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Buckhead
The affluent white suburb of Buckhead is a trendy area of glitzy, youthful malls and swanky hotels.
Within the space of two and a half blocks of Peachtree at Paces Ferry Road,
celebrity residents such as Elton John can enjoy over a hundred top-quality restaurants.
Tucked away nearby, permanent exhibits at the superb Atlanta History Center ,
130 W Paces Ferry Rd (Mon-Sat 10am-5.30pm, Sun noon-5.30pm; $10; tel 404/814-4000, ),
cover everything from Civil War black politics to women's history, while temporary
installations detail city-specific events and personalities. There are also tours of two houses
in the extensive grounds: the Swan House , a ponderous 1920s mock-classical mansion, and the Tullie Smith Farm ,
an antebellum farmhouse and garden. For a further taste of the Tara-style Old South, tour the Governors Mansion ,
391 W Paces Ferry Rd (Tues-Thurs 10-11.30am; free).
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Downtown Atlanta
Downtown Atlanta is for the most part the usual big-city concentration of glimmering skyscrapers,
transformed and overhauled for the 1996 Olympics. Its highlight, however, and the only place open after dark,
is Underground Atlanta (or "the Underground"), a four-block subterranean maze of shops, stalls,
restaurants and bars on the original site of the city (effectively buried in the late nineteenth century
by the construction of railroad viaducts). In the 1970s the district, ranged around Five Points MARTA station,
was a crime-ridden wasteland, but, thanks to Andrew Young's dream of a revitalized downtown,
it's now one of the liveliest - albeit very touristy - pockets of the city. The underground labyrinth of cobbled gas-lit streets,
restored to their original appearance and dotted with historical markers, is reached by steps from a piazza buzzing with street performers.
The eastern side of the piazza is dominated by the super-glossy World of Coca-Cola pavilion
(June-Aug Mon-Sat 9am-6pm, Sun 11am-6pm; Sept-May Mon-Sat 9am-5pm, Sun noon-6pm; $6, children $3; tel 404/676-5151).
This three-story spin through Coca-Cola's history, from its origins in the non-air-conditioned nineteenth-century Hotlanta,
through the evolution of the famed contour bottle "embraced by generations" to "the Real Thing," is surprisingly fun.
On the third floor you can quench your thirst with a whole host of coke products from all over the world,
such as Stoney Ginger Beer from South Africa or Japan's Vegita Beta.
Northwest of the Underground, the CNN Center - a structure that was originally an upmarket shopping mall,
and still holds a few small stores - daily achieves a global reach undreamed of by Coca-Cola's founders.
The Cable News Network is just one of eleven television networks in the empire developed by Ted Turner,
and sold to Time-Warner in 1995. Aptly, among the thousands of MGM classics now stamped with the Turner
logo is Gone with the Wind - witness the plethora of Tara, Scarlett and Rhett knickknacks in the giftshop.
Unlike the Coke pavilion, this is a working facility - adrenalin-fueled, forty-minute guided tours (daily 9am-6pm, every 15min; $8)
rush past frazzled producers and toothy anchorpersons - but you can videotape yourself reading the (real) news of the day ($15 in the giftshop).
If you're desperate to be on TV, time your visit to coincide with the 3.30pm filming of TalkBack Live ,
when visitors are invited to be part of the audience.
Several downtown blocks just northeast of the CNN Center were razed prior to the 1996 Olympics to make way for the open space of Centennial Park,
intended as a focus for public festivities during the Games; forced to close almost immediately by the pipe-bombing that killed two revelers,
the park has failed to find a post-Olympic identity, and rumors abound that it too will soon be redeveloped.
The Atlanta Public Library , in Margaret Mitchell Square at Carnegie Way and Forsyth Street (Mon-Thurs 9am-9pm, Fri & Sat 9am-6pm, Sun 2-6pm),
has a room devoted to Gone with the Wind author and Atlanta native Margaret Mitchell . The novel (1936) and film (1939) helped perpetuate popular
images of the genteel plantation South - as well, of course, as the burning of Atlanta. Fantastically popular, the novel took just six weeks to
sell enough copies to form a tower fifty times higher than the Empire State Building. The tiny downtown branch of the Atlanta History Center is also here,
with videos on city history and information on historical tours. Midtown's High Museum of Art has a downtown satellite gallery at 30 John Wesley Dobbs Ave
at Peachtree Street, featuring smaller photography and folk art collections (Mon-Fri 11am-5pm; free).
