(The following article by Larry Copeland was posted on the USA Today website on March 20.)
ATLANTA — This city has always had a special relationship with railroads. Atlanta began as a tiny settlement called Terminus because it was at the southern end of a rail line to Chattanooga, Tenn.
In the railroads’ heyday, Atlanta was crisscrossed by trains whose names evoke the romance of that era: the Southern, the Atlanta and West Point, the Louisville and Nashville.
As rail travel declined and the automobile culture took over, most of those storied trains vanished, and the tracks gradually fell into disrepair. The city simply grew around and over the rusted tracks.
Now, community and business leaders are launching an ambitious plan to reclaim some of the old rail lines and use them to increase Atlanta’s public park space by 50%. They say it will improve transit in the city, reconnect neighborhoods split apart for decades by railroad tracks and highways and serve as a blueprint for development for decades to come.
The 22-mile “Atlanta Beltline” will link parts of five rail lines in a corridor encircling the city. The corridor, which will be 100 to 200 feet wide in most places, will connect 40 existing parks and add more than 1,200 acres of green space. The Beltline ultimately will include a transit system such as light rail or streetcars and miles of hiking and biking trails. The city expects developments that mix commercial, retail and residential uses to sprout along the Beltline. Many of the Beltline’s tracks are still intact although new tracks would have to be installed for light rail.
“Rails to trails” — turning abandoned rail corridors into prized parks complete with hiking and biking trails — is a redevelopment idea picking up steam around the nation. The Trust for Public Land, a San Francisco-based, non-profit land conservation organization that will purchase much of the land for the Atlanta Beltline, has worked on many such projects. Among them:
•In Sarasota County, Fla., the trust last year bought 12.8 miles of an old CSX rail line that once carried circus trains to the winter home of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The line will link Sarasota and the nearby towns of Venice, Laurel and Nokomis.
•In suburban Detroit, the trust and local groups are building the Southeast Michigan Millennium Greenways Trail, which will connect seven counties in southeastern Michigan.
Connecting the parks
Atlanta ranks near the bottom of cities nationally in park acreage with 3.6% of its area in park land and public space compared with 16%-19% for cities such as Boston, San Francisco and Washington. The Beltline will increase park space to about 6.5%, says Jim Langford, the Trust for Public Land’s Georgia director.
“But better than that, this also gives us a chance to construct a connected system of parks,” he says. “It means if you live near one park, you can get on your bike or take a hike and go to any other park in the city without having to cross a major street or anything else.”
The Beltline is being touted by Mayor Shirley Franklin and others as the most ambitious civic undertaking here since Atlanta’s successful effort to lure the 1996 Summer Olympics. It’s also generating concern about how it will affect some neighborhoods.
“If the Beltline is done properly, our neighborhoods will have better traffic flow, improved connectivity and access to other neighborhoods, wonderful new homes,” says Lee Echols, president of Poncey-Highland Neighborhood Association, a northeast Atlanta neighborhood that prides itself on its history.
But he worries that, without extensive public participation, the project could destroy the historic character of his neighborhood. “Any development of this size requires a lot of education and vigilance on the part of affected neighborhoods,” he says.
Atlanta’s Beltline sprang from a master’s thesis in the early 1990s by Ryan Gravel while he studied architecture and city planning at Georgia Tech.
“I was fascinated by all the railroads in the city,” says Gravel, 33. “Atlanta’s built on railroads. I saw that as an opportunity to create a new transit system that would create a lot of development in a lot of neighborhoods that hadn’t seen development in years.”
Stitching Atlanta together
The Beltline cuts through backyards, fields, once-abandoned warehouse districts and former industrial wastelands. It slices through 45 neighborhoods, from the tony mansions and cottages of Ansley and Peachtree Creek in north Atlanta to the booming hamlets of Grant Park in east Atlanta, and from the transit stations and abandoned farmers’ market of south Atlanta to the condominiums and busy highways of west Atlanta.
“The Beltline gives Atlanta a chance to plan for its future development,” Franklin says. “For the city to be competitive, we need to have clearly defined, long-range plans for that development.”
The Beltline will cost up to $2.6 billion and take 20-25 years to complete. Much of the project will be financed by bonds backed by additional property tax revenue that is expected as redevelopment pushes land values higher.
The first prize from the Beltline is within reach. The city is negotiating to purchase a quarry in northwest Atlanta and turn it into a 300-plus-acre reservoir and park — the city’s largest park.
What makes the Atlanta project unusual is that it encircles the city, says Will Rogers, president of the Trust for Public Land. “On a national scale, it is a truly significant project,” Rogers says. “It’s really big, both in terms of financial investment and the potential for the Beltline to really transform Atlanta.”