Cynthia Tucker - Staff
Wednesday, August 4, 2004

The executives at the Atlanta Botanical Garden and their friends at the Piedmont Park Conservancy want to chop down 77 trees on a hilltop acre at the northern edge of Piedmont Park to build a six-story, 800-car parking garage.

What's next? Will People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals hold pig roasts to raise money? Will the Southern Baptists invite the raunchy misogynist Eminem to provide entertainment at their next convention?

It's absurd that a group of people entrusted with the responsibility of preserving parkland, exalting the gifts of nature and spreading the joys to be found among flora want to chop down trees for a parking garage. Next thing you know, the mothers of MADD will be swilling down martinis at a half-price happy hour.

Just like everybody else in this car-mad city, it seems, the executives of garden and park have automobile addiction. Atlanta has now surpassed Los Angeles as the poster child for traffic gridlock and air pollution. Nobody builds anything here without including the specs for a multilevel parking garage, sometimes as elaborately designed as the building itself.

In Atlanta, a so-called transit-oriented development, which is supposed to emphasize walking, bike paths and public transit, actually resembles the Perimeter at rush hour --- acres of asphalt covered in cars. Witness Lindbergh City Center, the not-transit-oriented development at the Lindbergh MARTA station, where developers swore they had to include lots of parking spaces to entice residents and shop owners.

A similarly specious argument has taken hold at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, where executive director Mary Pat Matheson argues that she must "resolve the parking issue." It's a strange argument, given that the garden is enjoying a spectacularly successful season. For the last three months, attendance at the garden has been twice as high as during the same period last year. Limited parking hasn't affected attendance.

Matheson threatens to taint her success. The garden has done so well because she was visionary enough to attract renowned glass sculptor Dale Chihuly, whom she commissioned to design pieces to exhibit here. "Chihuly in the Garden" has drawn 120,000 visitors since it opened on May 1.

Matheson also has taken a page from the marketing plans of other nonprofit institutions, such as the High Museum of Art and the Fernbank Museum of Natural History, which have organized activities to draw younger visitors who don't usually go to museums or botanical gardens. Those plans have worked well, too.

Matheson says she wants to build a garage only for the convenience of her car-oriented customers --- not for the revenues it would eventually produce. But the money clearly interests the conservancy, which would share the proceeds, easing its never-ending fund-raising struggles.

Having served on many nonprofit boards, I can sympathize with the desire to find a sure-fire money stream. But the park has no more business raising money from a parking garage than the Methodists do from a strip club.

Though Atlanta still likes to lay claim to its origins as a green city built on a piedmont, during the 1990s, the ever-growing, ever-building, ever-sprawling metro area bulldozed about 67 acres a day, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission. In addition, the city itself ranks very low in the acreage it devotes to parks.

While Atlanta reserves less than 4 percent of its land mass for parks, the national average is about 9 percent. I'm struggling to see how all this adds up to a crying need for another parking garage.

If it does, then let's just build a Pepsi museum in the middle of town.