For this installment of the esteemed Friday Fun Bag, let’s think back to a recent roundtable discussion high over Midtown, where several of Atlanta’s top planners, architects, designers, and developers were waxing philosophic.  

Hosted at JPX Works’ Emmi Midtown apartment high-rise, the Aug. 13 Atlanta Design Roundtable fittingly overlooked a familiar Spring Street scene on a baking summer afternoon: a logjam of commuter vehicles, many with one person in the car, for block after block after block. 

The host, veteran journalist and editor Maria Saporta, kicked off festivities by asking the panel a big question: “If you could bring back an Atlanta structure that’s been torn down, which one would you choose?”

Jarel Portman, the JPX developer behind the tower in question, dealt the room a curveball, picking not a landmark structure such as Terminal Station but a transit system. 

The ensuing conversation, edited for length, went like this… 

Portman: I’d love to see the old, almost New Orleans streetcars go straight up Peachtree Street. I think it’d be amazing if you could take it all the way [from downtown] up Peachtree all the way past Lenox [Square], up to Brookhaven. It’d give you the opportunity to jump on and jump off and really engage with the city in a way that gets people off the [congested] street that’s just brutal… I know that’s not going to happen— 

Saporta: Whoa, whoa, whoa—we are aspirational!

(Burst of laughter from the room). 

Portman: Well, that’s my aspiration. It’s a look back, but at the same time, it’s like how can we make life better for the citizens so they can avoid [traffic congestion and sequestration in vehicles]? … They would know how it feels to just stop and get off the streetcar at any point and get back on, anywhere they want, and it takes them all the way through the city. 

Saporta: It is sobering to look at a map of Atlanta’s streetcar system, and what it used to be. It’s like, God—we tore this up?  

Portman: It’s a shame that went away, and I’d like to see it come back. 

… which got us thinking. 

Atlanta newcomers could be surprised to know a nonprofit organization dedicated to reintroducing an electric streetcar on Peachtree Street—Atlanta Streetcar Inc.—was operational not that long ago. 

Its board included ATL titans of the time, such as Home Depot cofounder Bernie Marcus, U.S. Congressman John Lewis, Cousins Properties executives, and Portman’s father, developer and architect John Portman. (They even had TV commercials, extolling the virtues of a light-rail system on the city’s signature street, before the Great Recession extinguished those ad campaigns.) 

Courtesy of MARTA

The grand mission was to link downtown, Midtown, and Buckhead back together with Atlanta’s first active streetcar since 1949, zipping up and down Peachtree Street. But once the city’s current 2.7-mile streetcar loop went active in 2014, the organization handed off its duties to the city, tipped its cap, and dissolved. At the time, that loop was supposed to be just the initial streetcar phase. 

Let’s imagine how much different Atlanta would look, feel, and function today if Atlanta Streetcar Inc. had prevailed two decades ago. 

Would Peachtree Street be more of a grand commercial boulevard? Would Peachtree retail space have waiting lists? Would Atlantans and visitors have flocked to such an obvious and simple means of throwback transportation infrastructure? Or would it have flopped—relatively speaking, in comparison to expectations—like today’s limited loop? 

One more Q: Could/should a Peachtree streetcar concept gain enough steam, powerful backing, and political will to ever start flirting with reality again? 

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