Atlanta, GA
How Atlanta Became a Walkable City
Books & the Arts
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March 11, 2025
Atlanta’s Beltline and the effort to re-create pedestrian cities.
The Beltline and Georgia’s experiment in pedestrian spaces.
To me, Atlanta has long been the invisible city. Like anyone who flies with regularity (as I used to do pre-Covid), I’ve changed planes too many times at Hartsfield-Jackson airport. My joke about it is that no one has ever seen the outside of its seemingly infinite terminals—that, like certain freaks of topology (Google “Klein bottle”), it has no exterior.
In truth, though, I have occasionally escaped the confines of the endless terminals and ventured into the city itself. I once spoke at a conference at the AmericasMart (né the Merchandise Mart) in downtown Atlanta, but I can’t recall a single thing about what the place looked like, inside or out. Prior to a weekend in Atlanta this past October, my previous visit to the actual city was in 2003, and I can only reconstruct the details of that trip by reading what I wrote about it at the time.
I live and breathe cities. My memory is a vast trove of urban places, famous and obscure, large and small; I can go on at length about the graffiti-filled tunnel through which Little White Oak Bayou in Houston sneaks under a massive highway interchange, or the water tower that’s also the world’s tallest free-standing Corinthian column, found smack in the middle of a St. Louis intersection. So it is a little weird that, until I visited Atlanta again this past fall, my visual recall of the city was almost nonexistent. This is especially peculiar not just because I’ve found reasons to respect and admire even the most chronically unloved American cities, but because the first work of architecture that truly moved me was by a man who was, for a considerable time, Atlanta’s one noteworthy homegrown architect and developer: John Portman.
In the mid-1960s, Portman began the project of rebuilding a 2.5-million-square-foot chunk of downtown Atlanta (which eventually mushroomed to almost 19 million square feet) in what became his signature style: masonry towers that are inert on the outside and, seemingly, like the airport, all interior and no exterior. Portman’s theory, circa 1967, was that urban life as it once existed—the hustle and bustle of pedestrians visiting local shops and socializing on the pavement—was over. Streets were inherently dangerous and ugly, and what was needed instead were “total environments” in which “all of a person’s needs are met,” preferably without ever leaving the building.
As an 18-year-old college student on a summertime jaunt to San Francisco in the 1970s, I wandered into Portman’s brand-new Embarcadero Hyatt, with its dramatically raked 17-story atrium. To me, it looked like an M.C. Escher drawing come to life, and more than the other architecturally noteworthy buildings I’d previously visited—mostly museums like the Guggenheim or the monuments in Washington, DC—it instilled in me a sense of extraordinary possibility.
Of course, Atlanta isn’t John Portman’s city anymore—at least not entirely. One long, circular stretch of it is has been radically transformed by a very au courant piece of urban design: A linear park known as the Beltline, built incrementally since 2008, now encircles much of the city and has spawned new clusters of residential development along its path. The concept would be familiar to Portman, who believed he was building pedestrian-oriented villages—except his pedestrians were supposed to do their walking indoors, in corridors and across sky bridges, while the Beltline is outdoors, a long, narrow environment tracing the path of an old freight rail line. When it is completed, the main loop will be 22 miles long. And though it hasn’t yet inspired Atlanta to make its ordinary streetscapes more hospitable to pedestrians, the Beltline has become a magnet for walkers and bicyclists (who often drive to get there). Like New York City’s High Line, Detroit’s Joe Louis Greenway, or Dallas’s Katy Trail, the Beltline doesn’t just provide a recreational conduit; it changes the way people live in the city around it.
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My interest in the Beltline was sparked in 2017 when I interviewed Ryan Gravel, whose graduate thesis at Georgia Tech proposed repurposing the disused freight line that encircled downtown as the site of a linear park and light rail line. After his graduation in 1999, he began the work of making the concept a reality. With the initial support of a single Atlanta councilwoman, Gravel and a growing number of planners and community activists gradually built momentum and found financial support for the project in the form of a Tax Allocation District, meaning that the project is now supported by the development along its path. The TAD also funds affordable housing along the Beltline.
Invited to speak at a conference at Georgia Tech this past fall, I finally got a chance to see it. After getting my bearings, I arranged to meet Gravel at a spot along the Beltline so we could explore it together. I also invited a fellow conference participant, Maurice Cox, whom I had last spoken to when he was head of Detroit’s Department of City Planning, a role he would subsequently play in Chicago. Among other things, Cox is remembered in Detroit for meeting with a group of activists in 2016, soon after his arrival the year before, and declaring that he wanted to make the Motor City “America’s best city for bicycling.”
