Five weeks after the Atlanta Streetcar began service on its 2.7-mile downtown loop, Mayor Kasim Reed stood at the podium for his 2015 State of the City address and announced plans to make it bigger. The streetcar would be extended three-quarters of a mile eastward — the "first steps," in the mayor's words, toward connecting the downtown route with the Atlanta BeltLine trail system.
The extension would transform the streetcar from a self-contained tourist loop into a piece of a larger transit network. The existing 12-stop route connected Centennial Olympic Park to the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic District along Auburn Avenue. Adding a BeltLine connection would link downtown's hospitality and entertainment district to the 22-mile trail and transit corridor that was rapidly becoming the spine of Atlanta's urban development.
Bellwood Quarry: A Park at Scale
In the same address, Reed announced plans to convert the abandoned Bellwood Quarry on Atlanta's westside into the city's largest park. The quarry — a massive open pit surrounded by granite walls — had been decommissioned and was serving as a reservoir. Reed's proposal would transform it into a public green space that could rival Piedmont Park in ambition and exceed it in acreage.
The quarry park — which would eventually be developed as Westside Park and open in 2021 — represented a different kind of investment than the streetcar. The streetcar was infrastructure: tracks, wires, vehicles, schedules. The park was land reclamation: taking an industrial scar and turning it into public space. Together, the two announcements described a vision for Atlanta that prioritized connectivity and green space over car-centric expansion.
The Downtown Connection
For downtown Atlanta, the streetcar expansion was the more immediately relevant announcement. A BeltLine connection would bring trail users into the downtown core — cyclists, joggers, families — and create a transit option that did not require a car or a MARTA rail transfer. The BeltLine's Eastside Trail was already generating dense residential and commercial development wherever it ran; connecting that energy to downtown's existing institutions could catalyze the kind of street-level foot traffic that the city center had been trying to build for decades.
The vision described in Reed's 2015 address — a connected streetcar, a massive new park, a walkable city — remains the framework that downtown Atlanta's current transformation is building on.
Original reporting by GPB News, Georgia Public Broadcasting, February 4, 2015.