Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport:

The New York Times has picked up a story I reported first. I said most of what I wanted to say in the earlier post, but I'd like to respond to one point made in the article.

The argument basically goes like this: they tore down the terminal Hartsfield built and replaced it with a new one. Therefore the airport doesn't look like it did when Hartsfield built it, so it's not really his legacy anymore. No, I'm not buying it. Though the physical structure is different from Hartsfield's day, Hartsfield lured major airlines (Eastern. anyone remember them?) to Atlanta at the time that the hub-and-spokes structure was establishing itself. Airlines looking for a southern hub ultimately had to choose between Atlanta and Birmingham and thanks to Hartsfield's incessant lobbying, chose Atlanta. There's a pretty good discussion of this in The Temple Bombing, a compelling book about anti-Senitism and 1960s Atlanta (the book's title event occurs in Driving Miss Daisy also) which has the added virtue of being written by the mother of a girl I went to high school with).

Jackson couldn't have done this. Not because he wasn't a great leader, not because he wouldn't have wanted to, but because it was 20 years too late. By 1980, airlines had decided where their hubs would be and they generally weren't willing to move them to another city in the same region. After all, why would they spend all that money and hassle when they oculd just stay where they were?

If it weren't for Hartsfield, Jackson's state-of-the-art terminal could only have been built for a commuter airport and Birmingham would be the heart of te "New South."