BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI

 ATLANTA -- It was all here in the narrow street before the stately old U.S. courthouse: the familiar chants behind the metal barricades, the flag-waving, the shouted insults, the TV cables snaking down the sidewalk, the jousting of a mob of cameras and reporters. Even a bunch of bananas tossed in the street.

 Elianville, and all its attendant passion and weirdness, came north from Little Havana to downtown Atlanta on Thursday, albeit in miniature form, and, perhaps to Atlantans' relief, only for the day.

 Inside, before an ornate courtroom packed with reporters and lawyers, three federal appellate judges soberly heard oral arguments from attorneys for the government, for Elian Gonzalez's Miami relatives, and for the boy's father, locked in fierce legal combat over the child's fate.

 Outside was all street theater, noisy but peaceful in the main. Some 50 demonstrators, most of them local Cuban Americans, but a few from Miami and Tampa, vented anger at the federal government through voice and placard. They implored the court to allow Elian to stay in the United States over the objections of his father. Some showed up before dawn for the 9 a.m. hearing.

 ``Freedom for Elian!'' they chanted, loosely marching in circles before the courthouse doors.

 SIDEWALK DEBATES

 They verbally sparred with, and sometimes shouted down, a small number of besuited fathers' rights activists who want the court to bless Juan Miguel Gonzalez's return home to Cuba with his son. They engaged in heated sidewalk debates with passing Atlantans, including Gary Crosby, an African American, who, pushing a stroller with his three young daughters, angrily defended Juan Miguel Gonzalez's wishes for his son.

 ``You are making a spectacle here,'' he told one elderly Cuban-American protester. ``Why don't you listen to the feelings of true Americans?''

 The demonstrators bravoed the arrival of Elian's cousin, Marisleysis Gonzalez, of the family's retinue of lawyers, and, almost at the last minute, of Elian's great uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, and his spokesman, Armando Gutierrez, swarming them as they might movie stars.

 And they lustily booed the arrival and departure of Juan Miguel's lawyer, Gregory Craig, whose brief comments to the press were drowned out by catcalls from the crowd: ``Communist, communist, communist!''

 Juan Miguel, ensconced in a private Maryland retreat with Elian and his family, did not attend the hearing.

 NO ARRESTS

 Demonstrators on both sides of the Elian divide, however, were far outnumbered by the hordes of reporters and federal and Atlanta police officers who patrolled on foot, horseback and bicycle. The police cordoned off several blocks around the courthouse and kept a wary eye on the free-flowing crowd of demonstrators, media and curiosity-seekers that filled one block of Forsyth Street in the historic Fairlie-Poplar district, now on the upswing after years of neglect.

 Aside from some minor jostling, there were no problems and no arrests. Just to be sure, police confiscated any sticks or flagpoles carried by demonstrators.

 The hubbub, muffled by heavy red drapes, filtered into the high-ceilinged Courtroom 338, where the presiding judge made an unusual acknowledgement of the unusual scene within and without the usually quiet courthouse.

 ``I want to thank all of you for coming. Truth is, we don't get many visitors here,'' said U.S. Circuit Judge James Edmondson with a small smile.

 IRRESISTIBLE SCENE

 So irresistible was the spectacle that it stopped passersby in their tracks and glued children in a second-story day-care center across the street to the windows for much of the morning.

 A young couple, Alice Chen and Jim Wolbrink, prompted an uproar from some Cuban exile demonstrators when they unfurled a homemade banner that read: ``Free Elian from CANF,'' a reference to the Cuban American National Foundation, a key player in the Miami relatives' battle to keep Elian. Some demonstrators held back others who tried to strike the couple.

 Chen, from Boston, then dumped several bananas in the street, in imitation of protesters who have done the same on the steps of Miami's City Hall as a comment on the political fallout from the April 22 government raid that reunited Elian and his father.

 While Chen and a demonstrator exchanged shouts, just behind them a smiling local man, headphones over his ears, eyes shut to his own world, put hands on hips and gyrated funkily to a private beat.

 RELATIVES SILENT

 Only one vital element was missing from the mix: The usually voluble Miami relatives and their lawyers maintained a subdued silence, a posture they have adopted since shortly after the government raiders knocked open the family's front door and took Elian away.

 Marisleysis Gonzalez, looking thin and tired, mustered only a small wave of the hand for her cheering supporters as she entered the courthouse. The family left Atlanta for Miami shortly after the hearing, issuing no statements and giving no interviews.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald