because i am going to talk for a bit here. my name is mark pendergrast. there are probably about one third of the people know because that is their name also or they are related to me. this is the bookstore i like to come to. it is an independent bookstore with great heart and also close to where the pendergrast enclave has lived for many many years. i grew up here in atlanta. i live in vermont now. but i come back here very frequently to see my mother who is right here. and my father who is very much involved in my research for this book. he read most of the manuscript and who died last year at the age of 99 1/2. i want to dedicate this whole talk to him and he was a wonderful, wonderful kind and generous man. i dedicate the book to him and my mother and to my african-american maid. i will be talking about her. maybe i should talk about her now. i don't really have this plan in particular as to what i am going to say in what order but i promise it will be interesting. when i decided i would write a book about atlanta, which i have not lived in for decades! i thought that number one, it was, it took a lot to decide is going to do this. not many have written about atlanta since the olympics was held here in 1996. two really good books. -- by gary pomerantz and atlanta rising by frederick allen. but it is a huge amount that has happened in that time. when i named it city on the verge, it is because your city is on the verge of tremendous change. it is in the middle of tremendous change. and it is urgent that you figure out what you're going to do in the next 20 or 30 well five, one year. because let me tell you to give you an overview of what is about to happen here. for years the population was moving out. the last few years it has been moving back to some degree. well, it will be moving back according to all of the experts a lot in the next 30 years the population within the city limits of atlanta is probably going to triple. right now it is about 455,000 people. it will probably be 1 and a half million people. how you handle that in terms of transportation, equity and affordability, livability and walk ability and biking and getting out of your cars is absolutely crucial.when i decided to write this book, i thought how am i going to focus it? what is a narrative transport whenever you write a book you wanted to read well. you want people to actually be drawn in a narrative arc throughout the book. and i decided the best way to do that was to write about the atlanta beltline. it will close a transformative projects and it is a transformative project. so let me describe that briefly to you and why i chose to write about it. in 1999 a young master's degree student at georgia tech named ryan gravelle decided to write his masters thesis client for something called the beltline. it was not the first person to come up with this idea exactly. but he is the first person to really nail it and to eloquently explain why it was a good idea. so his idea was to have a 22 mile loop around the city of atlanta. mostly two or three miles from the center of town. and his idea was to put streetcars on it. it was going to connect neighborhoods that were quite wealthy and those that were quite poor and he was hoping it would cause development. and people to move back in and more density in the city and better transit. he wrote it and called it the beltline. the reason he called it that is because it was already called the beltline back in the late 1800s. let me just back up and explain a little bit about atlanta in terms of transportation. you will find chapter 2 in this book is a history of atlanta viewed through the lens of transportation. the city as many of you i am sure no, began in 1837 and it was called - a wonderful poetic name for a city. [laughter] very appealing! and it is because the railroad was going to end there. they pick a spot arbitrarily. this is where the real world will end. and it did. and a bunch of other railroads crossed there. by the late 1800s you know, or by the civil war atlanta was a very important nexus of the railroads which is why sherman burned it to the ground in 1864. but atlanta came back with a vengeance calling itself the phoenix pity. atlanta has always had this sort of can do attitude and we are going to go forward and do what we need to do. it has also been completely full of itself and full of a lot of hot air. >> someone in savannah joked that if atlanta could suck as hard as it blew, it would be a seaport like savannah. [laughter] but it is kind of lovable in that way. atlanta has never been like the rest of the south. it has always kind of been a little bit looking up north. a little bit envious of the north. atlantans are always talk about how they're going to be the next great international city. part of that same blow hardness. but atlanta does not have a lot of density, you have a funky and interesting places here that you can preserve. when you go off on another rant. as you all know atlanta is historic for destroying its historic structures without any regard to what they might mean or i have a picture in the book, terminal station. beautiful structure! which i do not remember because they destroyed it in 1972. and i never paid much attention to it. it was gorgeous, a railroad station built in 1905. and so this is part of the history starts to