvements to try to break down the barriers, but there’s a long way to go. And there’s still a long way to go.
Randal Roark: I should mention there’s really, in addition to the black political leadership and the strong white business community, there’s really a 3rd.
Leg to the coalition, and that was a very strong neighborhood movement that had emerged in the 70s of neighborhoods all around downtown, both black and white and some mixed at by that point, but they were already strong. And they became even stronger in the face of possible construction of venues, stadiums, and other things that, you know, got their attention.
And so they were a very strong voice from the very early planning of the Olympics and had a voice. So it really, there was a kind of third element to the, uh, the kind of dance that, that was required to, to get us, you know, to the opening ceremony. And they were major, major player.
Alison Brown: I was just going to say, one of the things that you mentioned in the book, there is the myth that a lot of residential neighborhoods were bulldozed for venues.
And that was a myth.
Randal Roark: Yeah, not any. Uh, A, because a lot of, there was enough vacant opportunity for that to happen. Where that comes from is largely, From the Centennial Park process, because Centennial Park also involves some involved demolition of an older, lower density, merchandising, warehousing office district downtown.
And it had very few, if any, uh, residences at the time, and there were some in that area, and for whatever reason, there was a sense that people were being displaced for, for that project as well, which was right in the middle of downtown as well. But to my knowledge, I don’t think any of the major venues had any displacement occur.
They were all. University situated or commercial district situation situated or already on sports related land or whatever the case may be, Mike. I don’t know if you recall.
Michael Dobbins: And first of all, I don’t think there was any residential displacement that occurred as, as a result of the Olympics. The length that people have drawn is that the housing authority, which was had been on a troubled state by HUD for for many years, uh, initiated separately, but linked obviously, because of the time frame to demolish and replace the, uh.
Uh, housing project that lies between downtown and Georgia Tech and, and to create, uh, what is now called Centennial Place using, uh, hud, uh, monies, uh, called Hope Six, which is administered at the time. By guess what, uh, the governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, came down here and, and, and that was his program, and he dealt with it and so on.
But the, as Randy says, the people who actually, the Olympic projects did not displace. Existing residents, except in a limited way, the Olympic Village. Adjacent to the, to the Georgia Tech campus, the land for that particular project had been purchased by the existing housing by the housing authority and sort of offered to use that land when they were already into a major rehabilitation program that had been approved earlier, and they actually scuttled that and replaced it with a whole 6 program.
So it’s probably, by the
Randal Roark: way, was the 1st public housing project. In the country built in 1934, and a lot of it by that time. And that is true. There were those 2 blocks that were dedicated over to the high rise component of the village. That that’s correct. But then the entire project was redeveloped as Mike said, as 6 mixed use.
Uh, mixed income project and all of the public housing projects of which there were many 6, I think, surrounding downtown during that same period. We’re also reimagined and redeveloped as as mixed income neighborhoods and almost all of them demolished and rebuilt. And so that may have played into the, uh, the displacement story, but that was a.
separate process, uh, parallel to the Olympics.
Michael Dobbins: It’s also important to point out that one of downtown’s great assets was lots of surface parking lots. Most of Centennial Olympic Park was surface parking lots. And I agree with Randy. Nobody was displaced. There were some small shops and so on businesses that were purchased, but there weren’t any residents in that area.
And there weren’t that many businesses. I mean, I think I don’t like them. I don’t remember we have a photograph in the book about that or not, but actually the story on that’s kind of interesting because what I’ve heard from Central Atlanta Progress is that Billy Payne and the Central Atlanta Progress folks were all looking out across.
It sort of dawned on them that, you know what, we don’t have a central gathering place for these games. And we ought to worry about that and they’re looking down from a, I guess, what the 10th story of a building looking over Centennial. Ah, there’s our, there’s our space and that’s what prompted it. And then the World Congress Center, which is state agency went about acquiring it and developing it and then still are and it’s still, it’s still very active, very vital activity.
