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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An NBA player from an opposing team has called on the Atlanta Hawks to cancel their upcoming game promotion that revolves around celebrating a well-known local gentleman’s club.
San Antonio Spurs center Luke Kornet asked the Hawks to reconsider their “Magic City Monday” plans for a March 16 game against the Orlando Magic in a letter posted to Medium on Monday, March 2. Atlanta’s ownership group and front office recently touted the one-night collaboration as an ode to an “iconic cultural institution,” citing Magic City’s role and impact in Atlanta’s Black communities and hip-hop culture in the announcement.
But Kornet wrote that “the Hawks failed to acknowledge that this place is, as the business itself boasts, ‘Atlanta’s premier strip club.’ “
“The NBA should desire to protect and esteem women, many of whom work diligently every day to make this the best basketball league in the world,” Kornet continued. “We should promote an atmosphere that is protective and respectful of the daughters, wives, sisters, mothers, and partners that we know and love.
“Allowing this night to go forward without protest would reflect poorly on us as an NBA community, specifically in being complicit in the potential objectification and mistreatment of women in our society.”
Magic City Kitchen is also slated to serve two versions of its “world famous” lemon pepper wings – Louwill Lemon Pepper BBQ – at the March 16 game. The flavor is named after three-time NBA Sixth Man of the Year-winner, Lou Williams. Rapper T.I. is scheduled to perform at halftime and limited edition Magic City merchandise will be available to purchase at the game.
Magic City celebrated 40 years with a five-part STARZ docuseries, ‘Magic City: An American Fantasy,’ that was produced by Hawks principal owner Jami Gertz and Atlanta native Jermaine Dupri. Magic City founder Michael “Mr. Magic” Barney and T.I. are scheduled to record a live podcast from inside Atlanta’s State Farm Arena before the game.
Kornet, 30, hopes the Hawks and NBA officials listen to him instead.
“I’d like to encourage the league, its owners, employees and fans to hold the Atlanta Hawks to a higher standard of what they find worthy of promoting,” Kornet wrote. “I and others throughout the league were surprised by and object to the Hawks’ decision. We desire to provide an environment where fans of all ages can safely come and enjoy the game of basketball and where we can celebrate the history and culture of communities in good conscience. The celebration of a strip club is not conduct aligned with that vision.”
Luke Kornet stats
Kornet is averaging a career-best 7.1 points, 6.5 rebounds and 1.9 assists in his first season with the Spurs. This is the sixth team he’s played for in his nine NBA seasons, with his previous four years spent on the Boston Celtics.
The Portland Trail Blazers put up an absolute stinker on Sunday, getting destroyed by the .500 Atlanta Hawks, 135-101. It was a soul-destroying loss. Jrue Holiday and Donovan Clingan have at least some reason to hold their heads high, with Holiday putting up 23 points on 56.3% shooting and Clingan getting a 15 point/15 rebound double-double. Otherwise you have to squint pretty hard to take away anything positive for the Blazers.
Here are a few observations from the game:
First Quarter Disaster Class
Not a whole lot went right for the Blazers in the first quarter other than Jrue Holiday’s 14 points in the frame. No other Blazer could manage more than three points. At the other end of the court, the Hawks were getting to the free throw line with ease, taking 15 freebies against only two for the Blazers. Atlanta found it easy to get wide-open shots too. Simple penetrate-and-kick was the order of the day, and it was shockingly successful. Five turnovers for Portland didn’t help either. With everything going wrong, the refs added to the misery, ignoring some laughably physical play for a steal at one end, while whistling Vit Krejci for a block on a clear charge on the other. Poor whistles led to frustration, with Clingan losing the plot a bit and picking up his third foul in the quarter out of frustration. Finishing down 19 at the end of the first quarter is no way to win a basketball game, yet somehow it could have been worse. With a bit over a minute to go, the Blazers had been down 24. Credit for not giving up I guess, but… yeesh.
Okongwu was terrific. At one point in the 2nd quarter, he had 20 points on 77.8% shooting from the field and 75% shooting from deep. Not bad for a 6’10” center. He was always open in the corner. Every time down the court. If Atlanta had wanted to make feeding him a priority, Okongwu might have finished with 60. Instead, they ignored the obvious and gave every Hawk who took the court plenty of touches and shots. It’s hard to argue with a 34-point win, but it really should have been a 40-point lead at halftime if the Hawks had pressed their advantage.
Henderson’s Three-Point Shot
It’s still early days for Henderson’s 25-26 season, but he’s shown good things coming back from injury. His strength and first step are encouraging. His three-point shooting, however, has been a real problem. For a team that was already at or around the worst three-point percentage in the NBA before Henderson took the court, the last thing they needed was him to come in and shoot 24% for the season. In this game he attempted 4 of them, making one. Two of his misses were so ugly that Atlanta fans were embarrassed for him. Without a functional shot from range, he’s just not showing enough to win the starting job.
Three Quarters of Garbage Time
One way to look at this game is to give the Blazers credit for keeping it pretty even for most of the game after the soul-crushing first quarter. You could also give Portland credit for finding their way to the arena today. This game was decided early and nothing the Blazers did the rest of the way gave anybody a sense that they could mount a comeback. That’s pretty discouraging.
Nice Shooting Percentage From Krejci, But…
75% shooting from the field and 66% from three for Krejci? Yes, please! Three total shots from deep and five overall in a game when they needed points? No, no, no. Krejci seemed like a brilliant pickup for the Blazers, what with him shooting over 40% from three the last three season in Atlanta. He just hasn’t had the kind of impact we all imagined so far. It’s still early in his Blazer career, but the 31.7% that Krejci is shooting from beyond the arc for the Blazers isn’t what anyone had in mind. Today he made his first three shots, with two of them from deep. Would this be the game that could get him on track? Unfortunately he’d only take one more three-pointer the rest of the game. It’s incredible that they wouldn’t at least try to lean into him a bit more when he looked like he might be poised to break out of his Blazers’ shooting slump.
The Blazers will get two days off before taking on the apparently lottery-bound Memphis Grizzlies on Wednesday. A Portland win would probably suit both clubs just fine.
The 2026 Publix Atlanta Marathon, which served as the USA Track & Field Half Marathon Championships, met chaos Sunday in the women’s half marathon event.
Three runners — Jess McClain, Emma Grace Hurley and Ednah Kurgat — were led off course by an official race vehicle with less than 2 miles to go. The nearly-half-mile error, according to data from Hurley’s Strava account, cost the runners their top-three finishes.
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