The Stitch has been a twinkle in A.J. Robinson’s eye for years.
It’s a “stitch” as in a way to sew together the moribund patch of no-man’s-land between the Civic Center MARTA station on West Peachtree Street and Folk Art Park at Piedmont. Robinson, Central Atlanta Progress’s president, floated the idea in 2016: a cap on I-75/I-85 to create a pedestrian-friendly space about two-thirds the size of Centennial Olympic Park. Basically, we’d build a roof over about 4,000 feet of the Downtown Connector and plant trees on it.
Six years later, in October 2022, Congresswoman Nikema Williams handed a theatrically oversized million-dollar check to Robinson at a press conference overlooking the Peachtree Street bridge, to kickstart project planning.
“We will reclaim a massive part of our community with a beautiful new streetscape, mitigate environmental damage from highway traffic, and build dignified, affordable housing,” Williams said. “As a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, I’m leading the charge to undo the intentional damage inflicted by federal infrastructure projects.”
Atlanta is backing a Rebuilding Communities program grant application for $21 million with an offer to match it with $10 million in city money.
Suddenly, the Stitch is looking real.
Also real: the blight that makes a $700 million park project look like feasible development planning. The Stitch sits in the center of a ring of half-empty or abandoned buildings and parking lots that we might normally expect to be preyed upon by migratory construction cranes in a city hurting for housing development.
Consider the abandoned Medical Arts building, which served as a backdrop for Williams’s comments: Its kicked-out windows ringed with low-grade graffiti loom over drivers on Georgia’s busiest highway. It’s a quick walk to two MARTA stations and should be prime property. Instead, it’s been a wreck for decades. (It’s on the market, by the way. Again.)
I…
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