How the Atlanta airport, now 100 years old, became the world's busiest

It’s an unlikely success story.

An abandoned racetrack that went bankrupt becomes the world’s busiest airport.

But Jackson McQuigg, a transportation historian at the Atlanta History Center and its VP of properties, says it’s no accident. “It was not luck. It was pluck, if you will.”

The success of what is now Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, he argues, is the determination of Atlanta’s leaders to aim high and refuse to let the odds get in the way.

“It’s the boosterism, which you see as a throughline throughout Atlanta’s history,” he said.

It’s the “phoenix rising from the ashes,” Bo Spalding, a History Center research assistant, added.

The airport’s is a story of how city leaders, including not-yet-Mayor William Hartsfield, made a long shot 1920s bid on crucial airma