Editor’s note: I’ve been lucky enough to visit Atlanta a few times, back when I had a “real” job and I needed to come in for work meetings. But even with a minimum of one day free on each visit, I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of what is truly a cool city. Sam Spector definitely does a quick visit justice in his article here, while freely admitting that it wasn’t enough time. For more of Sam’s writing, click here to visit his index page.

I have flown through Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. As a Delta hub, it is a place that you are likely to fly through, especially because every year since 1998 it has been the world’s busiest airport in terms of airport traffic. In 2023, 104.6 million passengers flew in or out of the airport. However, I recently got to actually leave the airport and spend a couple of days in what many have considered the unofficial capital of the South.

I sadly only got to spend a couple of days in Atlanta, and while some cities you can really see all the highlights in a day or so, I will definitely need to go back because I would recommend a minimum of three, but more ideally four, days in Georgia’s capital city. Of that trip, one entire day should be spent at Pemberton Place in downtown’s Luckie Marrietta district. Pemberton Place is named for John Pemberton, a lieutenant colonel for the Confederacy during the Civil War and local pharmacist, who is best remembered as the inventor for perhaps the world’s most recognizable product: Coca Cola. This area of downtown was rather downtrodden and forgotten until 1990, when Coca Cola purchased the plaza and built the World of Coca Cola. This place is a must visit for all lovers of Coke and history lovers alike. You will begin with a guided tour discovering the history of the iconic beverage and especially the mystique around the secret recipe that makes Coke so unique, which includes a visit into the well-guarded Coca Cola vault. The museum also shows Coca Cola’s history of advertising and marketing, including in different languages all throughout the world. There is also a 3D movie experience and a movie that is supposed to tug at your heartstrings to somehow create an emotional connection to Coca Cola (another marketing ploy). One of the cooler exhibits is the scent laboratory, where you can smell and taste different scents that might be used to create various sodas, as well as a beverage laboratory where you can make simulated beverages using different colors, scents, and tastes. However, the highlight for me was at the very end of the museum where there was a room that had sixty different Coca-Cola products from all around the world and every continent. Being ambitious, I tried a sip of each flavor, and I have to say that I found some of the foreign flavors to be absolutely delicious and others to be utterly disgusting, each one giving an insight into what tastes good in different parts of the world.

Across from the World of Coca Cola is the Georgia Aquarium, which very well might be the best aquarium in the United States. This aquarium is still the largest in the country (twice the size of the second largest) and is now the sixth largest in the world after losing its crown as the world’s largest in 2012. The aquarium is divided into different areas based on regions of the world and different marine biospheres. The aquarium features seals, penguins, reptiles, coral, and many fish; however, its most famous exhibits include more than a dozen dolphins, one of four aquariums in the world to have manta rays, beluga whales, and more than half a dozen shark species including two whale sharks, the world’s largest fish. Staring at the behemoth whale sharks, each of which is the size of a school bus, is truly fascinating. In the whale shark tank, there is also a moving walkway that takes you through a glass tube where you can see the various fish surround you. While these fast-paced exhibits are incredibly exciting, one of my favorite exhibits was the American South exhibit that felt as though you were in a Louisiana bayou. No matter your age, the Georgia Aquarium will be a highlight for any visitor.

Right next to Pemberton Place is Centennial Olympic Park, which was the main central area for the 1996 Olympics. The park is a relaxing area, but it also has many statues and monuments for the 1996 Olympics. Sadly, at these Olympics, one might recall that a domestic terrorist set off a bomb which killed one person directly (another died at the scene of a heart attack) and injured 111. In the park is a memorial for the bombing and you can see in one of the sculptures shrapnel damage from the event. A hero who prevented the death toll from being much higher was a security guard named Richard Jewell, who discovered the bomb and began to evacuate the area. Sadly, Jewell was investigated as being the bomber and was maligned by the media as the likely culprit, causing him significant distress for the remainder of his lifetime. There is a nice monument now in recognition of Jewell’s heroism in the park. Next to the park is the former headquarters of CNN, which closed nearly a year ago and relocated to another location. At the CNN Center, there used to be tours of the building and this was considered to be one of the highlights of Atlanta; however, these tours have now ceased.

