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Cole Walker,
owner of a 2-year-old private school in downtown's Fairlie-Poplar
district, is the sort of character that Atlanta has been attracting
for 150 years. He's a transplant (from Alabama), energetic, talks
your ear off, wants to build things. He's an entrepreneur, pro-tech,
popular. He studied engineering at college, invented a brain-wave
soother, got into real estate, became a sort of theorist in education
- and he's just 31. I looked him up at his New Century School, in
the bright basement of the elegant old Healey Building, so I could
ask him what he thought about downtown's progress and problems.
Walker also lives downtown, in the William-Oliver
Building. But it was hard getting him to reflect on the area's pluses
and minuses. "I'm such an eternal optimist," he said, "that
all the negatives seem to take a back seat." His high-ceilinged
brick office on the second floor looks out at the trees that shade
the corner of Broad and Poplar streets. Some of his windows face the
handsome but decrepit buildings that may get demolished to make way
for a new Georgia State University classroom building. (Walker supports
Georgia State, but he hopes the best buildings in that block can be
saved.) He eats at the neighborhood's restaurants and shops in its
stores. When school's in session he takes the kids out into the neighborhood
all the time. This summer's special camp sessions have scattered dozens
of children across Woodruff Park and deep into the workings of MARTA.
Negatives? "The usual loitering, hanging out and panhandling...also,
Five Points is the place where all the ambulances come through with
all the sirens... "But the good news," he quickly adds,
"is that their numbers seem to have dropped both absolutely and
in relation to the rising street population of residents, workers
and visitors. There's just no comparison with the scene of a couple
of years ago," Walker says.
He likes the attitude of Fairlie-Poplar's
hard-core boosters and residents: "They're going ahead whether
you like it or not - they just grind and push and grind and push."
Partly as a result, there are now a dozen preschools and day care
facilities in the historic district. Walker's New Century school -
kindergarten through eighth grade - this fall could grow to 110 pupils.
He's already looking for more space, and maybe someday the school
will include two primary schools as well as a middle school and a
high school. "The idea is to fill downtown with kids." Other
hopeful signs: Tourists now walk the streets downtown, even in the
evening. "And the Atlanta Arts Festival, over the long haul,
is going to have a huge impact," he predicts, when it moves to
Fairlie-Poplar this fall. I guess I'm more inclined than Walker is
to notice trouble. A lot of people who work downtown still aren't
convinced that the city and the police really want to clean up the
interrelated sicknesses of homelessness, begging, vagrancy and the
reek of urine in our sticky summer heat. Yet Walker's right. It's
"light-years" from two years ago. And his kids in their
red caps really do cheer things up.
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