We rendezvoused outside a food hall called Krog Street Market, after which Gravel walked us south, through the graffiti-filled Krog Street Tunnel and alongside the Hulsey railyard, a disused 70-acre CSX facility that may someday be redeveloped as a walkable neighborhood and a major stop on the Beltline’s light rail loop. Gravel no longer has any official ties to the project, but he’s still concerned with its future, particularly whether the light rail line he envisioned will ever happen. He also pointed out that there are very few spots along the Beltline’s path that have blossomed into full-fledged public places, with the landscaping and infrastructure you’d expect from a real park.
Nonetheless, the section of the Beltline we walked, on Atlanta’s affluent Eastside, appeared to be an overwhelming success. Everywhere there is new housing, both market-rate and affordable. We were also impressed by the intensity of the activity all around us: the sheer number of people taking pleasure in walking, biking, riding scooters (Cox tells me that his Atlanta relatives habitually head to the Beltline to get some exercise after big holiday meals), or dining in, say, an open-air taco shed. And unlike New York’s High Line—which, because it’s elevated and painstakingly crafted, feels like someplace very precious—the Beltline is at street level and looks, in most respects, very ordinary. This elemental piece of infrastructure, with some stretches paved and others not, mostly feels organic. If I didn’t know better, I would think it had always been there.
Not all of Atlanta is like this. On my first morning in the city, I’d set out on a pilgrimage: I began walking down Peachtree Street from the vicinity of Georgia Tech to Portman’s Peachtree Center. But I was spooked by the almost total absence, on a lovely Friday morning, of other human beings. So I decided to ride MARTA, Atlanta’s version of a subway, which wasn’t much more populated than the sidewalks.
When I emerged from the train station, I felt like I was in a badly designed video game surrounded by unmarked buildings. This was the mid-20th-century American city as envisioned by Portman. I was in a sea of taupe concrete; Google Maps was stumped, as was I. I finally asked a man on the street where the Marriott Marquis was, and he told me that it was right in front of me—that if I took a few more steps, I’d bump into it.
What impressed me most on this quick Portman field trip wasn’t the vertigo-inducing spectacle of the Marriott atrium (once I’d found it), but the remarkable deadness of the streets outside. While New York City’s own Portman-developed hotel, the Times Square Marriott, has been retrofitted in recent years with enough signage and lights to make it look like a good Times Square neighbor, this complex was still deeply mired in the 1960s or ’70s. Though Portman died in 2017, his disdain for street life lives on around Peachtree Center and on the pedestrian-free thoroughfares all over town.
Meanwhile, the Beltline is signaling that a very different city is possible. After Cox and I said goodbye to Gravel, we stopped by a Kroger supermarket. This might not sound like an architectural or urbanist landmark, but the Kroger had a shaded front patio where you could buy a beer from a takeout window and drink it at an outdoor table. It was a genuine pleasure to linger outside; it was as if we were dallying in Paris’s Tuileries Garden or Madrid’s Parque del Retiro. OK, it’s not quite so lovely or so formal, but the supermarket’s front porch is a spot where people take obvious pleasure in just being in public. To me, it’s the clear antithesis of Peachtree Center and Portman’s Atlanta: It’s the Atlanta that Gravel and the Beltline’s creators saw as the city’s future. It is precisely what 21st-century urbanism is all about.
As it happens, the supermarket also offers a splendid view of the new Fourth Ward project, an urban place that owes its existence the Beltline. It was developed by a man named Jim Irwin, who is as much a product of this moment as Portman was of his and is now president of his own company, New City Properties. Initially, Irwin, an Atlanta native, working for a developer called Jamestown, headed up the conversion of a disused Sears warehouse into a bustling destination called Ponce City Market, a massive flea-market-cum-food-hall. Irwin subsequently acquired a nearby site of about 17 acres along the Beltline from Georgia Power and, working with the planner Cassie Branum of Perkins & Will (who was also involved with the overall design of the Beltline), corralled an idiosyncratic, international group of architects to landscape the site and design its buildings. Neither starchitects nor the kind of safe choices to which many developers default, the firms Irwin selected have brought a finely honed eccentricity to the project, one that was inspired by, and contributes to, the vitality of the Beltline.