I just drove by there a few minutes ago. Yeah, it’s actually
Randal Roark: launched to the state. State of Georgia,
Michael Dobbins: that the Center for Civil Human Rights is there and the world of Coke is there. Of course, this is Atlanta and, uh, and the aquarium is not only there, but has grown substantially. They got a whole lot of new sharks, which I’m going to have to go check out.
Randal Roark: That’s 1 thing about the park, the Centennial Olympic Park was it did. Include additional area for redevelopment after the Olympics at the edge of and surrounding the park, which included those major facilities and Mike just listed in addition to some housing all occurred in the wake of the Olympics, actually, after the park was in and the games are over.
Jill Jaracz: Um, I’m glad you brought up the strong neighborhood groups because that’s a theme throughout your chapters, Randall, that the strength of the neighborhood groups that you you had to work with and the the Olympics covered a lot of neighborhoods, but one of the stories I was interested in learning more about was the building of Olympic Stadium and the protests that happened and then the working that working together.
You did to come up with solutions to get the neighborhood buy in. Randall.
Randal Roark: That actually all of that happened in detail before coda was formed and I was not involved. I don’t think I can give you the full story. Although some of the recounted is recounted in in the book. And there was a, there was a lot of negotiation there and a lot of it had to do with.
Uh, jobs for construction and the degree to which construction demolition would take place and and all the aftermath of taking advantage of. The Olympic stadium construction that the that the neighborhoods negotiated a piece of and that that brought about I think the body and ultimately the stadium itself, of course, was right adjacent to the.
Fulton County Stadium, the home of the Braves and Falcons at the time, and so it too did not displace any residential, but the impact of a stadium of that size certainly got everybody’s attention and brought about the negotiations.
Michael Dobbins: Yeah, I could, I can comment directly. I know the three gentlemen who worked together to put the heat on ACOG.
To assure that jobs be provided, uh, for the construction of the stadium. Uh, Columbus Ward, who is the president of the People’s Town Neighborhood. Uh, Stuart Acuff, who is AFL CIO North Atlanta. And Vincent Ford, who has been on the, in the, in the state Senate and been an activist for a long time. And basically they, they were ready and they had sort of phalanxes of neighborhood people and activists ready to move on to the construction site.
In the event that they were not able to bring to bring about the, uh, and, and of course, that was the groundbreaking for the Olympic Stadium. It would have had national, international, probably some degree of coverage, and they use that to basically pressure ACOG. And actually, at that time, Shirley Franklin was the sort of community outreach link.
She’s subsequently the mayor. I don’t know how you don’t know Atlanta history, but, uh, anyway, they, they, uh, they were ready. They, they had 50 at a time ready to move, but they assumed that they would be, uh, arrested. So they had 50 people ready to pitch tents on the site. And they assumed that if those 50 got arrested, which they thought they would, then the next 50 would move in and occupy the site, and then the next 50, and the next 50.
And my understanding is they negotiated all night long, and finally they got 150 jobs promised, where there wouldn’t be a restriction of, you know, ban the box, where criminal records and drug use would not be an obstacle to hiring, provided that whoever was, Accused or found to be abusing drugs or committing a crime would be off the scene, but so it was a, it was a well organized thing and going back to the neighborhood structure.
I think a little history there is really important because the strong neighborhood structure in Atlanta is nearly unique in this country. And it was basically Maynard Jackson and Leon Eplin who put it in place. I happened to be also the planning director in Birmingham in an earlier life, and Birmingham was one of the other cities that put strong emphasis on neighborhood directed planning design development policy.
And so that was so that we call it the Neighborhood Planning Unit System. There are 25 of them, only 24 at that time. But they were Uh, yes, they were recognized in law by the city. They had roles and responsibilities. They didn’t have approval, but they had recommendation roles, and they have played a very significant role throughout the development.
And then the question is whether the administration is going to listen to what neighborhoods are saying they want and need, or whether they’re going to figure out a way to duck around it. And we’ve gone up and down in that, in that response between the, uh, when I was there, uh, Mayor Campbell following, uh, Mayor Jackson, uh, we’re, we’re wholly committed to paying attention and trying to listen to citizen guidance, not just on the Olympics, but on zoning changes and budgets and all kinds of things, small projects.
