How Baseball Could Solve a Terrible Problem

One of These Days: Furman Bisher Blvd.

I have just squandered an hour or two of my life trying to solve the maze of streets named Peachtree in the northern Atlanta suburbs.

At $4 a gallon, this isn't funny.

My two sisters live in the northern burbs – half an hour apart, a long way from Queens. Between them are a staggering number of streets named Peachtree – Peachtree Corners, Peachtree Parkway, Peachtree Industrial Boulevard.

In the dark, on badly-engineered roads with wretched signage, this can be downright frightening.

I have seen estimates that over 70 streets in the Atlanta area have the word Peachtree in them.

This suggests a staggering failure of imagination, if all the planners of the New South cannot do better than slap the name Peachtree on bisecting boulevards.

But I have a proposal. And it involves the great American pastime.

The Atlanta Braves have been in town since 1966, and by now have accumulated enough history to provide heroic names to replace most of those Peachtrees.  

What makes it worse is that I just read that the name peachtree just may have stemmed from the type of pine, called a pitch tree, common to the south. How fitting if this regional jumble were based on a mistake.

I learned to like Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics (we lived in the very sweet Inman Park neighborhood near downtown) and later when my son’s family lived in Inman Park and moved out to Roswell. March is a gorgeous time to visit Atlanta. So is October.

This past weekend was a flying visit for a family reunion, but whenever I have time in Atlanta I love to visit friends and old haunts. However, I have a Peachtree rule: If a restaurant or some other business is listed on something called Peachtree, I won’t even try to patronize it. Otherwise, I could be driving up and down the region from Buckhead to Norcross, looking for the right Peachtree. 

Here’s my proposal:

Keep one Peachtree St. The main drag on the spine of the hill in downtown Atlanta would seem to be the logical choice. 

Then they should name every other Peachtree after a Braves stalwart – and there have been dozens of them.

Henry Aaron? Phil Niekro? Dale Murphy? Greg Maddux? Chipper Jones? Bobby Cox. I could keep going. John Smoltz. Tom Glavine. Rico Carty.

And when they are finished with the stars, I bet there is some humble little Peachtree Circle out in the middle of nowhere, where confused out-of-town drivers sometimes blunder. One modest cul de sac could be named Francisco Cabrera Circle, in honor of the vagabond who delivered the clutch hit that put the Braves into the 1992 World Series.

Who should be in charge of this crucial task to end the anarchy on the Atlanta highways?

This task demands an eminent historian. 

I suggest the Georgia favorite who is currently blustering around the country, running for public office.

Pretty soon, Newt Gingrich is going to need a job other than soliciting funds from wealthy sponsors. It’s time to put Newt’s massive intellect to work on something truly challenging --  ending Peachtree anarchy.