tell you before went off on my tangent. atlanta started as a transportation hub for railroads. it got really crowded in the middle. in the late 1880s they began to build beltline railroads to the outside of that center. and there were four different ones. so ryan gravelle had an idea to connect them and it was unusual because they never worked, they were owned by four different railroads. they were industry built up around them, people began to live around them. and then the streetcars came in the late 1800s and there was this magnificent network of streetcars atlanta.in their infinite wisdom, one year after i was born in 1948 they destroyed all of the streetcars in atlanta. why? because they were old-fashioned. why? because starting around 1915, atlanta really began to switch to automobiles. and trucks. there is a picture in the book of downtown atlanta in 1914. it had a few streetcars, a lot of pedestrians just walking across the street and there were some horses and buggies. they were a couple of cars. and then there is a picture on next page from 1924. 10 years later, it was all cars. some streetcars were packed in. so people began to complain. so they ended up building the streets over the middle of town. that is how downtown, how underground atlantic became to be. in the process of cars and trucks taking over, the beltline railroads died. the industries moved further out because it was cheaper land and they can be serviced by trucks. so by the 1990s when ryan was writing this masters thesis there was mostly -- of kudzu. i have a picture in the book it was covered with vines and weeds and ryan wrote this thing and said we should, people are beginning to come back into town. we should turn this into a vital network. take advantage of the infrastructure we already have instead of trying to make up some brand-new thing which atlanta tends to do. he saw it as something that can really change the city. it was very well written and actually is online. you can find and let me said that ryan wrote a book and it is a very good book that came out last year. elbows are complementary because his is a big picture book about his -- about what is dentist cities. and then mine is a different approach.much more about atlanta specifically. he wrote this brilliant thesis and he put it on the shelf and thought nothing would ever come of it. like most masters thesis. and so he went to work for an architectural firm.one day a few years later at lunch he and his colleagues were just talking about what they had written their masters thesis on. and he explain his.they said, wow! that is fantastic. bring it in, let us look at it. they read it and said you have got to do something with this. so together they wrote a letter and they sent it to every georgia politician and plan and environmental people. they all wrote back and said that is a terrific idea! good luck with that. except one person who is kathy willard. she championed the idea and so did brian and they sort of build a grassroots organization for a few years in 2004, the mayor franklin took it on and it developed into a bureaucracy which we have now. she found a businessman who had semiretired and had enough money where he could donate his time which he did for four years for this project. i've got to know all of these people. i have interviewed like 400 people for this book in the last six years. so i began to work on it in 2011. and so they tried to figure out how can they find it and in the process i should say ryan's original idea of running streetcars around morphed very quickly. his friends said why don't we put a trail by it so people can ride their bikes on it? and why don't we have people be able to walk along it and then a guy name jim langford at the time was in charge of the trust for public land, someone approached him and said they wanted help turning the sort of derelict land south of this big old derelict sears building into a park. in this invasion you can make this into a park and alleviate all of the flooding by building a retention pond there. and he thought it was a great idea. but that line was all in the news at that point the idea of it. and he said you know, look at the map. it goes right up to piedmont park. it goes through piedmont park. if we built the park down here and look! there is this other little park down here in this neighborhood. and he realized that it connected a bunch of parts. why not make it a greenway? right not make it a linear park that connected parts? so he hired a world-famous city planner i also got to not do this. to come down here and try to figure out what kind of parks you can have. and atlanta is severely under parked. we have a lot of trees in the city. beautiful trees. but most of them are in people's backyards. most of them are not in public places. in metro atlanta which is this huge sprawling mass of 6 million people or so now, they are losing land at an alarming rate. losing trees at an alarming rate. so, where was i? [laughter] let me mention while i am thinking about this. my mother is the author of the book called neighborhood naturalist. and she loves to start trees atlanta was a woman named marcia which has turned into a huge organization which is building an arboretum on the beltline. oh i know i was talking to olinda so they came down and got into a helicopter to go look