Atlanta also calls itself home to one of the most significant individuals in the history of America, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The district where Dr. King grew up is called the Sweet Auburn neighborhood and is a historically black and segregated neighborhood. The neighborhood has artwork throughout it and is worth walking around. You can see the “shotgun houses,” narrow rectangular houses only twelve feet wide that were homes for poor black individuals. The neighborhood also contains the 35-acre Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park, which contains King’s boyhood home, the King Center, which is a museum about his life and work and contains his Nobel Peace Prize, and also the graves of Dr. King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, which are on platforms surrounded by water. Across the street from the park is Ebenezer Baptist Church, founded in 1886. Despite being nearly 140 years old, this church has had only five head pastors in its history. From 1894-1931, the head pastor was Adam Daniel Williams, the grandfather of Martin Luther King Jr. He was succeeded from 1931-1975 by Martin Luther King Sr., who had three co-pastors during his tenure, including his sons, Martin Luther King Jr. from 1960 until his death in 1968 and Alfred Daniel Williams King from 1968 until his untimely death in 1969. Dr. King’s mother was murdered in this church and the church hosted the funerals for both Dr. King and Congressman and Civil Rights hero John Lewis. Since 2005, the head pastor of the church has been Raphael Warnock, who was also elected the United States Senator from Georgia in 2020. Despite being a senator, Reverend Warnock returns regularly to preach on Sundays at the church. Six thousand worshippers attend the church every week, and visitors are welcome to attend. I had the privilege of attending a church service, and while sadly Senator Warnock was not present for the service I attended, the music, energy, community, and hospitality that exist at the service are phenomenal, and attending a service is an excellent spiritual, historical, and culture experience.

In visiting the South, there is a dichotomy between honoring the heritage of the Civil Rights era and also holding nostalgia by others for the antebellum days of slavery and later Jim Crow. Nowhere better exhibits this than a visit to Stone Mountain. Stone Mountain is a state park in Georgia located fifteen miles outside of Atlanta. It is naturally beautiful with forested hiking trails and rivers. The main feature of the park is Stone Mountain itself, a 1686-foot-high quartz monzonite dome rock formation. From 1925 until 1972, the world’s largest bas-relief sculpture was carved into the side of the mountain and it is commonly thought of as the South’s version of Mount Rushmore. The sculptures are of the three most prominent leaders of the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson, on their horses. The sculptures are cut 42 feet deep into the mountain, and are 90 feet in height, 190 feet in width, and are 400 feet above the ground. This project was heavily advocated in its origin by the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and it was on top of the mountain that William J. Simmons founded the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915 and did the first ever cross burning. There still exists today a Confederate Hall, which has interactive exhibits and a theater showing a film about the site and Confederacy. At the lookout for the sculpture there is a lawn with thirteen tiers, each for a different state of the Confederacy with its flag and a plaque honoring its cessation date. There is also a cable car that will take you to the top of the mountain, allowing you to see the sculpture up close and giving stunning views of Georgia. While I found this park to be disturbing to my narrative, it was fascinating to see such a place and get an understanding for those who still revere the Confederacy, though I side with the position of the former president of the NAACP, Richard Rose, who called Stone Mountain “the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world.” Martin Luther King referenced this monument in his infamous 1963 “I have a Dream” speech, when he stated, “Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain in Georgia!”

In a less historical experience, one of my current goals is to visit every Major League Baseball stadium, and while in Atlanta I had to attend a Braves game at Truist Park, the fairly new stadium of the Atlanta Braves. The park is beautiful and has an outstanding museum area about the team’s history. There are great exhibits on the amazing team of the 1990s that won eleven straight National League Eastern Division championships, five National League championships, and the 1995 World Series, and featured baseball Hall of Famers Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, Chipper Jones, and Fred McGriff, all while being led by Hall of Fame manager Bobby Cox. There is a great deal about the former home run king and baseball legend Hank Aaron, who broke Babe Ruth’s “unbeatable” record of 714 career home runs, which also was a crucial moment for the promotion of black athletes in America. You can also read up on how the Braves are not only the baseball team of the South, but also the most controversial team in baseball (at least since the Cleveland Indians changed their name to the Cleveland Guardians), which still plays the Tomahawk Chop (though less prominently than before) and used to have an “Indian chief” run around the field and stay in an outfield teepee in the 1980s, who went by the name of Chief Noc-A-Homa (knock a homer). The one complaint that I have about the stadium is that it is far away from the city center and rather inconvenient.

While I did not have time to go and try all of the various culinary delights of Atlanta, the South has excellent food halls, and I highly recommend grabbing a meal and a few drinks and snacks at Ponce City Market. The market offers a great variety of food and retail shops and is an old historic factory building that was previously a Sears catalogue facility. The building is a historical landmark and the market was opened in 2014, giving it a mesh of old meets new.

While in only a day and a half I got to do a lot in Atlanta, my time in each place that I described was very rushed and I wish that my time in Atlanta had been at least twice as long. A couple of places that I did not get to see were the beautiful urban Piedmont Park, with its lake, beautiful trees, and wonderful views of downtown, nor did I go to the Center for Civil and Human Rights at Pemberton Place, as with limited time I knew I would go to several such museums in neighboring Alabama. I also did not get a chance to see the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum, nor the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park in Plains, Georgia, a couple hours south of Atlanta, where the former president, a couple weeks shy of 100, still lives, making it not fully open to the public yet. In recent years, Atlanta has become one of the entertainment capitals of the country, being a center of the hip hop and rap scene in America, as well as rivaling Los Angeles with its developing television and movie scene. While I am glad that I did not go during the sweltering summer, when the town is often called Hotlanta, I recommend that you visit one of our country’s most exciting cities, Atlanta, Georgia, a city that I would be greatly excited to visit again, and next time spend more time.

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