The most eye-catching new building is the Forth Hotel, which opened in June of last year. It’s a 16-story glass tower girdled with a dramatic concrete exoskeleton known as a diagrid. Designed by the New York–based architect Morris Adjmi, the startling structure brings to mind a Buckminster Fuller dome or the concrete frames designed by the Italian architect Pier Luigi Nervi. (The exterior of Nervi’s 1963 George Washington Bridge bus terminal in New York City is an unexpectedly great example.)
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The other major new building is an office complex by Olson Kundig, a Seattle firm best known for its idiosyncratic minimalist houses. The 1.1-million-square-foot office complex—clad in black glass and covered with louvers—consists of two mid-rise buildings linked by a sky bridge (à la Portman) but also connected at ground level by lush landscape (courtesy of Brooklyn’s Future Green) and a public stairway that joins the Beltline to the nearby park. Like many staircases these days, this one also doubles as a sort of lounge: It is to the Beltline as the Red Steps are to Times Square.
During a panel discussion at the end of the conference I was attending, Irwin said this about his development: “I almost want to re-create the feeling of looking at your phone in real life.” Which struck me as brilliant, perverse, and very revealing about the present moment. I appreciate that the developer sees the place that he’s willed into being as a remedy for a society “fixated on this little eight-inch piece of glass.” It’s definitely a place worth looking at (and, inevitably, it’s become a popular backdrop for TikTok videos).
Like Portman, Irwin is using architectural razzle-dazzle to address what he perceives as the social malaise of the moment. As Portman wrote in his 1976 book The Architect as Developer: “I decided that if I learned to weave elements of sensory appeal into the design, I would be reaching those innate responses that govern how a human being reacts to the environment.” Similarly, Irwin is trying to awaken a generation of sleepwalkers.
Portman’s Atlanta was built on the assumption that street life was a blight, that it undermined the value of the real estate itself. But the version of Atlanta that emerges from Irwin’s work and the Beltline is pure alchemy, transforming street life into social and economic gold. After a couple of days spent exploring and discussing the Beltline effect, I left convinced that even a city as wedded to the automobile as Atlanta could evolve and become walkable and (somewhat) car-free. I plunged back into Hartsfield-Jackson carrying indelible images of the city outside.
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Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
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Photograph by Ben Rollins
In the ’90s, when I was new to Atlanta, I found my way to the Atlanta Cuban Club in Doraville. On Saturday nights, it was a place to eat, dance, and listen to stories of life in Cuba before the Castro Revolution. The scene felt straight out of Miami, with a touch of Southern charm. But, about five years ago, the club closed its doors.
“I miss having a place that feels like ours,” my friend Karina Reoyo, a fellow Cuban American from Miami, tells me. “There’s nothing like that here anymore.”
Like me, Reoyo grew up in the Kendall neighborhood of Miami, where our Cuban roots showed in everything—from weekday meals to our parents’ stories about the island. She moved to metro Atlanta seven years ago, and I moved back in 2024, after first living here as a graduate student at Mercer University in DeKalb County. Now, without the Cuban Club to guide us, we’ve kept our roots alive the way we know best: through food.
And we’re not alone.
There’s a growing network of Cuban Atlantans crisscrossing the city like detectives on a hot trail, chasing down leads. We’ll drive 45 minutes for a proper pastelito, a flaky pastry filled with guava and softened, sweetened cream cheese; ground beef; or another classic rendition (like coconut). If they’re “just like they make them in Miami,” then we’ll share our finds with like-minded food sleuths we meet through friends, at PTA meetings, or even at the gas station.
If a Publix, like the one on West Paces Ferry Road, has stocked up on Materva (the sweet, slightly herbal Cuban soda made from yerba mate), then errands will be rerouted for an emergency grocery-store run. And, if Kroger, like the one on Dallas Acworth Highway in Paulding County, puts five-pound bags of frozen yuca—a starchy root vegetable served at most Cuban meals—on sale (which hasn’t happened yet this year), watch out! We’ll be there ready with two shopping carts, as if it’s Black Friday.
Photograph by Ben Rollins
Photograph by Ben Rollins
Photograph by Ben Rollins
It hasn’t always been this way. Havana Sandwich Shop co-owner Debbie Benedit says there was a time when few people in Atlanta were familiar with Cuban food. When she and her late husband, Cuban-born Eddie Benedit, opened their Buford Highway restaurant in 1976, Cuban fare was often mistaken for Mexican cuisine.