around this whole area and see what they might see. and suddenly he said what is that? and there was a huge hole in the ground. it was a quarry. in westside atlanta owned by vulcan and he thought it is within like a mile of where the beltline is supposed to go. wouldn't it be fantastic if we could get this and fill it full of water and people to sail on it and we could do all of this wonderful stuff in this body of water? it was in a very poor section or is in a very poor section of town. so there is a lot of empty space. that you can make a bicycle path and have sporting fields and do all sorts of things with. he put a picture from the helicopter. he put it back on this thing he called the emerald necklace. he called his idea of the beltline the emerald necklace. but there was a lease on it until the year 2034 so it was kind of, he felt a little strange putting it there. but the people saw it on the back of this thing, they called him and so we are ready to sell. and they did. soliciting atlanta now owns this. and they're currently filling it up with water from the river. and it will serve as an emergency water supply for the city of atlanta which given climate change and many other things and arguments with florida and alabama as to who honors the water is a good idea. but i will say - let me say also that when i write books, i generally do not like to preach at people. i don't like to tell people what they should think. i lay it out. i tried to make it engaging, i transmitted narrative nonfiction that reads like fiction. because i think nonfiction is a lot stranger than fiction. nobody can ever make up all of the challenges of this beltline ended up having to overcome. i can talk about that during the q&a but i can't remember no going to say again now. i was going somewhere. [inaudible] >> yes the quarry! watershed management and the city of atlanta in 1990, this is another segway. in 1996 the olympics, they decided the terrorists might come and pollute the water supply because they were paranoid. they put up fences around the waterworks. which is where when i was in high school, the cross-country team would practice and run around. a beautiful place. in fact, they had built a little building there for a community. you have cookouts they are and it was a nice place. since then it has been walled off which i think - and the beltline will go right by the waterworks. so i looked it up to find out about terrorism and municipal water supplies. i found several articles saying that you could not if you wanted to, even if you had a semi-tractor full of poison you would have a hard time poison all of the water. because there is just too much water. i'm talking about untreated water. i think once it is treated which is underground over there, then you do not want anybody near that. so there is a group it turns out, a facebook group called - waterworks park were friends of waterworks parker to have a picture of the website in my book showing what they think it should be like. i agree with them. even more, when they build, when they fill up the quarry, garvin envisioned he was going to fund this by selling the rights to coca-cola of a dam that he wanted to call to sunny waterfalls which i found amusing. he was envisioning a lot of recreational activities on this lake. it is very clear from my interviews with the previous commissioner of the department of watershed management and from the current one i think is a lot more open. they have no intention whatsoever of letting any human being near this body of water. for the same old raisins. terrorists might do that. that is the stupidest idea i've ever heard of because this is not even water they use and for the city. it is an emergency water supply. there is no reason to keep people out of it for that reason. the other argument is that it is so deep people can drown. well, people can drown in a bathtub. so have a lifeguard or several. have a little area where it is not so deep which i'm sure you can figure out. let people swim in it, fish and it, kayak on it, let people sail on it. also the problem is there is a 10 but it is scenic and very beautiful. i've been there. they are worried about people falling off or jumping off so put a fence there. that is fine. not a horrible thing but something to prevent children from going over. anyway, that is my - i do not say that until the very end of the book. as a lot of things i think in the last chapter. of the book. so anyway, i decided i would focus on the beltline. i would trace the history of it and i did. you will see the prologue is me walking around the beltline with ryan gravelle and actually with two of my brothers. and angel - but i left them out of the story pretty much. in late 2011 and in early 2012, i think is compelling. the first chapter talks about how ryan got the idea for the beltline and previous ideas for it. and then every other chapter is about how the beltline developed and all the challenges it faced which were numerous. so that is one, three, five, seven and nine. by the time i got tonight broke the story of two pretty much the present. really until the end of 2015. then in the final chapter i blurted right up to date. in between those, i put two historical chapters. chapter 2 is a history of atlanta looked from the lens of transportation which i mentioned to you. which includes the development of marta. which has been an incredibly chaffetz rapid transit system. and the fourth chapter is a history of atlanta viewed through the lens of race. it is called the to atlantis. because really there were two separate atlantis. let me mention one of the reasons i read this book was to get to know my own city that i grew up in for the first time. i knew this side of town where we are now. because i used to go out and visit all of my cousins and my grandparents right out here. and i knew the area over on the northwest side of town. but i did not know any of the poor areas of town in the south and particularly in the west. my maid who came to work for our family in 1950 when i was one and and a half years old, she lived on simpson street it turns out. i did not know this. i never went to her house. i knew nothing about her life. in this person is someone who was so important to me. was my second mother. he made all of the food that my family ate for dinner before she went home every night. who loves me more than you can imagine. and you know, she died - she died when i was in vermont. i had already moved there. i had to little kids and i was poor and when she had a stroke, my mother told me and i did not come home. because i was busy and i had a job and i had little kids. and then she had another stroke and she died. and i did not come home for the funeral. i felt horrible at this ever since. one of the reasons i wanted to write the book was to search for her atlanta. i called her nee. and i did, is a very personal book in many ways. so the epilogue in the book is about nee. so it was interesting. i decided i would spend the night in different areas around the beltline which is connecting on the areas for the first time really. it was fascinating and a wonderful experience. i made many new friends. many of whom have come to my book signings in the last week here in atlanta. it has just been very wonderful to reconnect with them. one of the people that, i interviewed mary porter. i would like to read to you from that section. it is at the beginning of - oh, and something that the book. so there's also a chapter on public health issues, homelessness, amazing experiences that i had meeting and talking to homeless people in different areas in atlanta. then i went on a tour of the neighborhoods around the beltline. so i started with the east. with the park and then i went south. so i went clockwise. south to neighborhoods such as south atlanta and peoples town and pittsburgh. none of which i never heard of growing up. then i went to west and in washington park and english avenue. then i went to very troubling neighborhoods and then i went north to places i knew better. but i still learned a lot. collier hills, ansley pope, piedmont heights and places like that. and i stayed with people all over. i want to review the beginning of this south beltline chapter. chapter 11. a slow dance to better communities.mary porter born in 1947, grew up in the south atlanta neighborhood. there really is a neighbor called south atlanta. i have no idea. it is where mcdonough and jonesboro roads split. you may have been there, i do not know. i interviewed her i think it says it in here. i will not tell you. in the south atlanta neighborhood originally known as brownsville. founded by freed slaves after the civil war. there, black residents turned back white police and vigilantes during the atlanta race riot of 1906. i interviewed porter in the heart of that community where jonesboro forks off from mcdonough boulevard. we set a block away on the future beltline. in community grounds. a coffeehouse that serves as a meeting place and refuge from the abandoned buildings and impounded car lots nearby. as i spoke to porter, who had recently moved to a nearby retirement complex i felt a curious affinity. we were almost mirror images of one another. she is only a year older than i. we both grew up in atlanta albeit on opposite sides of the city. her parents had eight children. i was one of seven. i had known few black people other than yard men or maids. she had known hardly any white people other than a few local store owners. and so we urge you to buy the book and read the rest of this. [ [laughter] >> i will tell you one story she told me. basically she told me that she had a great upbringing. was not full of prejudice and hatred. it was a solid, wonderful community to grow up in. if he did something wrong your parents would know about it by the time you got home. so you better watch out. and everybody was very friendly and it was safe. there was one street you would not go down but you knew that. and at one point she did play with some white kids which was unusual. they came over a field from lakewood which was a white neighborhood.and they got along fine is one of the white kids brought his cousin over. and the cousin said, you're playing with - and then never came again. she went home to her mother and asked her what it meant? from others that it is a bad word, do not use it. that was the first time she knew anything about that. it was amazing. there are many many stories like that that i heard. i heard stories about people who it snuck a drink white water fountain to see whether it is it any different then run like hell. the story of jerry mcwilliams -- who by the way, was not