At a recent lecture, Atlanta Beltline CEO Paul Morris took no small glee asking women in the audience the following question: When looking for a wedding site, how many of you would put “stormwater retention facility” on your list of potential candidates?
Hands? Anyone?
Morris explained that one of the perks of his job is authorizing weddings to take place at Historic Fourth Ward Park, a 17-acre, multi-tiered urban oasis south of Ponce City Market (the old Sears building) that includes terraced lawns, curved walkways, brick plazas and fountains. It all cleverly masks a functioning stormwater reservoir, reinvented as the tranquil centerpiece of a welcoming public space.
Morris used the anecdote to illustrate the Beltline’s creative knack for rehabilitating rundown areas and innovating around needed infrastructure, goals that save money — in this case, the cost of underground stormwater tunnels (about $15 million) — and open up investment opportunities at the same time. (For the record, parts of the park are owned by the city; Atlanta Beltline Inc. controls others.)
As the weddings confirm, nice parks tend to attract people in their sunniest, most meditative moods. They also appeal to businesses seeking healthy options for employees. Athenahealth, an IT company, just relocated its regional headquarters from Alpharetta to Ponce City Market, bringing with it 100 jobs and plans to add hundreds more.
One request Athenahealth had of its new landlord, Jamestown Properties, was to have direct access to the Beltline trail from the building.
“What’s so extraordinary” about the Historic Fourth Ward Park, Morris told his audience at the Georgia State University School of Public Health, “is recognizing what it’s doing in terms of community. It’s recognizing that in every part of what we’re doing, we have the opportunity, the obligation, to rethink the assumptions of how we heal the urban environment from a hundred years of blow-and-go, build-and-move-on mentality. And instead say we can do it better. And, more importantly, we can do it cheaper.”
While the Beltline is seen as exercise trail by many, art-and-nature loop by others and transit opportunity by some, its role as facilitator in the public health of greater Atlanta may be its real star turn.
“We believe that for our community to be healthy (and) vibrant, we have to fill in the gaps and put in the missing pieces,” Morris said. “We have to do it in a way that looks at every one of the unique 45 neighborhoods (the Beltline) touches, and bring forward the interests and cultural identity of those neighborhoods and give a sense of ownership to the people who live there.
“If we really believe in the anatomy of a community, then you have to have healthy people. They have to be able to live and work and play and shop and learn in places that are within the community. It needs the infrastructure to support all those activities. That’s what the Beltline seeks to do, making it possible for people who live there to stay there.”
Unlike governments, which sometimes aspire to these things, Morris points out that the Beltline has “a legal obligation to produce 1,300 acres of new parks, 5,600 new affordable housing units, 22 miles of transit (and) 33 miles of trails.
“The very foundational aspect of what we are doing to reclaim this landscape is to clean up over 1,000 acres of contaminated real estate. We have brownfields on the Beltline. We pretty much assume any property we touch is dirty. Our job is to not only create something that is good, but to fix something that is broken — by restoring the landscape, cleaning up contaminated properties and putting property back into productive use, whether it’s jobs, housing, greenspace, the trails (or) transit. All of which are essential components to creating a healthy environment for everybody to live.”
In May, the International Real Estate Federation named the Beltline the best environmental rehabilitation project in the world. The Eastside Trail, a two mile-plus stretch, will receive about 1 million visitors this year — putting its visitation rate in the same neighborhood as the Georgia Aquarium and World of Coca-Cola.
“On the face of it, it just looks like a 14-foot-wide two-mile-long piece of concrete,” Morris said. “But when you’re out on it, you recognize that there’s something else going on.”
That “something else” is a city rebounding through a place that is healthy, accessible and connective.