And so it’s, it’s, and not many other cities have that,
Randal Roark: uh, another side story relative to the neighborhood movement. Was the neighborhood movement grew and really cut its teeth on the fight over the freeways in the late 60s and early 70s and then over the long negotiations 20 years of negotiations over the right of way that had been stopped and abandoned for the freeway after demolition had taken place and there were six or seven neighborhoods.
Involved there and they really became awfully well organized and really helped to move the entire neighborhood movement along so that when the Olympics. came along, the neighborhood movement was really quite strong and they had been very active for 20, 20 some odd years. And, and part of that was the actual organization set forth in the neighborhood planning unit, neighborhood planning unit program of the seventies.
Jill Jaracz: Freedom Park is interesting. It seems like it’s got, like you said, decades of Time taking to get to a stage where you get some of the park. And it seemed, it sounded like during your time and working with the Olympics that part of the park got done. And then since then, part of the continuing legacy is finishing park, which is, looks pretty amazing.
It’s
Randal Roark: a, it’s a saga and it took a long time because even though the freeway was stopped, the department of transportation wouldn’t let go of the right of way. And it took 20 years of negotiating and, and legal hassles and, and issues about whether the property should be returned to the people that own the property to begin with before it was confiscated.
So, that caused it to drag out a long time. And I’m actually very familiar with the cycle because Maynard Jackson hired me to do the first concept plan in 1973. Of the Freedom Park, and in those days, it was referred to as Great Park, and there were several plans done along the way, but then when the Olympic period came, and Leon was back in the saddle, he raised the money to do a full master plan for Freedom Park, because he had finished the negotiation with the Department of Transportation to actually get a hold of the, A right of way if they agreed to build a smaller parkway around the Carter Center, the Carter Center being part of the saga, because it came in in the 80s when the right of way was there and the negotiations were going on and and.
President Carter was able to negotiate for land for his library and center for social change in the middle of that park. So it’s, it’s happened in very small increments over a long period of time. And so when CODA was formed, I inherited the master planning process for Freedom Park. And we got the master plan done, and we had a very small, in the scheme of things, grant of a million dollars to the Implement a very rudimentary first phase, which put a major trail in and really kind of cleaned up that area before the Olympics.
It was really not a park yet to speak of, but it has become one. It’s like 200 and some odd acres, and I think the largest park built, new park built in the United States in the second half of the last century. And going strong. A conservancy formed after the Olympics and has really taken over, uh, management of the development, uh, and there’s still phases to go to complete it.
Michael Dobbins: I think the, uh, the significance of what Randy just recounted in the Olympics is there’s a fair chance that if the Olympics had not been coming, he would not have been, uh, so much able to, to really move as far as we did. And that, that was true of a lot of projects. In downtown Atlanta, the recognition is sort of, you know, and I have to give credit to the ACOG group because they really put a whole lot of, they really raise the city wide awareness of this thing coming and that allowed us in the, in the bureaucracy to be able to also.
Sort of join with that wave as a way of getting our different departments to do things, and more importantly, getting the private sector partners to do things that they may not have had any interest in collaborating without the deadline, the absolute deadline, both the 1 thing I think that I was in meeting and after meeting after meeting right after I got here.
Uh, and there was obvious and palpable sort of uneasiness between the sort of neatly dressed white guys and and and our city administration. I was 1 of only 2 white guys in our cabinet. For example, the other guy ran the ran the jail. Um, and, uh, so that pressure of time. Forced collaborations that probably would have been talked about, but probably wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t had that absolute deadline.
We had to meet. We’re both whoever everyone in the room is committed to meeting the deadline. And that meant that a lot of people had to come off of their, you know, maybe overly rebellious ideas or they’re over self serving kind of ideas. And that was actually pretty, pretty cool.
Randal Roark: You asking your written questions, what would have happened of the projects that were done that if the Olympics had not gone on?
