Following a year of underground preparations, streetcar track has returned to Atlanta for the first time in more than six decades.
On Wednesday, huge pincers dropped 80-foot-long pieces of steel track onto Edgewood Avenue, creating the first pieces of a 2.7-mile line that passengers are scheduled to be riding in just over a year.
That will be just the beginning of a much larger streetcar system if city officials have their way. They hope additional lines can sprout from the seed being built now, expanding through downtown and Midtown in the future.
“It’s just a beautiful day in Atlanta,” said Tom Weyandt, senior transportation policy adviser, as he stood in the blustery cold, watching crews position steel track over the newly prepared ditch.
The streetcar line is to run between the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site and Centennial Olympic Park, and city officials believe it will transform the development of that corridor.
“It means a new mode of transportation that will build off the regional rail system and provide last-mile connectivity for residents, for shoppers, for tourists and for students,” Weyandt said.
The $93 million cost of the streetcar and corridor improvements will be covered by a $47 million federal stimulus grant, as well as funds from the city of Atlanta and the Atlanta Downtown Improvement District, a self-taxing business district.
A study for the city projects that the Atlanta streetcar will pump $168 million worth of investment into the area over the next 20 years.
City and regional officials hope the streetcar will not only provide tourists, commuters and lunchtime travelers an alternative to congested streets, but also transform the city into a more walkable and pleasant streetscape for development.
At the moment, however, construction in the area is disrupting foot traffic, dividing business owners between those who simply can’t stand it and those hoping it augurs a brighter future.
“The construction is killing us,” said Tsegay Wandafrash, owner of a convenience store on Auburn Avenue.
Horace Robinson, a 36-year-old barber on Auburn, agreed, and said he didn’t believe it would bring more customers.
“Most people who come in say it’s a waste of money,” Robinson added.
Some tempered their frustration with hope.
“Oh yes, it’s been a virtual war zone now for about seven or eight months or so,” said Matt Ruppert, owner of the Italian restaurant Noni’s, located on Edgewood Avenue to the east of the Downtown Connector. He estimates business fell about 20 to 30 percent as crews blocked off the entire street in the last couple of weeks.
Nonetheless, Ruppert said he has high hopes the streetcar will bring an influx of the businesspeople and Georgia State University students that throng the streets to the west of the Connector.
The area beneath the Downtown Connector overpass has “always been like a cesspool,” he said, “and I think a lot of these kids — and I don’t blame them — have never wanted to brave it and walk to a restaurant that’s only 3 blocks away.”
Pamela Colbreath, owner of the Sisters Bookshop in the Sweet Auburn Curb Market on Edgewood Avenue, right across from the construction site, called the streetcar “a wonderful idea” that would bring new customers and spark public interest in the area. “I think it’s going to bring good business,” she said. “It’ll bring a real spotlight in that regard.”
City officials in Portland, Ore., a big streetcar city, said experience changed some streetcar opponents into supporters.
“The turnaround has been 180 degrees,” Catherine Ciarlo, policy director for the city of Portland, told the AJC last year. She and others cite the example of Michael Powell, owner of a prominent bookstore there.
When Portland was planning one of its first streetcar routes, Powell realized with horror that its construction would skirt his building. “I got involved because I was terrified about what it might do to my business,” he said.
But Powell later became one of the streetcar’s biggest advocates, believes it has brought him business, and has served on its board of directors.
Atlanta is already performing mandatory design and environmental studies in preparation for extensions of the streetcar, Weyandt said.
But building them depends on money. Talks are under way to develop a public-private funding plan, according to Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, who has made rail a priority. With funding secured, construction could happen within a couple of years, Weyandt said.
Likely routes would extend outward to pieces of the Beltline corridor.
The moment comes 100 years after the Atlanta streetcar system expanded to its biggest size into the suburbs, before starting to retract and eventually shutting down.
At the turn of the century, streetcars were a crucial fixture of Atlanta transportation. The system built lines to then-distant suburbs such as Marietta, and according to the Atlanta History Center reached the height of its sprawl in 1913 with a line to Stone Mountain.
But streetcars’ strength evaporated within a decade. According to archivists for Georgia Power, which used to own the streetcar system, the company decided in the 1920s that the automobile was already drawing away streetcar customers too much to make building new lines worthwhile. By the late 1930s only tiny bits of track were laid on rare occasions.
Atlanta’s last streetcar line ran in 1949.
Jacqueline Robinson, 65, used to ride rubber-tired trolleys in downtown Atlanta before they were removed in the 1960s like the streetcars before them. She said she was thrilled at the new streetcar, and would take her grandchildren on it.
“I feel like, hey, I rode the trolley, I rode the MARTA train and now I’m back on the trolley,” Robinson said. “Time just goes back around.”
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