Blending community enrichment with practical function is a BeltLine hallmark. The stunning stormwater retention pond in Historic Fourth Ward Park saved the city $15 million from what would have been a municipal sewer tunnel.
The Eastside Trail is set to open this summer between Piedmont Park and Inman Park, the first of the BeltLine trails to be built within the old rail corridor. If voters approve the penny transportation sales tax at the end of July, transit could operate on this segment within five to ten years, connecting with the Atlanta Streetcar.
Last year, as part of its affordable housing program, Atlanta BeltLine purchased the foreclosed Triumph Lofts in Reynoldstown and sold twenty-eight of the thirty units for $150,000, plus down payment assistance, in the city’s first-ever housing lottery.
A symbol of environmental and community healing, D.H. Stanton Park in Peoplestown features a splash pad, baseball field, and solar-paneled promenade. In 1999 a little girl suffered third-degree burns when methane gas on the former landfill site ignited under a playground slide. She survived and, last spring, attended the park’s reopening.
The old state farmers market in Oakland City is one of many abandoned properties along the corridor that could be repurposed into a vibrant mixed-use development.
Starting with more than 200 saplings along the West End trail, Trees Atlanta has begun work on what could be the world’s longest linear arboretum, divided into themed “character rooms” to complement the shifting landscape and neighborhoods.
Earlier this year, the Atlanta City Council approved the last of ten master plans for land use around the BeltLine. With input from local residents, the plans make recommendations for future transit station locations, street configurations, and private development. Pictured: a vision of Culpepper Street in Westside.
Off-limits to the public except on the BeltLine bus tour and as a backdrop for The Walking Dead, the former Bellwood granite quarry off Marietta Boulevard will one day house Westside Reservoir Park—300 acres of greenspace and athletic fields (larger than Piedmont Park!) and a reservoir that will hold a thirty-day water supply for the city.
A total of thirty-three miles of walking-biking trail will at times veer from the rail corridor to connect nearby greenspaces and landmarks. The first completed segment was the West End Trail, running from White Street to historic Westview Cemetery, followed by the Northside Trail in Collier Hills’ Tanyard Creek Park, site of the Civil War Battle of Peachtree Creek.
A “garden” of brightly colored hammocks. Brambles twisted into a whimsical passageway. Stainless steel ginkgo leaves forming a graceful ring. These and other works have beautified tracks, trees, and building sides as part of Art on the Atlanta BeltLine, a temporary public art exhibition (plus a growing permanent collection) now approaching its third year.
In the center of an old railroad bridge in Reynoldstown, a man pedaled a unicycle, arms outstretched. An odd-looking chap, he had spindly fingers made from motorcycle foot pegs and a red taillight heart that gleamed, E.T.-like, under horseshoe ribs. Visitors to last year’s Art on the Atlanta BeltLine exhibition could bring him creaking and clacking to life with a separate set of foot pedals. Will Eccleston’s Uniman is gone now, dismantled in the artist’s backyard, just as the overgrown grass and rusted tracks will someday be transformed. But for a moment, Uniman was part of an unfolding history.
If you’ve ever wondered whether you’ll be dead and gone before the BeltLine comes to fruition, take heart. Six years into the twenty-five-year work plan to repurpose old rail corridors into a twenty-two-mile loop of streetcar transit, trails, and greenspace, good things are happening. Inner city parks, every bit as pretty as their renderings promised, have replaced garbage-strewn blight. New walking trails connect neighborhoods with historic landmarks and each other. A former slaughterhouse in Westside shines like a beacon of realized potential; the old Sears building on the eastside is on the brink.
In his now-legendary 1999 Georgia Tech master’s thesis, Ryan Gravel, who grew up in Chamblee, described Atlanta as “adolescent,” evoking not just the city’s youth but its arrested development in the wake of suburban sprawl. His proposal turned yesterday’s mistakes into rosy possibilities; how many major cities, for instance, can still build a 300-acre park at their center? Says Atlanta BeltLine spokesman and native New Yorker Ethan Davidson, “New York is a city that’s constantly finishing itself. They’re redeveloping the waterfront, the High Line. But they could never do one project to change the face of the city.”
Dr. Catherine Ross, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development and longtime spreader of BeltLine gospel, calls the project “a link from where we are to where we aspire to be”—and right now, we’re somewhere in the middle. Our children may reap the fruits of our aspirations, but we can tell them we were there when Atlanta grew up.
This article originally appeared in the August 2012 issue.