I might address that. A lot of them were, were on the, on, you know, on the docket. A lot of them had been, had had plans done. A lot of them were in discussion. Many of them were not, and many of them were fresh with the Olympics. So you could say a lot of that Was in the works, but it would have taken a lot longer because the coalition hadn’t coalesced, let’s say, as it did prior to the Olympics and the funding, of course, was, you know, straggling and, uh, and struggling.
So a lot of that just came together as happens in in preparation for an event like that. And it happened, it happened in a hurry as opposed. You know, happen quicker than it might have, uh, because, because of the pressure and the interest surrounding the games
Michael Dobbins: and, and the, the marker of the success of those projects was the streetscape and smaller park developments that code was able to accelerate and get done.
Uh, I think the. The idea of having a competition to fix Peachtree Street goes back into 1991 and the guy who won the competition is a friend of mine. And, and, you know, the project really accelerated when the Olympics was announced, and somehow, uh, Randy and his, and his cohorts were able to actually get, get it installed, and basically it set a whole new standard for what a street ought to look like.
Started downtown, Midtown has extended it, Buckhead has extended it, Auburn Avenue has extended it, it’s become sort of the model. For how we improve streets and a lot of that’s been going on continuing to go on. It’s going on more and more places
Randal Roark: and I have to say in Atlanta in 1990 in that regard, there was nowhere to go.
But up from the point of view of street environment was sad. A lot of broken sidewalks, a lot of narrow sidewalks. And a lot of on street parking that some of which was needed and some of which perhaps didn’t have to be there and street trees, non existent street signage, non existent. It was pitiful street lighting spotty.
It was embarrassing. It was so bad. And so 1 of the things we did was to have, we tackled that for 1 reason we tackled it because that was what coda was formed to do officially. Because when ACOG set the plan for the venues, only 1 of them really was sitting directly on a MARTA rapid transit station. And everyone knew that people would be arriving by transit and would be having to walk to a lot of those venues, transit station.
And venue, and so 5 pedestrian corridors were envisioned by the city and by ACOG. To make the connections between transit and venue, and when coder was formed, those were the only projects that we were handed and told that this is what we had to do. And so we began with that charge. And we expanded it to, I think, 10 corridors and 12 miles of streetscapes downtown, and just push that idea because, because it had a lot of support.
We found funding, there was some federal funding in place. And we were able to transform the whole culture of street environment really kind of overnight because of the press of the, you know, Olympic pedestrian need. Of course, after all, having said all of that, they closed the streets anyway, between the venues and the train stations, because there are so many people, the whole street was closed to carry the pedestrian traffic.
Michael Dobbins: One of the things that, under Leon’s, uh, Commissionership. He had a, uh, one of his, uh, staff was a woman named Alison Wooden, and they came up with this idea that we had all these vacant parking lots all over downtown. And they came up with the idea, okay, we’re going to require the owners of those parking lots to plant trees, one tree for every eight spaces.
And that was litigated instantly and, and lost and mitigated again and lost. And it went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court refused to review. The finding that yes, the city has the ability to do that because it has stated in the comprehensive development plan that this is a goal. And that’s another another part of this is the critical importance of having a comprehensive development plan.
That lays down policy that’s clear enough and specific enough that it can begin to trump the sort of 1 off development initiatives that whoever developers developer wants to do this or that. So that was pretty cool. But. The connectivity framework that, that Randy’s projects were critical and they’ve been, they’ve advised, uh, all kinds of stuff and still are up and down the city.
One thing that we bring out in the book is that the the venues themselves, many of which sort of existed in in one form or another as as a basis for winning the bid that this city, both the housing, the venues, the connectivity framework, uh, all still exists or has been transformed and upgraded. Uh, and and that’s fairly unusual among Olympic cities, you know, Athens and and even Barcelona to some extent they have.
The major Olympic venues that are standing empty or vacant or deteriorating, Sydney, the same thing.
