Perimeter residents feel 'they have it all’

When Judy and Aaron Alembik moved to their Sandy Springs home three decades ago, trees and animals far outnumbered the cars and homes in the neighborhood.

Just a mile south of I-285, the area off Riverside Drive served as Atlanta’s fringe.

Over time, locals would begin to use the Perimeter highway as a dividing line: Inside the Perimeter, you were intown. Crossing the highway put you OTP — well beyond the frontier.

“This used to be the wilderness,” said Judy Alembik, a retired attorney.

And now?

“Any direction you can go in — the Fox Theatre downtown, the Tara [cinema], Marietta Square — it’s just 20 minutes,” she said. “If you use this as the center, it’s extremely convenient to get to anything in Atlanta.”

That sort of lifestyle has blurred the region’s demarcation. Two new and growing cities north of Atlanta have quietly changed the mindset of what it means to live in the urban core or in the suburbs.

Live in Sandy Springs or Dunwoody and you are now ATP: At The Perimeter.

The once-outlying areas have morphed into burgeoning metro communities.

Between them, there are 130,000 residents — a figure expected to grow when new Census numbers are released next year.

Those already there best the region in both education and income, increasing the ATP appeal and importance on the regional stage.

“You have the advantages of a more traditional suburb, but you have it close in,” said Dunwoody Mayor Ken Wright. “You basically have it all.”

For residents, that can mean brisker commutes on surface streets — no need to hop on or off highways to get to job centers in Buckhead, the Perimeter Mall area or even downtown Atlanta. There is also the option of public transit — MARTA’s two northern train lines end on the northern side of ATP — for both work and play.

But in true suburban fashion, there is plenty of parking for the trains. And when work is done, ATPers return to the leafy yards and big houses once thought to be the domain of those willing to live far outside Atlanta.

“We loved living intown and being close to everything, but two kids later we outgrew our shoebox down there,” Polly Frederick said of her previous home in Brookhaven.

A growing family led her and husband Russ to buy a “5-4 and a door” in Dunwoody eight years ago.

The Georgian two-story home, nicknamed for the number of windows on the top and first floors, gives Russ Frederick a dream commute of five minutes.

The accountant can drive another five minutes to get to the highway, should he need to travel to visit clients.

Polly Frederick, a stay-at-home mom and part-time entrepreneur, finds everything in a three-mile radius: her kids’ schools, Perimeter Mall, the post office and grocery store.

The neighborhood has at least five other families who moved from ITP for the larger homes. That sense of community allows the children — ages 11, 9 and 6 — to ride their bikes to the community pool and tennis courts. “This is our small town, with a sense of security and community, inside the big city,” said Polly Frederick. “We could still be considered inside the outside of the Perimeter.”

The notion of the highway as a dividing line is a relatively new way to create the division of city versus suburbs, David Sjoquist, an economics professor at Georgia State University, said.

The beltway around Atlanta opened in 1969. But before that, Atlantans considered places like Inman Park, Sherwood Forest and Ansley Park — with their lavish homes, big yards and neighborhood patterns — to be suburbs.

The layout of those neighborhoods doesn’t differ much from the intown areas of Sandy Springs, Sjoquist said.

What sets Sandy Springs apart is it became its own city, but one without a downtown.

That means it — and Dunwoody — can’t be absorbed to become part of a larger city, yet neither has a historical center.

“It’s a suburban community that is developing some sense of place, some sense of centrality,” Sjoquist said. “They are becoming much more complex communities.”

Other cities that sit ATP have made that shift, with varying results.

Smyrna, for instance, took 20 years to build a downtown from scratch. The southeastern Cobb County city — which sits ATP just west of Interstate 75 — has won awards for its creation. And 47 percent of its residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher, 13 percentage points higher than the region as a whole.

The picture is more mixed in Doraville, which sits ATP to the east. Though the city is sliced in two by the Perimeter much like Sandy Springs, Doraville also is divided by a MARTA rail line and the former GM factory.

The city lost its downtown to some of those divisions and has pinned its hopes on recreating a center city with development of the 165-acre plant site. A proposal that may have launched that goal died earlier this year.

“It takes time to build a downtown,” said Sandy Springs Councilwoman Karen Meinzen McEnerny. “We’ve got the great neighborhoods and great employment centers. We just need to strengthen our identity with a downtown.”

A downtown Sandy Springs — planned for the area just north of I-285 and west of Roswell Road — could disrupt Judy Alembik’s “magic of 20” travel time.

Still, she said she welcomes change because of how much life ATP has somehow managed to stay the same.

She and her husband, also an attorney, handed over the family law practice to one son, but the drive to Buckhead remains a breeze.

Traffic has increased on Riverside, where a new shopping plaza opened just a year ago. But a few weeks ago, Alembik she saw a family of deer — “mama and two babies” — roaming around her three-acre wooded yard.

When she takes to walking the grounds herself, she points out the azaleas and holly, creeping ivy and even walnut trees.

Aaron Alembik landscaped the property himself, planting every shrub and flower and making a small back lawn to enjoy the natural splendor