Building the
BeltLine

PHOTO: Historic Fourth Ward Park is a completed BeltLine development. The park was designed to flood — stone markings on the walls indicate the levels of a 100-year and 500-year flood. Bob Andres, bandres@ajc.com

Workers building the Atlanta BeltLine never know what they will dig up next, which has led to a joke around the office.

“We say every time someone puts a shovel in the ground, we find something no one knew was there,” says Lee Harrop, Atlanta BeltLine Inc.’s program management officer.

They have discovered a flowing creek, an old pedestrian tunnel, layers of railroad tracks and even what is thought to be the headwaters of Utoy Creek since construction began.

Atlanta BeltLine Inc. is the organization responsible for planning and construction of the BeltLine, while the Atlanta BeltLine Partnership (ABLP) works with communities to educate residents about the project.

Harrop has the daunting responsibility of overseeing construction of the 22-mile loop that will connect parks, commercial areas and 45 Atlanta neighborhoods by its scheduled completion in 2030.

His life is filled with spreadsheets, meetings and overseeing projects with tight construction deadlines challenged by unexpected delays. The weather has been one of the project’s biggest obstacles.

Almost 29 inches of rain was dumped on metro Atlanta in the six months leading up to the middle of May, about 4 inches more than in 2014. Incessant spring downpours stalled work on the Westside Trail, a 3-mile stretch connecting University Avenue in Adair Park with Lena Avenue at Washington Park that’s expected to cost $43 million.

“We were calling it the Westside Lap Pool, as much as it was raining,” Harrop says.

That means the trails are being built along the ground, as opposed to the “vertical” construction of a building. In linear construction, the ground presents ongoing challenges, such as terrain, old structures, tons of debris and contaminated soil.

“If you’re building a building, it’s out of the ground once you get the slab poured,” he says. “Your only interference is air.”

Despite the issues each area presents, BeltLine Atlanta works with such construction partners as the Astra Group to provide a consistent appearance throughout all sections of the path and the parks they connect.

“Before we started building any parks and any trails, we decided how the end product was going to look,” Harrop says. “We wanted to ensure the Westside Trail would have the same quality of materials as the Eastside. Even though the Westside Trail has more existing trees than the Eastside, we wanted the look and quality to be consistent.”

Planners knew parts of the BeltLine would be built on repurposed land that was once home to factories, industrial warehouses, parking lots and railroad facilities and tracks, so they expected to find contaminated soil throughout the construction zones.

They planned for 1,100 acres of soil to be remediated because of lead and other hazardous materials.

“There were corridors of unsuitable soil and old, unstable structural walls for extended lengths that had to be cleaned up and corrected,” Lindsay says. “This area is supporting the new paths and future rail, and has to be done properly. We had to solve those issues. It has to hold the weight of the trail and the future transit.”

BeltLine officials were surprised to find so much arsenic in the soil, but later learned that railroads used the poison as a pesticide and herbicide.

“Atlanta was in an environmental free fall for 140 years before the EPA was created,” Harrop says. “Some of BeltLine land is in a corridor more than 100 years old that went through the Industrial Revolution. When we uncover environmental issues that could impact public health and the health of the construction workers, it can lead to unforeseen cost overruns.”

The arsenic was only found in low-lying areas and proved “easy enough to clean,” he says.

There is some type of cleanup on every corridor purchased for the BeltLine.

“We haven’t found any gold,” Harrop says. “Just a lot of problems.”

He describes the BeltLine as the largest project he’s been involved with and jokes that the 2030 completion date will correspond with his retirement.

“There are worse ways to take my career out,” Harrop says. “This would be a tough act to follow.”

Andrew Lindsay, a native of Brookhaven and president of Astra Group (a construction company that specializes in public spaces and parks), was awarded the bid to build the BeltLine’s Eastside and Westside trails, as well as Historic Fourth Ward Park.

Living Intown: What is your favorite part about the BeltLine?

Andrew Lindsay: My favorite part of the Beltline during the construction phase was being given the opportunity to provide needed jobs within the community through the Westside Works jobs program. My favorite part of the BeltLine after completion is showing my brother the transformative affect it has had on the Historic Fourth Ward/Inman Park area. I took him to Rathbun Steak for dinner and he was amazed at how the vibrant the area had become with masses of people using the Eastside Trail at dusk. It is very rewarding to see people enjoying the work that you do.

Why did you want your company to be a part of the BeltLine project?

As a native Atlantan, I identified it long ago, before it was called the BeltLine, and decided we wanted to be a part of this hugely important project. This is a transformational project. It’s important to the city, and this is what we do. We want to please the BeltLine and please the taxpayers.

What is the most surprising thing your crews have found while building the trails and park?

We found all sorts of debris — bottles, bricks, old Coke bottles, glass (conductors) — all kinds of urban backfill. We found three sets of railroad tracks built right on top of each other. That was a surprise. The bottom tracks were stamped 1918 and they had gone in and put new railroad tracks on top of the old ones and kept going up with the land. There was a lot of illegal dumping.

—Andy Johnston

By Curt Holman. Photos by Jenni Girtman.