Jill Jaracz: One of the things that bugs me, I think, about anti Olympics activists is the lack of knowledge that a lot of projects don’t get. Started or don’t have that impetus to get finished because because of the Olympic deadline and you’ve talked a little bit about some of the things that we wouldn’t necessarily notice sidewalks, trees, all of that is streetscaping, all of that may not have happened without the Olympics or would have happened very at a much slower pace.
Correct?
Michael Dobbins: Definitely true. Two bond elections. We had one in 1994 and we had another one in 1999 to continue the work with the 1999, uh, bond, uh, referendum in Atlanta was rather stunning in a number of ways. First of all, before the 1994 bond referendum, bond issues had been routinely failing. And, and the 94 1 1, probably because the Olympics were coming, and I think the 99 1 was approved, uh, by 85 percent of the electorate, when the mayor was not a very popular guy, particularly among white people, in fact, really only among white people, and, uh, it won by 85%.
And that was to continue on with what we had started. We called it a quality of life bond election. And it, uh, it, it passed and was approved. So it was not just setting up for the Olympics, but it was also public support funding for continuing the efforts that, uh, people felt were improving the quality of their lives.
Jill Jaracz: What were some of the things that didn’t work?
Randal Roark: We had a palette of a lot of projects that we. Thought we could get done. And of course, we didn’t know because the money wasn’t there and the support wasn’t there, but we pushed right ahead on all of them thinking that we just keep pushing until it was very clear that the money and the time was not going to make it.
And so it is simply in the point of view of the amount that was requirement of time, money and support that was required. We had several. Projects drop away. Not really anything particularly wrong about thing. There were, there were a couple art projects that might have been controversial, but they were not particularly.
Well, the funding didn’t appear that it was going to be there anyway, but there were no major projects for me. The biggest disappointment because the, the other half of codas agenda was neighborhood redevelopment. And we knew from the start that in 3 years, we weren’t going to do a lot of redevelopment.
It was absurd to think that. And we thought what we could do is change the culture of redevelopment and change the machinery, public machinery of redevelopment and create a process that might be able to be continued. And so we, we did that and we put in place that process, which Mike really picked picked up after the Olympics, but.
Unfortunately, not a lot of actual redevelopment was done in the period leading up to the Olympics, except for the, the public housing redevelopment that we mentioned and some. Uh, scattered independent projects, scattered singular projects, all of the neighborhood plans were in place and passed and adopted and which was our, our main goal to make sure that was done before we left in 1997.
So, that was disappointing to me that we didn’t get any further, but we did set the machinery up for it to continue. There were no big projects, construction projects that really didn’t get done. I’ve stopped and think about that for a minute that we actually started that were on our plate to begin with.
CODA had, there was a sunset provision in the development of CODA that we knew that it was going to dissolve in 1997. A lot of people, it had enjoyed some success and a lot of people didn’t want that to happen, but there was a major process, transitional process that Mike oversaw, the renaissance project under Mayor Campbell right after the Olympics.
Picked up the energy of the Olympics and said, where are, where is the city now and what can we put in place to, to keep to leverage what we’ve done going in from a point of view of public, public policy, and then COTA did have a successor organization, the kind of super development agency that. That was established to pick up a lot of the same function.
So there was some continuity there, even though the code itself was dissolved after the game.
Michael Dobbins: We already had some locally based community development corporations, neighborhood initiatives that came out of the neighborhood that were supported through block grant funds. A number of others came to be. But the biggest disappointment and keeping in mind that we had the, uh, the reference of the, uh, push to get jobs into the community with the stadium, uh, that’s an idea that has come to be called community benefits, and that would be called a community benefit agreement in current parlance.
That is, if somebody’s going to spend a bunch of money. What’s in it for the people who are most impacted by it? And what does it do for the wealth divide? What does it do for the race divide and so on? And that’s my biggest disappointment. Is it in in in in 1970? We had about 500, 000 people in 1990. We had about 400, 000 people, about 20 percent of those people between 20 and 25 percent of those people were living under the poverty line.
So what happens right now? We still have 20, 25 percent of the people in the city living under the poverty line. And that’s my biggest disappointment is if we’re going to do big projects, we’ve got to be very explicit about, you know, those projects don’t happen with a whole lot without a whole lot of governmental support, whether it’s money or zoning or entitlements, a different kind of things, or street improvements or whatever.
