Before the Atlanta BeltLine was green, it was pure academic theory. Atlanta’s most ambitious park plan began as a nebulous, fantastical idea dreamed up in a graduate thesis. As a Georgia Tech student in 1999, Ryan Gravel wrote a paper that launched the effort to repurpose defunct rail corridors encircling the city — then struggling with sprawl — into a network of trails, parks, and, eventually, light-rail transit. To many officials, it all sounded too extensive and too
expensive for serious consideration. Gravel himself told Atlanta Magazine this year: “I never really imagined anything like the BeltLine was going to happen…. We were proposing an ambitious, transformational project on railroads that the city didn’t own.”
But the BeltLine had its champions, too. In 2004, The Trust for
Public Land commissioned renowned park planner Alexander Garvin to produce a feasibility study. Community advocates went neighborhood to neighborhood rallying grassroots support. Over the ensuing years, various park and conservation organiza- tions got to work. The Trust for Public Land acquired 33 proper- ties for the Atlanta BeltLine, negotiating deals and transferring land to the City of Atlanta one acre at a time. And in 2010, construction began.
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