How a former Georgia Tech student’s vision for unused Atlanta rail is shaping the city’s destiny

Many graduate theses and dissertations propose brilliant ideas and are never heard of again. You could argue that the most famous master’s degree thesis of our time was “Belt Line — Atlanta: Design of Infrastructure as a Reflection of Public Policy.” In 1999, even before Y2K and 9/11, Georgia Tech graduate student Ryan Gravel asserted: “The Belt Line should accomplish more than just an improved system of public transportation. It has the potential to change the way we look at Atlanta, how we understand our space within the city and within the region.”

Gravel’s idea for unifying Atlanta’s unused rails drew on such formative experiences as growing up in Chamblee, haunting Westside train yards as a college student and visiting the Promenade Plantée, a Parisian linear park built over an obsolete rail line. A decade and a half after his thesis defense, the Atlanta BeltLine has exceeded Gravel’s wildest dreams as it alters the perception of the city and serves as a model for civic projects in the region and beyond.

Today, the urban planner lives along the Eastside Trail in Inman Park with his wife and two children. In June of this year, Gravel founded Sixpitch, his own consulting firm, but he still serves as a passionate, soft-spoken ambassador for the BeltLine. He talked withLiving Intown about the initial idea, how it went from a proposal on paper to paths of concrete, and how it will lead the city to a new future.

Living Intown: Were you always interested in trains?

Ryan Gravel: I grew up in Chamblee, where you could hear the trains at night passing through. I was fascinated by trains. When I went to Georgia Tech to study architecture in 1991, I lived in the west campus dorms and kind of got obsessed with the gritty industrial side of the city — the west side of town in particular where all the train tracks converge in the big yards. Looking at maps, I was really fascinated with the fact that Atlanta was built by the railroad, but there was this unique loop of them that was significantly underutilized and seemed to present a real opportunity for the city.

Didn’t a trip to Paris partially inspire the BeltLine?

For my senior year at Georgia Tech, I went to study in Paris for a year as part of their study abroad program. Within a month I dropped 15 pounds. I was in the best shape in my life because I was eating fresh food and walking wherever I went. The connection between the built environment, the places I lived and my personal health and well-being became crystal clear. I came back to Atlanta that summer, graduated and took a job driving on the top end of I-285 every day. That got me to wonder how we could change this paradigm, how we could create that healthy, walkable paradigm in Atlanta.

How did your master’s thesis evolve out of that in graduate school?

Because I was doing a joint degree with architecture and city planning, my thesis had to bridge both of those things. I was interested in this loop of railroads and thought that if we repurposed it for transit, it would revitalize existing neighborhoods and incentivize the development of the industrial belt to create a new way of life for people in the city.

How was the idea received?

My professor and advisers — nobody thought it was real. I never thought it was real. It was a fun conversation. We put the book on the shelf on the library at Georgia Tech, and that was it.

How did you decide to take it off the shelf?

I graduated in December 1999, and after the holidays I got a job at an architecture firm. We were doing mixed-use infill projects, converting old buildings into lofts and building new intown residential and retail. We were doing the master plan for the old Mead site on Lake Avenue in Inman Park and trying to decide, do you take the parking garage and jam it against the abandoned railroad, or do you orient the project toward the railroad, hoping that it’ll become something else one day? I was telling my co-workers about this idea I had in school, for that very railroad, and they thought it was cool. The more we talked about it, the more people wanted to hear about it.

This was the summer of 2001, so eventually we sent out a letter to everyone we could think of — the mayor, the governor, all the regional planning agencies – describing this idea.

What was the response to that?

We got some nice letters back saying “Good luck with that,” but we got one really enthusiastic response back from Cathy Woolard. She was the chair of the Atlanta City Council Transportation Committee. She was looking at all the regional plans for transit, and there really wasn’t anything for people who live in the city, the large proportion of people who really depend on transit to get around because they can’t afford a car.

She was just frustrated by that, and thought that the city should be investing in that. One day she went to her office, and our letter was on her desk. She called us in and asked us to do a town hall meeting, which we did in a church basement in Virginia-Highland, and the neighborhood fell in love with the idea. Then she was elected city council president, so we took the conversation citywide.

How long did that conversation take?

Literally for two and half years, we went to every neighborhood group, every neighborhood planning unit, every church, school, business, rotary club, anybody and everybody who wanted to hear this idea. I was doing three or four public meetings a week for two and a half years, and so was Cathy, and so was her staff, and a handful of volunteers.

And we created this amazing grassroots movement. We built this constituency around community organizers fighting for their lives in their communities, developers who wanted to take advantage of the new growth coming into the center city, and a lot of other nonprofit and environmental-type groups interested in changing the growth paradigm of the city and advocating for things like parks and housing and bicycles and all that stuff. It was an amazing coalition to have all at the same table, wanting the same outcome. It got the attention of other elected officials, the mayor [Shirley Franklin] and everybody.

The project started to take on a life of its own. And as it did, the vision started to expand, so what started as this kernel of an idea — transit and trails, connecting existing places, redevelopment of this land, revitalization of communities — that core concept grew to include 1400 acres of new parks, the largest affordable housing initiative the city’s ever undertaken, public art, public health and preservation. The bigger the vision got, the more constituencies it brought to the cause. The more powerful the proposal was, I think the more likely it was that we would succeed. You want to believe in a big, ambitious vision for your future.