And, and, uh, I get increasingly frustrated that, uh, uh, where we really had teed up. The idea of sharing wealth, where it comes from, whether it’s a developer or some other private investment, and that there ought to be something explicit that redounds to the benefit of the people who are feeling the greatest need, and that pattern just simply hasn’t gained ground.
There have been a lot of people working to try to make something like that happen. It’s always a huge struggle. It’s always resisted, particularly resisted by the sort of the. Uh, the ruling class, which is mostly white, but also resisted by existing laws. You know, you all, I don’t know how much you follow this kind of field, but there’s sort of a national debate going on about, about zoning laws and how the zoning laws are systemically racist and discriminatory, and a lot of jurisdictions all over the country are trying to deal with that, including, including Atlanta, and it seemed like when you, and now, you know, we have a, we have a big investment.
Binge going on the city’s doing great and all kind of stuff coming on Georgia Tech’s transformation, which we get into the beginning of in the book, you know, as now we’re bringing now, we got Microsoft coming to the West side of Atlanta and Amazon coming to the West side of Atlanta, a big acres project and actually, I’ll be teaching this all my students about how do we, how do we work to inculcate values that are community driven of community need.
And make sure that before we give the way the store, we get something back for it. That actually improves a lot of the people who are there. You’ve heard about displacement and gentrification. Those are issues that are really taking off in the areas where Microsoft and Amazon are beginning to fund and there are a lot of local groups that are working.
Some of them fairly effectively about trying to to implement this. So we need to have the private sector to come along and recognize that the, the spiraling wealth divide that is occurring in Atlanta. We’re, we’re the, we’re the city worst off in terms of the division between rich and poor in the country.
And, and we were then, and we still are, and that’s, that’s, that’s a great frustration for me. And it’s the kind of thing that you can deal with almost block by block, or you can deal with it by policy overview and all that kind of thing. I’m still working at it.
Randal Roark: You all ask a question about Olympic finances and ticket sales and that sort of thing, which we cover somewhat in the book, which is an interesting, quick story is, uh, what we point out in several places in the book that, that in the context of the Olympic movement, the Atlanta games are really something of an anomaly, in fact, a big anomaly.
And when you look at it from point of view of money spent, it really was the cheapest Olympics in the last 50 years. Largely because, uh, Billy Payne and ACOG said it was going to be. They were going to, to be efficient with their investment. They were going to break even. There was not going to be any public debt.
And lo and behold, all that was true in the end. Uh, they spent a little under two billion dollars. And then another billion, we’ve, we’ve analyzed it, uh, for this book. And we’ve added, uh, another billion to the cost that came from other sources. That were improvements that really had to happen by the Olympics, and that included what coded it.
So total cost of the games was about 3 billion. You compare that with at the other end of the spectrum Beijing, which we think was somewhere around 50 billion dollars and maybe more. And that comes a lot when you have major autocratic governments investing in the games on a national level. And in the United States, we almost always are pursuing doing the Olympics on some form of private formula of one kind or another.
It is actually kind of interesting that the federal government did an audit on the three games that happened in the states in the last 20, 30 years. Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Atlanta. And there actually was quite a bit of federal investment. It just didn’t, it wasn’t always direct. It was indirect across a whole lot of agencies and different funding programs and so forth.
And that was the case in Atlanta as well. Some 600 million dollars of federal money was, was invested in the games. But the other half of the formula that we point out in the book, which surprised me, Was among all of those Olympic games in the last 50 years, Atlanta sold the most tickets and had the highest attendance and at the same time was the cheapest.
So you have to analyze those 2 things separately. Probably Atlanta was in the middle of the United States. It was easy to get to by car and by plane and a lot of people came. Because he could, and the tickets weren’t too bad, and so it just a whole lot of people were here for for the Olympics. And so, uh, the attendance was very high.