a racist. he wrote in dialect but read the part about him it is interesting. in the book. but jerry is an african-american woman. and i was interviewing her. she was telling all about this stuff and tiffany for a tour. i said where did you grow up? she said i glorify here. i said i thought it was mostly a white neighborhood up until the 60s and 70s. she said there was a small black area here. i used to walk by her all the time on the way to sears. and we did not know what it was this building. there were all these little creatures you know for rabbit and fox in the front yard. so my girlfriend and i when we were about 14 decided we would knock on the door and asked them what is going on here. so they did. they knocked on the door and two little old ladies, two little old white ladies opened the door and said, we don't let - in here and closed the door. and she told me this like it was matter-of-fact.and then she ended up working there. it was aggravated -- it was segregated until 1988. so everything in the city of atlanta, every issue has a unspoken underlayment sometimes of race. everything. if you look at it closely. and so, it is something that you cannot and should not ignore. the good news is atlanta has always been much more progressive. it did not riot and burn when other cities were doing so. we were not but there was plenty of prejudice. let me tell you one other thing. see? i'm talking about the book. when i finished all of the neighborhoods i did something called outside the perimeter. outside of the 285 interstate. that is where most people lived. so how would i concentrate on that? so i decided to look at gwinnett county to the north. >> >> they really have been able to handle all of these languages and cultures in a remarkable way and i was impressed in a lot of ways and i wrote about that but to the east i wrote about stone mountain bankcard stennis where many refugees have settled and again their stories are amazing and could take up a whole book and stone mountain is a little bit further to the east. i found a woman who lives near there and grew up there and she is smart and funny and is fascinated with all the people that go of stone mountain. many arcturus but it is very diverse. she has a web site call i a.m. the mountain.org. so i walked up with her and what is ironic is stone mountain is where the kkk had its rebirth in 1915 following the lynching then not long after there was a race riot. and there are confederate flags with of right reading -- winning races but it is in that way anymore so i was fascinated -- fascinated by the juxtaposition here in atlanta i went to the west view cemetery where my grandfather and my mother's father is injured in a magnificent mausoleum and also turns out there was a hill for confederates and up on top is a tattered confederate flag. now this neighborhood is complete the black so i just they could not put it there but there it was a couple years ago. one more thing. so with urban planning in development and business with philanthropy and the importance to make this happen and affordability issues there is a huge problem with that on the dull wine. so unless so unless you have decent schools you are in trouble wherever you live. so i said in the book on the verge of tremendous growth were declining into mediocracy so the worst of the very wealthy and the core of any major city in the country with the international poverty it is almost impossible to get to out of with the almost third world conditions. and to take part in for a while. there is no magic bullet it annoys me when they talk about affordable housing anybody that makes 60% or more so that area median income is $67,000 in a land of. none of the people that live in the neighborhood of pittsburgh make that much money they will not get help at all by affordable housing so with that inclusion of the zoning ordinance limited at 60 or 80%. so nobody pays more than 30 percent of their income. i don't they give is rocket science. more people who want to move into a leotard driving the prices up. many places haven't been atlanta fed does not have rent-controlled to protect property from driving people out. it could be done because people want to move here but if they don't in those surrounding areas may be those luxury apartments would be cheaper but i don't think that matters the developers can handle this they will make money so that just means they have to charge more and you could have a smaller places. so i just really think that you are having a mayoral race right now and i am so grateful the head that tries to promote in atlanta loves my book but he contacted me to say can you get me copies ? i will personally handed them to every candidate because they need to read your book. so the conversation and stars from the people reading this with those discussions all over atlanta i really hope this book as an impact their grateful that you are here to talk about it. [applause] >> the figure the people to live on the current city limits in about 30 years from now so where does that figure come from? was it part of a study? so what type of housing will these people be living in?. >> where did i getting it? it is the new planning commissioner for the city of atlanta is very smart. to be in charge the atlantic city design project i am not a city planner by treating but