Photograph by Audra Melton
The sun breaks on a chilly October morning over Dunkin’ Donuts and MARTA’s headquarters, slowly illuminating from gray to cloud-dotted blue the glass ceiling of a vast office tower atrium at the Lindbergh mixed-use district—or what developers have rechristened “Uptown Atlanta.” It’s the annual State of the BeltLine address, and it smells like cappuccino. Seated in the atrium are about 250 city bureaucrats, nattily dressed real estate executives, architects, engineers, state reps, business industry bigwigs, and media. Plus at least a couple people who think building anything resembling a train on the Atlanta BeltLine is pretty much the dumbest idea of all time.
That latter category does not include Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens. Or the executive who’s guiding the BeltLine through a period of unprecedented growth, as MARTA formulates plans to start building an extension of the controversial Atlanta Streetcar, called Streetcar East, along the BeltLine’s most popular section next year. This much is made very clear to the audience.
“[The BeltLine is] connecting us to each other, to nature, and hopefully to job opportunities that may one day reduce our city’s income gap,” says Dickens, clad in a dapper gray suit. “The promise of transit will serve to integrate with and not discard what Atlantans have already fallen in love with on the BeltLine.” A little while later, Clyde Higgs, the BeltLine’s CEO and president of five years, calls transit “the DNA of the Atlanta BeltLine” and a partial solution to the city’s Achilles’-heel car traffic. Then Higgs urges the room to think macro, long-term. “We’re going to add another almost 2 million people [to the metro] in the next 25 years,” says Higgs, citing Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) projections. “What are we going to do? We have to give people options for getting around the city. This [BeltLine transit…
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