What percentage of people refer to Nashville as "Nashvegas"? Whatever happened to "Music City USA"?

What percentage of people refer to Birmingham as "The Ham"? Whatever happened to "The Magic City"?

What percentage of people refer to Atlanta as "The ATL"? Whatever happened to...Ok, Atlanta never had a good nickname. Sure, there was "The City Too Busy To Hate" back in the '60s, but let's face it, that's very lame and presumptious. Just because Atlanta prospered while much of the South floundered doesn't mean it was because Atlanta had the intelligence/civility/compassion market cornered. A lot happened, some of it for a reason and some of it by chance that made Atlanta what it is today, "The City Too Busy For Anyone To Really Want To Live In".

Even though Georgia rightfully is coined "The Peach State", it has also been known as "The Empire State of the South", a nod to the State of New York. That's not particularly inspiring, but maybe more so than Birmingham being "The Pittsburgh of the South" or Nashville inexplicably being "The Athens (Greece) of the South". The whole "peach" association is illegitimately connected with Atlanta specifically, though, not just the State of Georgia. Look no further than the oft-mentioned Peachtree Streets that supposedly cover Atlanta, or the Peach Bowl, played annually in Atlanta, albeit in the Georgia Dome. Thankfully, there has been an effort in recent years to change the branding of the game to the Chick-Fil-A Bowl (Chick-Fil-A being based in Atlanta). This can only be because the closest you'll come to a peach in Atlanta is on the back of a truck driving up from downstate.

The mention of the Georgia Dome seems to illustrate the notion that all of Georgia is somehow intrinsically linked to Atlanta. Everyone from Georgia (with the likely exception of Savannah folks) seems to think of themselves as from Atlanta, but it's pretty easy to see why. Atlanta is the namesake of hardly anything that makes Atlanta most identifiable. There's the aforementioned Georgia Dome, Georgia Tech, The Georgia World Congress Center, Six Flags Over Georgia (home of the Georgia Cyclone) and The Georgia Aquarium. Even the arena football team is the Georgia Force, but nobody watches that anyway.