Uh, most games sell and generate about eight to nine million tickets. I’m not sure what Rio did, but that was the case. London sold just about the same number as Atlanta, but all the others were quite a bit smaller. A lot of the more remote. From a world point of view, Olympics, people buy the tickets, but they really don’t come because it’s a difficult thing to do.
For example, Sydney, uh, great Olympic games, but it was not a full house, uh, because accessibility as much as anything else. So it was the cheapest games. And the most attended, well attended game, and it broke even, and there were small but catalytic investments around, around the city. So, what we call in the book, we call it small ball Olympics, which is maybe a good formula or a good, a good model.
Maybe for Olympic movement going forward, where the Olympics have become ridiculously expensive. for listening. And, and almost pricing itself out of existence, in addition to all the other problems the movement has. Uh, that it can actually be put on for, uh, a smaller investment and still have a big impact.
And so, one of the reasons we wrote the book was to point that out. That the kind of contribution that Lana made to the Olympic movement as an anomaly in the Olympic movement. And, uh, we wanted to make sure that was part of the book.
Jill Jaracz: Last question here, but how do people think of the Atlanta Olympics today in Atlanta?
Randal Roark: Well, you know, I brought up, I tell people here in Florida, writing a book about the Olympics, and the first thing I want to talk about is the bombing. Saying that’s what most people want to talk about because of the most highly visible. Event and it was tragic. And, you know, of course, it was, uh, it was certainly covered heavily.
Second thing that, uh, people remember were the, the tawdry commercial spectacle of all the vending tents. And it was awful. Uh, it was not regulated and the vendors ended up not even making very much money. And it looked bad, and the world press didn’t like it at all, and none of us liked it either. And I even likened, in the end, the spectacle of the Atlanta Olympics was more like the Texas State Fair than it was a Eurocentric elite sporting event.
Because it was rowdy, and it was loud, and it was rather tawdry, and on the other hand, it was fun, and it was loud, and it was rowdy. And everybody had a really good time, and the sports events came off very well managed and well, well done. So, you can look at it that way. In a way, it kind of emerged as kind of a people’s Olympics, as opposed to a kind of elite event.
But the whole world was here, and they saw it, and I think there were some things about the Olympics that didn’t go well, at least from the point of view of the international press. And so a lot of people remember those things, but we wanted to, in this book, make it clear that there were a lot of good things, in many cases, a lot of small good things, but they had the effect of creating a kind of sea change in Atlanta, in town culture that I think is held pretty well in the 25 years since.
Michael Dobbins: It is interesting, and your question is that, uh. Doing little things positively, incremental development, guided by a systematic set of plans and continuity of a planning effort are not the kind of things that get headlines. Uh, you, you got to have a big splash. You got to have a big name superhero architect come on.
By the way, Randy and I are both architects. Um, uh, and, and if you don’t do that, you’re not going to catch the, the sort of, uh, Sort of innate elitism that accompanies the Olympics. I, I grew up in the state that you guys, I’m sure if I were to pose you this question, you could guess where I grew up. It was the only state that took a state referendum to reject getting the Olympics.
Jill Jaracz: Oh, uh, you grew up in Colorado.
Michael Dobbins: Thank you. You, you knew. Okay. And so, uh, I think the. It’s interesting, too, in the local, I think the race issue comes up in the response, in the subsequent response, uh, people whom I’ve known a long time and have known well and have generally respected, uh, termed the Olympics in Atlanta as the city having lost the opportunity.
Now, when you’ve grown back. 100, 000 people and you’ve attracted successive greater and greater investment. I’ll be without the proper sort of distribution of the benefits of those investments. How can they possibly still think of it as being a lost opportunity? And the only thing I can come up with is it’s a racial view.
The mayor we had during that time is actually the mayor in place when all this stuff was happening. Guy named Bill Campbell was not, uh, yeah. How, how would you characterize his, his, his reception among the white community, white business leadership? Randy, you got a way to comment on that? Not popular. And then, you know, that, that coloring of the cities and activities will continue on for some time.