you are there other people in the audience who are. so he said he thought berry 1.5 million people and he probably knows he is talking about. but nobody can really predict the future. so people have to move up intelligently with two types of transportation one is time limited so you are building maurer by trails doing an incredible job to connect up a bunch of bike trails within the city of atlanta to stone mountain so the thinking they will rebuild the streetcar system is a mistake because i did not talk about this in my talk to be incredibly successful pact with strollers and dog walkers on the weekend but the rent has gone through the roof and there are more and more cars to experience the belt line but unless they put the streetcars there is trouble but i don't think they should in the city they built a loop that is a boondoggle it doesn't go anywhere. and also their runs in traffic also i was told this so with other places you could do this and people will ride that i am the only person invariably if you have a bus system then they will get out of the car that is what has to have been with mixed income with mixed use communities in the intelligent way other questions?. >> this is dennis to is related to me who is say wonderful and sustainable building. >> dan has already read the book spent there are many things better innovative did you address that?. >> tell us your thoughts on how that is working is that likely to work. >> remains to be seen referring to something the tax allocation district that is called a tad for sure -- four short you take a port area you want the development to occur you freeze property in school taxes at a given level and as you develop because property taxes go up for a specific amount of time and with the belt line is 25 years. everything over that level from 2006 goes back into developing of project with a snowball effect so the economy collapsed 2008 so they cannot float the bonds they thought they would. now it is always diverted to affordable housing so what has not worked and it will not be sufficient in any way shape or form. it is coca-cola money with home depot and ups and coca-cola. have been very generous and kaiser permanente a dave a lot of money to develop the trail. the federal government has given a lot of money so there is the big story to do infrastructure so every means to be seen so i don't know the answer to that question. so those this summer and that impact to replicate the betty side already comes back. so everybody says it is gentrification i'd like that word. i wish it could be abolished for it is pejorative. and safe to walk the streets to have greenery hopefully. and so what you want is to improve the quality of life for everyone. so especially with the number of people into the city now that nobody wants to live like the pittsburgh neighborhood everybody will want to live. everybody is driven out on a dime but it is urgent to have affordable housing but it is all peas mail and then they have a history to do things in a piecemeal way. but to have a real opportunity now to get it right. >> given the figures so what do offer or see what is happening there? or to see us fall even further? with there is some developing areas in what types of approaches to recommend and in the decades to come. >> there are some hopeful things happening the initiative the commission has helped to sponsor and pay for work with the suburbs that have not had them before they were building their own town center event with in southeastern atlanta so to the answer your question everybody recognizes the cul-de-sac suburbs did not work nobody wants to live where they have to get in their car to drive anywhere. sulfate we will be doing that many more of them in the suburbs are trying to imitate to make level and workable communities where they are. a lot of it has to do with transportation issues. so they didn't want african-americans to be in the suburbs so now light a within the next 10 years it is very likely they will vote and want to pay the '01% tax and i do think they will eventually expand but they're behind the eightball to turnaround over the last three years to have done an incredible job but now they're doing transit oriented developments instead of the parking lots. >> so i will mention one other thing and this is a marketing plea for outside atlanta of the subtitle is city on the verge it is in justin mantegna dealing with these issues but every major city in the country is dealing with similar issues one way or another so actually has something to teach other cities when it is in its adolescence still developing and has done a terrible job in many ways as the poster child for an equity but if it can pull off this transformation and anybody can i compared it to that song about york you can make it anywhere. so it will really show the country so that bill live is the extraordinary project the pipeline in new york city is not very long and does not run through neighborhoods and has lots of development around it. so getting a the high sign that we need to wrap it up. 8q very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] programs online at booktv.org. bring you roosevelt reading festival at the fdr presidential library in hyde park, new york. the annual event teaches author . .

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