GLENWOOD PARK: Once-bleak lots grow into cozy community

It’s been nearly five years since the first residents of Glenwood Park moved in, but they still hear it all the time: You live where along I-20? Isn’t that an empty old waste yard?

It wasn’t so long ago that the 28-acre patch in southeast Atlanta was rubble, ditches and busted concrete left over from an industrial past. From scratch, it was built into a neighborhood —- condos, townhomes and single-family residences, retail spaces, a playground and pool. About 400 people live in homes that cost from $150,000 to nearly $1 million, next to older neighborhoods like Grant Park, North Ormewood, Ormewood Park and East Atlanta.

But can you build a community from nothing, especially when so many had labeled it as a forgotten wasteland?

Absolutely, developers at Green Street Properties say. They designed Glenwood Park with heady goals of maximizing public space, walkability, mixed use, diversity and connectivity. They wanted a New Urbanist community that sacrificed big yards for better communities, familiar chain stores for locally owned business. Green Street president Katharine Kelley said they were mostly successful. She notices little things like out-of-place gas meters, but the big plans for Glenwood Park remained intact, and have room to develop.

“If you look at a historic neighborhood in the city, it evolves with time. That’s what makes it wonderful,” Kelley said. “As long as you hold fast to the [goals] that really define the core of the project, you’ll have a better result if you allow some freedom of expression.”

Five years in, residents agree that the community-from-moonscape experiment worked. They organize their own weekend farmers market, playground improvements and bocce ball tournaments. Their neighbors are white, black, Asian, retired, young, gay, straight, married and single, with more young children than anybody imagined. Front yards are virtually nonexistent. Parking is mostly hidden. People have no choice but to run into each other and chat.

“I’m not sure that everybody realized what it means to live in a community like this,” said Abbie Gulson, who lived most of her life in England, and moved to Glenwood Park with her family two years ago. Having less space, she said, “takes some getting used to.”

For being new, it feels old-fashioned, Gulson says, in a “Can you take the kids?” and “Can I borrow a cup of sugar?” way, and for the less-affluent neighborhoods nearby, it has meant less crime and more accessible businesses.

“We wanted to keep it all public, give the streets over into the town so it could fit into the town, be used by all the people in the neighborhoods, as opposed to just us,” said Chris Fogg, who has lived in his townhome with his wife since 2007.

Residents’ biggest complaints are about empty commercial spaces. A gym, coffee shop, dry cleaner and some restaurants have lasted, but some businesses, including a boutique, spa and pizza spot, have shut down.

Stuart Meddin, a Glenwood Park investor and president of the company that handles the retail leasing, said it is in talks with several businesses, including one residents most request: a neighborhood market. Meddin said he’s willing to wait for the right tenants.

But without a dense population, long-established businesses to draw a crowd or a main artery to increase visibility, it’s tough to stay in business.

“I definitely think there’s a large chunk of the nearby area that doesn’t know we exist,” said Cindy Shera, owner of The Shed, a fine-dining spot. David Green, a Georgia Tech instructor and architect at Perkins and Will, said the good news out of the recession is that the building slowdown allows more time to improve on plans for developments similar to Glenwood Park, which he calls “one of the best examples of a preconceived community.”

There aren’t any signs of the old industrial site these days, Gulson said. She likens living in Glenwood Park more to raising a child: They can plan all they want, but the identity that develops will determine what it becomes.

“No matter what you imagine it to be, it will do what it’s going to do,” she said. “You can only engineer things to a point, then life takes over.”