It has a lot to do with, you know, it’s not just a city, but cities everywhere in light of the re revelation of the discrimination has been visited upon black people, people of color, people of divergent viewpoints. Systemically, it’s built into the laws and so on and so forth. And. Frankly, I think the Olympic movement has depended and had been literally dependent on having a lot of billionaires from a lot of different countries, uh, and, and so, uh, expressing a kind of an elitist perspective, and I think that might be why some people are resistant to it.
Jill Jaracz: Thank you so much, Randall and Michael. Their book is available for purchase in our bookshop. org storefront at bookshop. org slash shop slash flame alive pod.
Podcast Changes in 2025
All right, show next year, next year is coming.
Alison Brown: I know, it’s so funny because we spent so long planning for 2024, as I think a lot of people did.
A lot of people took trips to Paris. We got to see a lot of, of, listeners and, and fans. And now here’s 2025.
Jill Jaracz: But we still have to do all the planning, right? Even though it’s an off year. Right, right. So we will still have shows next year because that’s how we do. We keep the flame alive all year round.
We are going to streamline a little bit. So this year in 2024, we, spun the history moment out into its own show and had it be a separate 15 minute thing. Part of that was because, We wanted to make sure the shows that we put out regularly stay to a reasonable length, and some of our history moments were getting kind of long.
This kept it being like a 15 minute episode because it was Chamonix, 1924, and there’s not a whole lot of stories. The games were tiny. Next year, we’re looking at Sydney 2000 because it’s the 25th anniversary of those games, little bigger, a lot more content, we’re going to have more content, but we’ll, keep that being a separate episode.
We’ll have two stories, so it’ll be about 30 minutes or so, so shorter than average, but it’s going to be part of the regular episode schedule. So instead of. Having five or six episodes a month, like we did this year with Chamonix, we’re going to have four to five episodes a month, depending on the calendar.
And Sydney is going to be the second Thursday of every month episode. We’re probably going to throw in some, Rekindled episodes here and there throughout the year. Both of us have to account for some family caregiving time that has to happen, particularly in the spring. uh, and probably summer. So we’re going to have those.
And that will also help us have more planning time for what we’re going to do for Milan Cortina. So, if you have a favorite interview that you would like to have rekindled, please let us know. Drop us a line and tell us and we will put it in the mix. really there’s Not a ton of changes, we’re still here.
We’re not going anywhere. Yeah, so, keeping the flame alive as usual, but we just got to streamline the show a little bit to make some accommodations for other elements of time. That’s going to do it for this episode. And this year, let us know your thoughts on our conversation with Randall and Michael and your thought on host city legacies.
Get in Touch and Coming Soon
Alison Brown: And we love hearing from you as we have all year long, you can chat with us and other listeners on our Facebook group. Keep the flame alive podcast, email us at flame alive, pod at gmail. com. The voicemail and text line is always open even throughout the holidays at two zero eight eight. 4 8, that’s 2 0 8 flame it.
If you need more Olympics and Paralympics in your life, and these will keep coming during the holidays, you can sign up for our newsletter at flamealivepod. com. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.
Jill Jaracz: We will be back on January 9th. Our plan is to discuss the new Clarissa Shields biopic called The Fire Inside.
It’s scheduled to open on Christmas Day. I will tell you, our plan for Patreon for December was to talk about September 5th, that movie that is about, the coverage of the Munich 1972 hostage crisis. That film, release date keeps getting pushed back. So, those plans have changed. Hopefully the Fire Inside comes out.
Alison Brown: In more than limited release.
Jill Jaracz: Right. So if it does, we will talk about it. If you see it, let us know what you thought about it. Let everybody know that you have seen it. Uh, when Boys in the Bowl came out, everyone was putting pictures of, uh, going to the in our Facebook group, which is so much fun to see.
But, if the fire inside does not happen. Don’t worry. We have a bunch of interviews waiting in the wings. So we will always have something fun to discuss at the beginning of the year and something that you can look forward to. So thank you so much for listening and for all of your support this year.
We really appreciate it and can’t do the show without you. Until next time, keep the flame alive.