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Midtown
Midtown stretches from Ponce de Leon Avenue, lined with funky restaurants, to 26th Street. In recent years,
it has become dominated by massive skyscrapers - look out for One Atlantic Center , a spiky, futuristic monstrosity at 15th
and Peachtree streets that was designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee. The wildly flamboyant Art Deco Fox Theater ,
660 Peachtree St at Ponce de Leon (tel 404/881-2100), with its strong Moorish theme, should also not be missed.
Unless you buy a ticket for one of its fairly mainstream theatrical shows, the only way to see the theater is on an organized tour
(Mon, Wed & Thurs 10am, Sat 10am & 11am; $5).
A few blocks north, the huge Woodruff Arts Center includes the main branch of the High Museum of Art ,
1280 Peachtree St NE (Tues-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; $8, free Thurs after 1pm; tel 404/773-HIGH, ).
You'll find excellent contemporary and non-western exhibitions - particularly strong on African art - on display in the
ultra-white glass-and-steel building, designed by Richard Meier. There's also a good giftshop, and a peaceful little espresso bar in the airy atrium.
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Stone Mountain
Just half an hour's drive east of Atlanta, Stone Mountain State Park (park daily 6am-midnight; attractions daily spring & summer 10am-9pm,
rest of year 10am-5pm; $6 per vehicle) centers around a huge dome of granite with a five-mile circumference. You can climb it in around 45 minutes,
or take a cable car to the top, and there are various train rides and so on, but most visitors come to see the massive 90ft by 190ft relief of
Confederates Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Work on the colossal sculpture was started in 1924 by Gutzon Borglum,
who went on to carve Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, but was not completed until 1970. Concessions and giftshops down below supply endless souvenir kitsch,
and the nightly lasershow in summer culminates with Elvis's gut-wrenching rendition of Dixie (9.30pm; free with entrance to park).
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Grant Park
Directly south of downtown, Grant Park is home to the Cyclorama , a huge circular painting (50ft by 900ft) depicting the Battle of Atlanta,
executed by a group of German and Polish artists in 1885-86. Cycloramas used to travel around the country as entertainment in the days before movies;
you sit inside the circle of the painting and the whole auditorium slowly rotates twice. During the second rotation, a guide provides interesting details
about the painting; look out in particular for the hole in the wagon, originally used as a fire escape. In the accompanying museum,
treating the war from the point of view of the average soldier, banks of distressing statistics are interspersed with photos and memorabilia
(daily: summer 9.20am-5.30pm; rest of year 9.20am-4.30pm; $5). Adjacent, Zoo Atlanta ( ) features giant pandas from Chengdu and re-creations of
African rainforests and other habitats (daily: summer 9am-6.30pm; rest of year 9.30am-5.30pm; $15). In summer, a special zoo shuttle runs
from Five Points MARTA stion to the park.
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West End
The West End , Atlanta's oldest quarter, dating from 1835, is a slightly shabby but slowly reviving district southwest of downtown.
Historically a black residential area, it remains so today: a buzzy, more upbeat counterpoint to Sweet Auburn. Georgia's only museum
dedicated to African-American and Haitian art is displayed at the Hammonds House , 503 Peeples St (Tues-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat & Sun 1-5pm; $2),
and you can tour the 1910 Beaux Arts Herndon Home , 587 University Place (Tues-Sat 10am-4.30pm; $5), designed and lived in by Alonzo Herndon,
the freed slave who became a barber, founded the Atlanta Life Insurance Company and went on to be the city's first black millionaire.
Together with his wife (the director of Atlanta University's drama department), and such black luminaries as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington,
he participated in setting up progressive black institutions. The mansion's grand interior, built and crafted by black artisans,
contains the family's original furnishings, including some fine Venetian glass.
The fascinating Wren's Nest , home of Br'er Rabbit author Joel Chandler Harris, at 1050 R.D. Abernathy Blvd (Tues-Sat 10am-4pm, Sun 1-4pm; $3),
skewers preconceptions about the Uncle Remus stories propagated by the racist images of Disney's Song of the South .
Harris, a friend of Mark Twain, was a respected journalist whose column for the Atlanta Constitution retold the slave stories he had heard
while training as a printer on a plantation newspaper; recently the dialect has been reappraised as authentically African and the
stories as valuable affirmation of a black folk tradition. Regular storytelling sessions take place in the peaceful, untamed garden.
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