#atlantic station

[therapeuticsoul]

[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]

[feralgirlfromatl]

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

[appreshaeation]

Spent the last two weekends working the final Atlanta Open.

[lifebehindthecameras]

🍾🏇🏅

[therapeuticsoul]

Took a night off, for you 💖

[jadafitch]

Great Duck Island Light, Frenchboro, Maine. Aptly named, Great Duck Island is estimated to support 20% percent of Maine's seabird population. Under the Maine Lights Program, the lighthouse and 12 surrounding acres are owned and manned by College of the Atlantic. The rest of the seabird-friendly island is owned by The Nature Conservancy in Maine

[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?

------

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]

"What do you see?"

"A bloody big ship."

James Bond x Turner (1)

Skyfall x The Fighting Temeraire, a grand old warship

[samanthahirr]