" Major League City"

Abstract

This dissertation is a study of how the pursuit, advent, and popular response to professional sports in Atlanta both shaped and reflected the region’s evolving political and consumer culture during the 1960s and 1970s. It examines the concerted effort by municipal elites during this time period to acquire professional sports franchises for their city and its environs. Atlanta’s leadership succeeded at luring four major professional sports franchises to Atlanta in a six-year period (1966-1972) by securing significant public and private investments in two playing facilities in the Central Business District (CBD). Scholars of the economic history of professional sports describe the increasing geographic mobility of the major leagues in the post-World War II era as “franchise free agency.” Atlanta took advantage of this expanding market by making civic investments in two playing venues as a means of attracting franchises. This dissertation analyzes how the emerging metropolis’ negotiation of “franchise free agency” reshaped the culture, public policy, and urban planning of Atlanta. It shows how Atlanta provided a model employed by future Sunbelt cities as they pursued professional teams of their own, often luring clubs from Rust Belt cities with similarly lucrative offers of public support. This dissertation proceeds to analyze the response to professional sports in Metropolitan Atlanta in the decade after it achieved major league status. The city’s elites assumed that residents would embrace the teams and transform their tony playing facilities into twin focal points of leisure and communal pride. Instead, Atlantans from all of the region’s racial, socio-economic, and residential clusters responded apathetically to the teams. The collective shrug with which Atlantans reacted to their new franchises demonstrated the growing cultural divergence which characterized life in the booming Sunbelt center over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. In subsequent decades, civic elites in other rapidly growing Sunbelt centers believed, like their predecessors in Atlanta, that municipal investments in professional sports would provide their communities with a wellspring of unity and prestige. Residents of these metropolitan areas responded to their new stadiums and teams in the 1980s and 1990s with an apathy similar to that of Atlantans toward their teams during the 1960s and 1970s.