I occasionally see tourists, especially from other countries, at Underground.  Talk about a confused look on their faces wondering why it is included on their tourist list of places to go see, but they wander around anyway without a clue, no situational awareness at all.  I'm surprised there is not more crime against tourists there, cause it's sure not a result of the APD.

If you come back you should check out the botanical gardens, I love it there and it's right there at Piedmont Park.


ETA, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra is also fun to go when they are playing. I prefer Midtown to Downtown.

Just like many cities, nothing to worry about in the touristy downtown areas. Head over to East Point, Bankhead, South DeKalb and that's where you might run into trouble.

Agree on both counts!  I ran under that skywalk the Botanical Garden has way up in the tree cover. That looked really cool!

Midtown certainly has a more up-to-date, vibrant feel.  Downtown had some stale-ness to it.  Peachtree Center, for example, was pretty sad.

I am being serious, keep your head on a swivel . Three times I have been almost mugged, and all three times it was in the parking lot of the hotel at night. I say almost because when they saw I had my Glock they realized they needed to be somewhere else.

I love the Vortex. Triple coronary bypass please.

Best view of atlanta is in the rear view mirror while on I-75 north

Some of the worst food in Atlanta

It's Clermont. At least it was the last time I got thrown out of there years ago.



 

This.


Six dancers, eleven titties. You will never forget it.

You were mostly in the tourist areas, which the APD tries to keep fairly clean, and, admittedly, the crime rates are lower than when I was going to Georgia Tech in the late '80's and early '90's.    I stayed in some condos on Peachtree Street for DragonCon, less than a month ago, right across from the Hyatt Regency.  One of the guys I'd seen working at the Hyatt lived in the condos, and after I joked with him for a minute or two about the craziness of the convention, warned me not to park in the parking lot there and said he'd never own a vehicle living downtown due to the high risk of break-ins.  That condominium building had armed security working there for a reason.  I shared an elevator with another resident, noticed his jaw was wired shut, overheard him tell someone else that it had been broken in a robbery as he was leaving another friend's condo a few blocks away.  While on summer break from college and again when I graduated, I worked armed security in the Atlanta area.  There were some neighborhoods my company couldn't put me because a white boy by himself would be too much of a target, it was OK if I worked there with a black partner (right next to the Atlanta prison was one of those, not that far from Zoo Atlanta).  Heck, in the mid-90's, when I worked at one of the universities in the Atlanta University Center (a cluster of historically black colleges and universities), one of the students I was friendly with warned me to stay away from the liberal arts school - the main criteria for getting a job there was participation in the civil rights movement and they might very well incite a lynch mob against me with their rants about how whites were holding blacks down, and that was on a university campus coming from faculty.  Imagine what it's like in some of the neighborhoods where nobody even finished high school, much less went to college?



 

Yep, lived here all my life and just because OP got lucky doesn't mean Atlanta doesn't have it's problems.  I won't let my wife and kids come to the city and hang out unless I am with them....day or night.  You might get lucky, you might pay the price.  I refuse to risk my families life.

 

I think some of you guys are afraid of leaving mom's basement.


Either that or you've been picked on in school so badly that your scared of your own shadows.

I've lived in metro Atlanta for 26 years...5 of them in Clayton county, and routinely go to the city for various entertainment venues etc...I have never had an issue. Never felt threatened, ridden MARTA hundreds of times and have yet to have a fright.


It must be that I'm a real intimidating looking middle aged nerdy white man.


Some of you really got to get out more.

I really hate that city.  I have been seeing a girl that lives there for 3 years off and on, have only been down to see her once if that tells you anything....she always comes here.  

I use to go down there a lot years ago, hung out in little five points a lot, but I just don't have the patience anymore for the traffic and such.

I had at least two robbery attempts, one armed with a knife, my freshman year at Georgia Tech.  In later years, making it clear I was armed convinced the predators that they should hunt elsewhere.  My ex worked for Georgia Tech, she had two incidents where she nearly had to draw in two weeks, one right next to campus (heck, by now it may be ON campus, with the way Tech campus has grown), the other literally at our apartment door in Dekalb County (black guy tried to follow her up the stairs to our apartment).  She was pregnant for both of those encounters, so probably looked vulnerable.  A year or so prior to that, she had to take MARTA back from the airport (I'd had wisdom teeth surgery while she was out of town and wasn't driving far), and when she got off at the Doraville station (last stop on the line, for those not familiar with Atlanta), had a guy approach her asking "Where we going, baby?".  He backed off when she dropped her luggage and got ready to fight, yeah, THAT was a panicky phone call to haul ass to the station to pick her up...  Prior to dating her, girlfriend and some friends had a car break down at the Edgewood exit off I-75/85 North, they had at least one gun flashed at them as they were waiting for me to arrive.



I've been here a year longer than you have, maybe I just pay more attention?  Oh, that's not counting the time when I was in Army ROTC and we were contacted about having some cadets serve as escorts for a debutante ball, which happened to be at the old train station at Underground.  When we went back out in civvies after the ball, our group was approached about recreational pharmaceuticals, and when we declined, I noticed that we were being followed.  Lightly flipping up the back of my shirt to show my SIG convinced them that while some members of our group were not paying attention, some were (and one member of that group is now command staff at APD).  That would have been in '92 or so...  Heck, one of my friends moved up near me in East Cobb after interrupting an attempted burglary of his apartment - he'd been up all night at work and was catching some sleep before driving up to his parent's property in Tennessee to do so some shooting.  Was waiting inside the door when the perp busted it open, to find my friend locked and loaded, he found an excuse to be elsewhere pretty quickly.  He moved up to my area and had to give up on being a scanner junky, nothing to listen to other than the occasional traffic stop or dumbass teenager running into a tree.



 

He won't be able to see the hills in the dark after it takes him 3 hours to go from downtown to the hills in the God awful traffic.

Did the OP survive his trip? Running for his life down 'round GA State?

I tell everyone that's never been here they have no idea. I've seen traffic in NYC, San Fran, So. Kali, etc and Atlanta is up there with them. Locals around here have done a horrible job with 'planning.' I have a good friend that has his house up on the market a half mile from the new stadium, even in a hot market he can't sell it without absolutly dumping it. Yes it's bad, you plan you work/home/entertainment around traffic flows and paths.

My wife and I made it 5 feet into it before I said "fuck that" and turned us around. I wouldn't go down there by myself and I sure as hell ain't taking my wife there with me.

Looking poor and ugly can often keep you from being accosted.