She says customers would ask, “Where are the tacos? Where’s the salsa? Why isn’t this spicy?” Then she’d have to provide a quick culinary lesson. “We’d explain that Cuban food isn’t spicy. It’s olive oil, garlic, beans, rice, citrus, and vinegar,” she says. Cuban cuisine blends Spanish, African, and Caribbean influences. It’s shaped by the island’s tropical climate and the ingredients that thrive there, including sour oranges, lemons, limes, root vegetables, and plantains.
“Things are different now,” Benedit says, adding that more Atlantans are seeking out Cuban flavors. The area’s growing Cuban population may explain the culinary shift. According to The Atlanta Regional Commission, Cubans are the fourth-largest Caribbean-born group in the area, and their numbers have more than quadrupled in counties such as Forsyth, Henry, and Gwinnett since 2010.
When Miami-raised Stacie Antich moved to Atlanta in 2007, she craved pastelitos, but there was a problem: “Pastelito recipes weren’t on Pinterest or Instagram,” she says. “You didn’t even know what was in them. I had to work from memory.”
Photograph by Ben Rollins
In 2016, she opened Buena Gente Cuban Bakery food truck, serving up her perfected pastelitos, empanadas, croquetas, and other favorites. Then, in 2020, Antich cut the ribbon on a brick-and-mortar bakery of the same name in North Decatur; the shop is bright and pink, just as her food truck was, with freshly baked pastries in a welcoming display case. “This would be considered a fancy bakery in Miami,” she says with a smile.
Buena Gente’s pastelitos are flaky, golden, and sweet, with delicate layers that break apart with each bite. And they come in a few distinct shapes: a circle for meat, a rectangle for guava, and a rolled cigar shape for cream cheese alone—an unspoken code for Cuban pastry lovers. The pastelitos de queso (cheese pastries), my go-to every time, are indeed just like the ones sold from the ventanitas (walk-up windows at neighborhood restaurants) in Miami.
Photograph by Ben Rollins
Photograph by Ben Rollins
In Roswell, Lazaro’s Cuban Cuisine offers a proper sit-down meal wrapped in nostalgia, with Cuban memorabilia throughout. A black-and-white photo of the I Love Lucy star Desi Arnaz (surely Cuba’s best-known expat) hangs directly across from the front door; I even found a bottle of Agua de Violeta in the bathroom, a nod to the abuelitas who douse the floral cologne all over babies.
Cuban-born chef and owner Lazaro Tenreiro, who once owned jewelry stores in the metro area, also says he missed the food he grew up with before he opened his own eatery. “When I opened the restaurant in 2012, it was really a passion project. I wanted food my kids and my family would eat—so it had to be good,” he says.
Lazaro’s frijoles negros (black beans) are exactly how I was taught to make them: rich with garlic, onions, and a hint of cumin. And the vegan picadillo (a clever twist on our traditional ground beef dish) is a tasty surprise, with ground green-plantain peel cooked with peppers, onions, and Manzanilla olives.
Photograph by Ben Rollins
Photograph by Ben Rollins
In Marietta Square, a popular spot to take my kids for a quick, authentic meal is D’Cuban Cafe, which has other locations around metro Atlanta. Colombian co-owner Nicolas Angel says his cousin, D’Cuban co-owner Lucas Mejia Angel, also from Colombia, fell in love with Cuban food during a trip to Miami and brought those flavors back to Atlanta.
Though the D’Cuban menu is fast-casual, everything is made from scratch daily. A bowl of ropa vieja (“old clothes” in Spanish) comes with shredded beef simmered in a garlicky tomato sauce, served alongside black beans, white rice, and perfectly sweet maduros (ripened plantains).
Of course, Papi’s Cuban Grill is still my top pick when Cuban relatives come to town. The Kennesaw location brings back memories of the casual spots we Miamians grew up with. When my family and I walk in the door, we’re transported to the famed Versailles restaurant on Calle Ocho as the aroma of sofrito—the base of most Cuban dishes, comprising the holy trinity of onions, garlic, and green peppers—fills the air. And the fried yuca appetizer, crispy on the outside, tender on the inside, is even better than the one I grew up eating.
Meanwhile, in Paulding County, my friend Karina’s husband, Carell Rodriguez—who is also Cuban and from Miami—is reviving the spirit of the Cuban Club by guest-teaching rueda de casino, a form of Cuban salsa, at Rosa Negra restaurant in Dallas. “Rosa Negra is Latin-infused, and not necessarily Cuban food,” Rodriguez tells me. “I do, nonetheless, enjoy their chicharrones (crispy fried pork), empanadas, and tostones (twice-fried, smashed plantain slices). They remind me of home.”
