3-hour tours share Beltline vision

Thirty-some people are staring at Heather Hussey-Coker, waiting for her to talk. She has no notes, no fact sheets. For her, that’s no trouble at all.

After narrating the Beltline tour more than 200 times, the 31-year-old Georgia Tech grad student knows all three hours of its history, factoids and talking points as if she wrote it — because she did.

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Jamie Gumbrecht/jgumbrecht@ajc.com

Yolanda Bray, 36, of College Park shot photos of a quarry on the BeltLine tour on a recent Saturday. Free three-hour tours run every Friday and Saturday. Bray, who works in real estate, wanted to see some properties along the future corridor.

“I know, that sounds a lot like ‘Gilligan’s Island’ and their three-hour boat tour,” Hussey-Coker says as she promises the crowd they’ll be back by 12:30 p.m. on a gorgeous Saturday.

Since the free tours began two years ago, about 5,000 people have gotten a drive-by view of Atlanta neighborhoods they might not have known existed. Hussey-Coker, the tour coordinator for the Beltline Partnership, takes them along a 22-mile route that, 25 years from now, is planned to be ringed with light rail, green space, bike and walking paths and mixed-income housing.

Hussey-Coker laughs when she remembers that they set up the online reservation system to make sure they’d have people to justify the twice-a-week tours. Since the beginning, the tours have been booked weeks in advance, although no-shows often leave a few seats for standby riders. Early on, Friday seats were filled by businesspeople and real estate types trying to understand the Atlanta market and its future. Saturdays were usually for the community — people who had heard of the project but didn’t understand it.

The bus riders are black and white, from their mid-20s to their mid-60s, from Atlanta and from outside the city.

Peter Rawls, a self-described transit buff from Decatur, wants to work or volunteer on the Beltline’s development. He took the tour with his wife, Christie, to learn more about the area, where they’ve lived for only a year.

“The visual stimulus helps you connect the dots,” he says.

Sisters Yolanda Bray of College Park and Jamila Beasley of southwest Atlanta want to buy property along the Beltline to rent. After taking down pages of notes on the tour, they want to sign up their parents.

Lately, the number of businesses taking the tour has dropped; real estate, development, they’re all on hold. Community members are taking the tour a second or third time, and bringing friends. Two years in, they’re looking for progress. Development around the Beltline is supposed to happen in pieces, but about five parks and more trails are supposed to be under way or complete by 2010.

“I know, it doesn’t look like much,” Hussey-Coker says as the tour passes a stretch of overgrown weeds and dirt that she calls the Beltline.

What riders can see: a path in the West End adorned with a Beltline logo, condos under construction on the northwest side of town, new trees planted outside a middle school. They see, too, blocks of boarded-up, foreclosed houses where people lived just a few months ago.

Before Atlanta grew up around automobiles, it grew up around this rail line, Hussey-Coker tells the riders. She points between houses, through parks, at the asphalt they’re driving on — this is the Beltline, here, here and here. She points out the challenges, too: the rail yards, neighborhoods and still-used train tracks they’re not sure how to cross and connect with. She is a believer, 100 percent. She knows this story too well for it not to have an end.

By the time the bus rolls back into Inman Park/Reynoldstown MARTA station, Hussey-Coker’s voice isn’t even hoarse. It’s just after 12:30 — “Long-winded today,” she apologizes — and her audience applauds.

“It’s going to happen,” she tells them in closing. “How does it get over? Under? Through?

“We don’t know.”