Atlanta Without a Car

Atlanta, Georgia, is one of the four non-stop destinations offered out of Baton Rouge Metro Airport. It is the first destination in our four-part travel series, and you may also want to read about getaways to Houston, Dallas, and Charlotte. 

Mass transit in a strange city makes me nervous. I don’t think I’m alone here. It’s a phobia I suspect plagues many travelers. And that phobia has long limited my options.

Take this story for example. The whole premise is to write a piece about visiting Atlanta without a car. And this particular city, as the first in the South to offer rail transit direct from the airport, is way ahead of the curve for that approach, dating back decades. At the end of last year, Atlanta also added a streetcar that connects the vast majority of its must-see attractions.

So I was going to keep it simple. Take the train downtown, set up in one of the hotels there, and use the streetcar to tour all the main attractions: the CNN Center, the World of Coca Cola, and the Martin Luther King Jr. historic district. Seemed like a darned good plan … until I had a chat with Chris Crenchaw, who works for the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, better known as MARTA.

“There’s just so much more when you add the bus,” she told me, following up with a couple of examples tantalizing enough to motivate me to figure out the bus connections.

“Two bus routes that are fun to take are the #2 Ponce de Leon in either direction, between the Decatur Station and North Avenue Station. This is a long, windy trip down an old Atlanta thoroughfare that passes gorgeous historical homes with ivy-filled yards, parks, and churches. Then, before you know it, you’ve transitioned into a more urban scene, a busy Krispy Kreme and lots of construction. Then soon you come up to Peachtree Street at the Fox Theatre to enter the North Avenue Station. And if you want to drift back in time to a fifties-style fast food plaza, you can walk over to the Varsity to hear “What’ll ya have” yelled out to you; just don’t leave without having a Frosted Orange! Especially on a hot day.”

Does this sound like somebody you’d like to have in the seat next to you on the bus, or what? But there’s more. She also raves about bus route 110, which travels north and south along Peachtree Street. Headed north from Five Points, it stops at the Arts Center MARTA station and continues on to the Lenox MARTA station, passing Woodruff Park, the Fox Theatre, Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell’s home, the Federal Reserve building, and the Woodruff Arts Center, where you can visit the High Museum of Art, Atlanta Symphony Hall, Alliance Theatre, Savannah College of Art & Design, and the architecturally significant Amtrak station.

“I did a school project on this building in fifth grade,” noted Crenchaw of the station, illustrating just how far back her love for her hometown began blossoming.

So my new plan is to ask you to think about planning this trip the way you’d think about buying a car. I’ll offer up a perfectly pleasant basic model, then present some options like the one above, letting you soup up the experience if you’re willing to invest a bit more (in this case, investing time to learn your way about the city’s mass transit system).

Back to that basic model, and it’s a nice one. Chris Crenchaw is not the only Atlantan who’s pretty pumped about the mass transit medium.

“My favorite part of riding it is that it’s just fun. It’s a good way to experience the sights and sounds of Atlanta,” said Scheree Rawles, director of marketing and communications for the sparkling new Atlanta Streetcar, which just began service at the end of last year. And while she concurred that the streetcar connects lots of well-known attractions, she added that there are lots of lesser-known delights along the way as well.

“It’s a couple of blocks away, but you can get off at Edgewood and walk to the historic Oakland Cemetery,” Rawles noted as example.

There you’ll find the last resting places for baseball legend Ty Cobb and Margaret Mitchell, among others. The cemetery is so popular with locals that it even hosts occasional music concerts. The streetcar also puts you in strolling range of the revitalized Edgewood District, which has become the new go-to spot for shopping, dining, and clubbing.

Another destination on the streetcar line getting rave reviews is the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, which opened in June of 2014. It’s a stunning new facility that uses state-of-the-art technology to immerse visitors in stories from the American civil rights movement of the 1960s as well as contemporary human rights issues.

One gallery is called Spark of Conviction: The Global Human Rights Gallery. “We based the Human Rights Gallery on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” explained the museum’s LaTasha Smith. (The UDHR was established by the United Nations shortly after WWII and serves as a set of principles that governments use to remain accountable for protecting the rights and freedoms of all people.)