After class, he unwinds with a mojito. “A mojito is basically Cuba in a glass,” he says. “It’s light, refreshing, and nostalgic.” His wife agrees, chiming in, “Their mojitos are better than the ones in Miami.”
I can’t vouch for their mojitos (not yet, anyway). But in many ways, Atlanta’s Cuban finds are better than what we left behind. Maybe it’s the chase that makes them more satisfying. Or maybe it’s just the joy of tasting home, right when you need it most.
This article appears in our April 2026 issue.
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ATLANTA – An Atlanta man faces a potential life sentence after a federal jury found him guilty of terrorizing two young children during his military service abroad.
What we know:
A federal jury found 39-year-old Adam Schlueter guilty on Friday following a four-day trial. He was convicted of two counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a minor under the age of 12 and two counts of assault resulting in serious bodily injury.
Schlueter was stationed in Grafenwöhr, Germany, from 2009 until 2013 while enlisted in the Army. During this time, prosecutors say he physically, emotionally, and sexually abused two victims who were under the age of 10.
Both victims testified during the trial that Schlueter beat and choked them. One victim recalled an incident at age 8 where Schlueter pushed him through a second-story window and dangled him above the ground. Evidence also showed Schlueter threatened victims and witnesses who spoke about his crimes.
What they’re saying:
“When he should have been honorably defending our country with the utmost integrity, Schlueter instead spent years terrorizing his young victims through physical and sexual abuse,” U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg said. “Excellent work by the prosecutors and investigators assigned to this case will ensure that Schlueter is suitably punished for his wickedness.”
What’s next:
Schlueter is scheduled to be sentenced on July 9. He faces a mandatory minimum of 30 years of imprisonment for each of the aggravated sexual abuse convictions and may be sentenced to life in prison.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Leanne Marek and Trial Attorney McKenzie Hightower are prosecuting the case, with assistance from former Assistant U.S. Attorney Annalise Peters.
The Source: The information in this story was gathered from federal prosecutors with the Northern District of Georgia following the conclusion of a four-day federal trial.
Atlanta, GA
Philadelphia Phillies lose fifth straight game to end homestand, swept by Atlanta Braves
Michael Harris II homered and had three hits as the streaking Atlanta Braves defeated the slumping Philadelphia Phillies 4-2 on Sunday night to complete a three-game sweep of their NL East rivals.
Ozzie Albies hit an RBI double and Austin Riley also drove in a run for the Braves, who have won five in a row and nine of 11. It was Atlanta’s first series sweep of at least three games at Philadelphia in 10 years.
Kyle Schwarber went deep for the Phillies, who have lost five straight and 10 of 13. They were outscored 56-33 on a 2-7 homestand against the Diamondbacks, Cubs and Braves, leaving Philadelphia 6 1/2 games behind first-place Atlanta in the division standings.
Raisel Iglesias escaped trouble in the ninth inning for his fifth save. Philadelphia put runners on first and second with one out, but Trea Turner struck out and Schwarber lined out to right field on an excellent running catch by Ronald Acuña Jr.
Tyler Kinley (3-0) pitched a scoreless sixth for the win.
Schwarber’s two-run shot in the first gave Philadelphia a 2-0 lead.
Harris homered leading off the third before the Braves went ahead in the fifth with three runs against rookie starter Andrew Painter (1-1) and lefty reliever Tim Mayza.
Painter was lifted after he opened the inning by allowing singles to Harris and Acuña. Mayza loaded the bases with a walk, and the Braves tied the game on Matt Olson’s groundout. Riley’s dribbler to third went for an RBI infield single, and Albies’ double to the left-field wall made it 4-2.
Riley saved at least one run while ending a Philadelphia threat in the bottom of the fifth with a stellar defensive play at third base.
Braves starter Grant Holmes allowed two runs in 4 2/3 innings.
On a chilly night, Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto sat out after leaving Saturday’s game with lower back tightness.
Up next
Braves: Begin a four-game series Monday night at Washington. RHP Bryce Elder (2-1, 0.77 ERA) opposes Nationals RHP Jake Irvin (1-2, 6.16).
Phillies: Open seven-game trip Monday night with the first of four games against the Cubs. RHP Aaron Nola (1-4, 4.03 ERA) faces Chicago RHP Colin Rea (2-0, 3.63).
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