Photograph by Alex Potemkin/Getty Images
You can have your Space Needle. Your Chrysler Building. Your Burj Khalifa. Your Sears Tower, or whatever they’re calling it now. Give me Bank of America Plaza—the tallest building in Atlanta for more than 30 years, a certifiable supertall skyscraper—any day. I’ve heard friends describe it as our city’s eternal cigarette, freshly ashed and pointed heavenward. But to me, the tower is more like a lighthouse. At night, it beams with that brilliant, undeniable orange glow, through its gold-plated spire, across so many treetops, over our wonderfully nonsensical patchwork of neighborhoods, clear to Stone Mountain and Duluth and probably the moon, signaling that I may have been lost in some journey elsewhere, but I have indeed found the safe shores of my Atlanta home.
The rest of Atlanta’s skyline makes almost no sense. But in a lovable and somehow appropriate way.
In contrast to those more mature, compact skylines, from downtown Los Angeles to Chicago and Philly, Atlanta’s is awkward right now, having entered its pimple-faced, growth-spurting teenager phase. It’s proud, captivating, powerful, beautiful, gaudy in places—and absolutely disjointed, with far too many gaps. Just try to take a cohesive photo of the metro’s clusters of spires from downtown to Buckhead and the crown-topped royalty of Sandy Springs. They’re all over the place. They obey what seems like no logic at all, and in that way, they reflect Atlanta’s spaghetti bowl of streets, its devil-may-care population booms. It’s like a flowering, futuristic garden of sky-high commerce that nobody’s really tending.
Say what you will about intown’s scattershot street vibrancy and traffic atherosclerosis, the skyline leaves no doubt: We’re not living in some plucky Southern town anymore. This is a bona fide metropolis. Only five metro areas in all of the United States are larger. And somehow, these really tall buildings, with so many construction cranes toiling among them, instill gratitude in a former Rust Belt kid that I get to be part of today’s commotion, this skyward push.
My favorite time to walk my dog, Rocco, is at night in deep winter. Once the Halloween and Christmas lights are packed away, and all the deciduous leaves finally fall, we scout the quiet Eastside streets for raccoons, rabbits, and surprise skyline vantages, peering through bare branches to our tallest landmarks: the pyramid-topped One Atlantic Center, the dual-crowned 191 Peachtree Tower, and the stair-stepping Georgia-Pacific Tower, all blazing in the west. Knowing they are there—and that I’ve earned a spot among them, in a place where so many people clearly want to be—imbues me with a renewed sense of accomplishment, I suppose, simply because I’m here and walking around.
But after living in Atlanta for 17 years—and making a living, for much of that time, chronicling the city’s physical evolution—I’d say the best way to take in our skyline is from the western side of town, during sunset on a clear day, in any month. Watch the glassy cylinder that is The Westin Peachtree Plaza blaze pinkly in the day’s final light. See our 1,023-foot-tall lighthouse flicker to life. And feel that warmth in your belly, that ease of home, the embrace of a place that will harbor you, if you lean back and let it.
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