>1. COA greatly botched their response to the icestorm that
>occurred that weekend...and they still haven't learned their
>lesson.

The City responded aptly and the roads and MARTA kept running; if anyone screwed up, it was the DOT dealing with the northern interstates. And it's rare as hell that we get those sorts of ice storms that late in the winter as is.



>2. They've crushed any decent nightlife. People blame the Ray
>Lewis incident, but that was the perfect catalyst for
>leadership to keep undesirables (read: Blacks) out of Buckhead
>and turn that land over to developers on the cusp of the
>housing boom. Drinking hours got rolled back and clubs
>bulldozed. Now, Atlanta's larger clubs are outside the city in
>fucking strip malls...and they're just getting to work on the
>hole that used to be where the Buckhead establishments used to
>be. Not much entertainment is centralized or easily
>accessible and ATL sure as hell ain't walkable.

Buckhead needed to die and nobody is really nostalgic for it. At all. The club hours have been what they are for years now, all over the city, and scenes of nightlife have sprung up organically in places that it needed to be. The "major clubs" that are outside the city were always there and never competed with the faux upscale nightlife that was in buckhead and now rules midtown/west-midtown.


>3. Traffic/ lack of decent public transportation. MARTA's
>woes are well documented and the people who have the means to
>fix it view PT as a tool of the commies and its users as
>indigent takers. But with everything in Atlanta being insanely
>spread out and its highways always extremely congested are you
>really going to want to drive from midtown to chamblee-tucker
>25 min or more away to party during your SB weekend? What
>about getting around the city proper otherwise? The only
>thing MARTA can do with any certainty is get you to the Dome
>and the airport.

What, you think people are taking public transit Superbowl weekend in NOLA? In Tampa? In Detroit? Houston? pssh...not happening. There are cabs. There are strings of high end hotels that are actually on MARTA. It's not some Atlanta only thing that public transit doesn't "go anywhere" and it's not something that keeps events out of this city (hold for that point). And nobody is partying in Chambodia. There are four times more high-end hotels and bars in downtown/midtown Atlanta today than in 2000.

>4. Downtown needs to be solved. Right now its a damn wasteland
>overrun by homeless, tired storefronts, and a few tourist trap
>restaurants. Underground is useless...although its clubs are
>the only places that can serve liquor until 4am...but still no
>one goes there. Peachtree Pine homeless shelter is the
>epicenter of it all, but there's not much of anything of any
>consequence south of North Avenue.

Peachtree Pine Shelter's sad history is coming to a close but, besides, there is nothing over there in the Civic Center area for a tourist to even be concerned with; nothing north of Morton's or south of the Fox but churches and homeless people anyway. Downtown downtown is in a lot better shape than it has been for a while, if you just grant that Underground/5 Points is a lost cause. The Peachtree corridor is okay, as a tourist trap, and the Rialto area has some decent bars and restaurants. Retail is never going to return downtown, but that doesn't really matter (retail is dead and dying in America, as is), and the resurgence of Edgewood/Sweet Auburn under the guidance of kick-ass extraordinaire Kwanza Hall can't be ignored or discounted. If you so choose, you are soon going to be able to get on a free trolley in front of the Omni (say) and go to the Soundtable (say) without having to worry about navigating the GSU wasteland between the two.

>Atlanta is a great city, I'd love for a SB to be held here
>again. But it frustrates me how deceptive and disingenuous
>they've been to literally ram this stadium through.

The dome sucks as a football watching place and was only ever shoehorned into the Falcons future as a desperation Olympic move. It was built before the modernist movement toward "experience" stadiums and no amount of retrofitting is ever going to make a multipurpose indoor stadium make sense in the south. Facts are Blank is picking up 70% of the damn tab and almost all of the money the state would have to kick in is already there and can't be spent on anything but "stadiums" on state land, aka, papering over the Dome again and again. Why do that?


But, really: 1) They gave a SB to Indy. 2) We still host huge events despite your case against Atlanta (final four in a few months). 3) Strippers need to eat.