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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ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) — Soccer fever took over The Battery Atlanta on Thursday as fans gathered outside Truist Park for a rare chance to see the FIFA World Cup trophy in person.
Children kicked soccer balls across the plaza while crowds counted down to the dramatic reveal of the iconic trophy, widely considered the most coveted prize in international sports.
The appearance marked the first public viewing of the FIFA World Cup trophy in Atlanta.
“It’s the real trophy,” said fan Abdulrahman Dwead. “Nobody is allowed to touch the actual trophy unless you won it or are the president of FIFA. So, me standing beside that cup, that’s an honor to me.”
The trophy stop carried extra significance because Atlanta is one of the host cities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Local fans said the event gave them a deeper sense of excitement ahead of the tournament.
“It’s the greatest feeling in the world,” said Melissa Richardson. “It’s something that doesn’t happen often and to be here in this moment is very important to me.”
The trophy was displayed outside the ballpark before moving inside Monument Garden during Thursday night’s Braves game, allowing ticket holders another opportunity to see the historic prize.
Organizers said the event gave thousands of fans a rare chance to experience a piece of soccer history in Atlanta.
“I’m so happy that Atlanta will host eight games,” Dwead said. “I’ve been here in Atlanta for almost 14 years and I love Atlanta so much.”
Copyright 2026 WANF. All rights reserved.
The Atlanta Dream are undefeated heading into their home opener and still finding ways to improve their roster.
The Dream announced Wednesday the signing of forward Amy Okonkwo to a developmental contract. It’s the latest roster move for an Atlanta team that is 2-0 and gearing up to play Sunday against the defending champion, Las Vegas Aces.
Okonkwo brings an impressive résumé despite her young career.
She most recently attended training camp with the Dallas Wings ahead of the 2026 season and appeared in eight games with Dallas during the 2025 WNBA season, averaging 11.0 points, 3.1 rebounds and 1.4 steals per game while shooting better than 60 percent from the field. She recorded a career-high 20 points against Phoenix on Sept. 11, 2025, and made history as the first undrafted player since 2000 to average 10 or more points while shooting 60 percent or better through her first two WNBA games.
Her international résumé is equally impressive. Okonkwo has earned back-to-back FIBA Women’s AfroBasket MVP honors in 2023 and 2025 while helping Nigeria’s national team capture consecutive gold medals. Collegiately, she played at USC before finishing her career at TCU, where she earned 2018 Big 12 Sixth Player of the Year honors.
Okonkwo joins a 12-player roster that includes Naz Hillmon, Te-Hina Paopao, Jordin Canada, Angel Reese, Aaliyah Nye, Rhyne Howard, Madina Okot, Allisha Gray, Isobel Borlase, Indya Nivar, Sika Kone and Brionna Jones.
The signing caps a busy stretch of roster moves for Atlanta.
Earlier this month, the Dream claimed guard Aaliyah Nye off waivers after she was selected by the expansion Toronto Tempo in the 2026 WNBA Expansion Draft and subsequently waived on May 7. Nye brings championship pedigree to Atlanta, having been a member of the 2025 WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces as a rookie, appearing in all 44 regular season games and finishing fourth among franchise rookies in made three-pointers with 37.
A guard out of the University of Alabama, Nye is one of the sharper shooters in the league. She finished her college career with 389 three-pointers across stops at Alabama and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, shooting 40.9 percent from beyond the arc. In her final season with the Crimson Tide, she earned Second Team All-SEC honors after averaging 15.2 points per game and setting the program’s single-season record with 111 made three-pointers.
To make room for Nye, the Dream waived guard Holly Winterburn, a move that came with an emotional cost. Winterburn, a Northampton, England native who went undrafted in 2025 before signing with Atlanta as a free agent, said she learned she had been cut just before boarding the bus for the team’s first game of the season on May 9.
“I thought my welcome to the W moment would happen on the court, not as I’m getting on the bus for my first ever game,” Winterburn wrote on Instagram. “But that’s the reality of this business and I will always be grateful for the opportunity Atlanta gave me. I’m built for this.”
Winterburn did not stay without a job for long. The Portland Fire signed her to a developmental contract shortly after her release.
After Tuesday’s road win in Dallas, the Dream return home Sunday to face the defending champion Las Vegas Aces at 1:30 p.m. at State Farm Arena.
Atlanta’s vibrant food scene offers diners so much more than comfort food classics (although top-notch versions of chicken, biscuits, and all the fixings can be found here, certainly), and leaving the city without tucking into an unforgettable meal should be criminal. But the trick is knowing where to go.
To make your stay in The A culinarily memorable, you need not only an up-to-date list of the city’s epicurean hotspots, but you also need to choose a home base that makes it easy to get to where you want to go. Choose your hotel poorly, and you might miss where fine dining finds industrial restoration in West Midtown, the continuous creative renewal in buildings and on menus in Old Fourth Ward, or the spirit and soulful flavors of Atlanta’s southside. That won’t be an issue with what’s below.
Old Fourth Ward
The walkable Old Fourth Ward neighborhood (O4W for short, which is located north of downtown Atlanta and southeast of Midtown) is home to many of the city’s top food spots. Find a morning pick-me-up from Chrome Yellow Trading Co., sweet treat from Little Tart bakery, or a decadent sandwich from Kinship Butcher & Sundry, where you can choose if you want your breakfast sausage sandwich served “double double,” or opt for a lunchier option like griddled pork belly with “drunken” mustard on brioche. Eastbound to downtown Decatur, Michelin-recommended and James-Beard-Foundation-recognized restaurants like Kimball House, home to some of metro Atlanta’s best oysters and craft cocktails, and The Deer & The Dove, where farm-to-table is performed with a fierce focus on flavor, are admired far beyond their suburban city’s limits.
O4W is also near historic Inman Park, where you can find exceptional pasta at BoccaLupo, steaks at Kevin Rathbun Steak, or dinner with premium cocktails at Ticonderoga Club at Krog Street Market.
Forth
Forth bills itself as part hotel, part local hangout and membership club, and its range of amenities and convenient location makes it a smart choice for your home base. It’s just off the Atlanta Beltline’s Eastside Trail and a five-minute walk to Ponce City Market, a food hall with stalls from a who’s-who of Atlanta’s culinary talent. (Don’t miss Botiwalla, where chef Meherwan Irani of the award-winning restaurant Chai Pani is slinging dishes inspired by Indian street food.)
Rooms at Forth mix mid-century style and modern function, you’ll find both heavy black telephones inspired by the old-school rotary dials and Bluetooth-enabled radio speakers in groovy wooden and brushed copper casing. The decor is otherwise understated, featuring metallics and earthtones, which allows the views they afford of the surrounding buildings and Beltline activity below to stay the star.
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