#atlantic station

[boyfrombk]

thirty.one 🌹 | ◬

[atlurbanist]

Atlantic Station: before, after, & thoughts for the future

This is Atlantic Station (note: I've got this upside-down, with north on the bottom). It was built on a 138-acre brownfield, the former site of an Atlantic Steel facility that required major remediation.

The work involved the removal of 180,000 cubic yards of slag-contaminated soil. Steel slag is a by-product of steel manufacturing. In the absence of regulatory controls, it had been disposed of directly onto the Atlantic Steel property.

Also required was the installation of a groundwater extraction system to prevent contaminated water from running into adjacent properties or the municipal sewer system.

In 2002, this remediation work cost $25 million. The City of Atlanta created a Tax Allocation District in 1999 as part of a financing plan for the Atlantic Station project.

[Info source: Atlantic Station, Atlanta, Georgia: A Sustainable Brownfield Revitalization Best Practice, By Christopher De Sousa and Lily-Ann D’Souza. Image source: Google Earth]

There's no doubt that this was a majorly impressive undertaking.

But can we do even better for urban sustainability on this property? I see room for a BRT line through connecting to Howell Mill Rd and to MARTA rail, for instance. And how about a protected bike path?

Can we also improve the way this fits into the city's system of neighborhoods so that it feels like a natural extension? I'd like to see some truly public-owned space here with a community center, a library, and a city park.

[itsexclusive]

Ice skating attempt. Wish me luck 🙏

[q-o-s]

The 12 x YTH.

[helloparkerrose]

[sarahsupernovah]

choosing to go to the midtown target... always a bad idea

[appreshaeation]

Spent the last two weekends working the final Atlanta Open.

[lifebehindthecameras]

🍾🏇🏅

[fashionguruqdg]

Birthday Girl by me

[cicerfics]

00Q Headcanon

One more quick headcanon, as 007 Fest 2024 draws to a close!

After Bond retires (and he and Q FINALLY get together), I like to think that Q slowly shifts his focus away from ballistics/cybersecurity and into the biotech sector. There's lots of medical work to be done with nanobots, and Q is a world-class specialist in that field!

Plus, this career shift allows Q to fulfill his ultimate goal: turning his husband into the bionic man.

...OK, not literally. But as Bond ages, he needs some help with certain things! Contact lenses that can magnify the text he's reading! Invisible (and extremely durable/waterproof) hearing aids! New alloys for joint replacements! And as Bond becomes genuinely elderly, he develops other health issues that require nanobots to fix.

Q is on the job! He's trailblazing entire new fields of medicine in order to keep his husband alive and healthy for as long as possible! He jokes that Bond is his 'muse', and that he never really did manage to retire from the job of keeping Bond well-equipped and in good repair.

But Q's greatest triumph isn't listed in any medical textbook. It isn't any of the inventions that win him (or one of his aliases) awards and accolades. His greatest accomplishment has nothing to do with guns or bombs or firewalls or even nanobots.

It's the fact that his husband (against all odds!) dies peacefully in his own bed as a very, very, very old man, after they've shared a long and happy life together.

[atlurbanist]

Looking at Atlantic Station 25 years after the EPA analysis that gave it life

Since Atlantic Station has a 300-unit AMLI apartment tower under construction, let's review a bit of its history.

25 years ago, Jacoby Development undertook the redevelopment of a 138-acre steel plant called Atlantic Steel (founded in 1901 as Atlanta Hoop Company to make cotton bale ties & barrel hoops, it grew into Atlantic Steel Company which lasted from 1915 till 1998).

In addition to needing Brownfield pollution remediation, the site needed an essential transportation ingredient -- better connectivity to Midtown by way of a new 17th Street bridge over the interstate.

But there was a problem: because Atlanta didn't meet federal Clean Air Act standards for air pollution between 1998 and 2002, according to EPA regulations, federal money couldn't be used to build the bridge. Which left the Atlantic Station project dead in the water. It was bridge or bust.

But Jacoby found a work around. They could bypass the EPA ban if they could prove that the redevelopment qualified this was a project that provided clean air benefits.

So throughout 1999, the EPA analyzed the expected air quality benefit for this project, compared to an equivalent one built elsewhere. Their analysis showed that it would produce significantly less air pollution if built here rather than elsewhere due to the transit access (including free shuttle service to Arts Center MARTA) and walkability. It worked -- the bridge was funded, and the cleanup work for the development commenced.

Approximately $167 million of the $250 million needed for the Brownfield cleanup, plus site preparation and infrastructure, was provided by a Tax Allocation District (TAD). Atlantic Station opened in 2005.

Notably, the EPA documents from 1999 mentioned that the shuttle service should at some point "switch to a fixed transit system (e.g. light rail)" which "should connect with a more extensive transit network that could serve much of the area west of 1-753-85 and possibly provide a connection to Cobb County...the 17th Street Bridge would be designed such that it can accommodate future rail, potentially connecting to the MARTA Arts Center Station."

25 years later, we still have no plans for rail. Maybe in another 25?

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Note: much of the above info was drawn from an excellent paper by Alexus Moore: A Multilevel Analysis of Exclusion in Atlantic Station - ScholarWorks@GSU.

[itsexclusive]

I made it around without busting my ass.

[luminiferocity]

James Bond x Archer incorrect quotes

[jadafitch]

Mount Desert Rock Light, Frenchboro, Maine. Since the light's automation in the 70's, Mount Desert Rock has been used by The College of the Atlantic as a whale and marine mammal research outpost.

[aching-arc-reactor]