“You’ll find personal stories of individuals fighting for freedom and equality around the world,” Smith continued. “When you enter the gallery, you will first experience the Who, Like Me, is Threatened? exhibition, which is an installation of large interactive mirrors that sense your presence and activate the experience. You will then be presented with a selection of characteristics—LGBT, Christian, Blogger, Artist. You choose one, and are then shown a short video from an individual from another country that shares that characteristic, but is experiencing injustice due to that trait.”

The museum also includes a simulated sit-in lunch counter in a gallery where visitors don headsets to get a better understanding of what the protestors experienced during the wave of such sit-ins that swept the country in 1960, including cities like Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Another gallery highlights a rotating collection of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal documents and artifacts.

Now let’s throw another transportation option into the mix. Bikes. The hot new destination for folks on two wheels is a work-in-progress rails-to-trails program called the Atlanta BeltLine, which will eventually circle the core of Atlanta. The completed sections are already hugely popular. The project was conceived in a 1999 master’s degree thesis by Georgia Tech student Ryan Gravel, who founded the non-profit Friends of the BeltLine and is making Atlanta yet another city where getting about on two wheels is easier and more fun.

“A mile from downtown, The Inman Park and Old Fourth Ward neighborhoods have just exploded. On a sunny day there’s dogs and bikes and strollers,” noted Judi Knight, a web designer and builder who also owns the Urban Oasis Bed and Breakfast, the only lodging right on the Atlanta BeltLine. Her enthusiasm for the project is unrestrained. “People come from all over,” she said, launching into a long list of restaurants, bars, and other hipster hangouts that are drawing them in, in addition to the appeal of the BeltLine itself. Places like Serpas True Food, serving up gourmet fare from a noted chef, located a block off the BeltLine in a renovated warehouse space. And then there’s Sister Louisa’s Church of the Living Room & Ping Pong Emporium, the nearby creation of artist, bartender, and collector Grant Henry.

“Grant’s a character. He collected paint-by-number religious paintings,” said Knight, explaining that Henry went on to add his own sayings to the paintings, then created an origin story, attributing them to the mysterious Sister Louisa. The legend grew and grew ... eventually into a bar quirky enough to live up to the backstory.

For those wanting to explore on two wheels, Beltline Bike Shop, handily situated just across the way from Urban Oasis, rents bikes and is the spot from which, each Saturday morning, a free bicycle tour of the BeltLine rolls.

Okay, here’s one more slightly-off-the-beaten-path option for you to consider as you build your Atlanta vacation. A short hop away on MARTA is the charming suburb of Decatur. How can you not love a community that, in inviting its citizens to write six-word stories about their hometown, inspires stuff like: “Take a stroll, feed your soul” or “Decatur: trendy brews, comfortable shoes, Subarus” or “Where the bicycles flow like wine”? The boutiques and award-winning restaurants circling a pretty town square have made it a daylong getaway for lots of Atlantans; and should your trip happen in May, there’s one more remarkable reason to visit: a lantern parade.

“People make these highly individualized things,” explained artist, designer, and lantern parade organizer Chantelle Rytter. Prior to the evening parade, she conducts workshops to help participants make their lanterns. Lots of children are expected to be among this year’s participants, in part because a number of the members of her Krewe of the Grateful Gluttons are teachers from the local school district.

And for Rytter, a lantern parade is much more than just an evening’s amusement. “It’s a perfect example about how the brilliance of individuals can illuminate the community.”

So there you have it, at least a handful of the many, many options for customizing your next visit to Atlanta, which you can explore via the links that follow.

Details. Details. Details.

• The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority’s website is filled with detailed maps and tips on how to use the system. There’s also a link to download a smartphone app. itsmarta.com.

• The Atlanta Streetcar’s website offers detailed information and links to the many adventures that await along its route. And an all day pass is just $3. streetcar.atlantaga.gov.

• visitdecaturgeorgia.com

• The Artmore Hotel: If you’re planning to make the heart of downtown Atlanta your headquarters, and one of the sleek highrise hotels there is not your style, this contemporary update of an historic building makes a good alternative. artmorehotel.com.

• If your flight is late or you’d just like to ease into the MARTA system, the first stop after the airport is College Station, to which the Hotel Indigo is immediately adjacent. hotelindigo.com.

• Urban Oasis Bed and Breakfast: If you’d like to explore Atlanta on two wheels, Urban Oasis B&B makes a perfect starting point, located as it is directly across from the Beltline Bike Shop. They’ll pick you up from a nearby MARTA stop. urbanoasisbandb.com.