Related coverage:
EVENT, Sunday (Aug. 7), 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.: Opponents of the Presidential Parkway have scheduled a 25th anniversary reunion at Olmsted Linear Park - Dellwood (corner of Clifton and Ponce de Leon Ave.). The event, which will include music, is free, but there is a suggested donation for food served. http://www.atlantaolmstedpark.org/stoptheroad
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Two paths diverge in a city, to mangle the words of poet Robert Frost.
And one – the newest — is getting all the buzz, the big crowds and the business.
So much for taking the one less traveled.
Atlanta's Beltline has, of course, become a lucrative magnet for development and a wickedly cool intown promenade for everyone from joggers to bar hoppers. It's Eastside Trail reportedly attracted 1.3 million people last year.
Meanwhile, the paths of Freedom Park, which have been around years longer than the Beltline they intersect with, get far less attention.
I’d even call them underused, especially considering how many east Atlanta communities they meander through.
Never even heard of Freedom Park? Don't know where it is?
Yeah, the park’s backers hear that all the time.
Freedom Park owes its birth to the 1991 settlement between neighborhood groups and state and local governments that curbed the once-planned Presidential Parkway. (A 25th anniversary reunion of road opponents is slated for this Sunday.
“It’s kind of an undiscovered park,” David Hamilton said.
“The park is a little difficult to understand,” he said. “People don’t know where the park is because it is everywhere.”
Hamilton, an architect, is the volunteer board president of the Freedom Park Conservancy, which helps support the greenspace for the city of Atlanta.
He’s, of course, a big fan of the park.
I am, too. I've not been on it much, but I'm amazed by a paved trail that – while sometimes hard to find – wends all the way from downtown Atlanta to other paths connecting to Decatur and Stone Mountain in DeKalb County.
The Beltline and Freedom Park were set up with different intentions. The Beltline was designed largely to spur redevelopment. It connects to Piedmont Park, a regional draw for all of metro Atlanta.
Freedom Park is a linear greenspace that crisscrosses mostly single-family neighborhoods. The potential for development has been pretty limited so far. (Heck, the nearby Druid Hills neighborhood apparently was certified as a wildlife habitat community by the National Wildlife Federation.)
Hamilton told me he’s noticed an uptick in people using Freedom Park paths since the Beltline opened. I imagine that could increase as the Big B grows even more popular and people start hunting for alternatives.
In the meantime, the Freedom Park Conservancy wants to raise money to update the park’s master plan in the next year or so.
Hamilton told me the park was never really finished. Built in a bit of a rush before the 1996 Olympics, it has, he said, “a lot of rough edges.”
Gateways to the park sometimes look like little more than road dead ends. Landscaping is a bit limited, and grass struggles in some stretches because it was laid over ground compacted for the Presidential Parkway.
Fixing all that will take real money, which the conservancy doesn’t have in abundance. I suspect it won’t be long before conservancy folks will be knocking on donors’ doors.
I assume some businesses will be ready to pony up. Green spaces have a way of attracting green dollars.
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