First a new open-container district, a “micro food hall” announcement, and now more multi-use trail options. Chamblee might have to change its name to Yuppieville soon.
We kid, we kid.
The City of Chamblee has been working for more than 20 years to transform the abandoned Roswell Junction Railroad line and adjacent properties into a new system of multi-use trails. Come next week, city leaders expect to celebrate a new milestone.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony is planned Thursday evening to mark the opening of Chamblee’s next Rail Trail section—specifically Segments 4, 5, and 6.
According to city leaders, the multi-use trail addition stretches .46 miles, from Pierce Drive to Chamblee Tucker Road, west of the city’s historic downtown.
The Rail Trail project’s overarching goal is to increase connectivity downtown. To date, the trail spans 1.96 miles from Keswick Drive to Peachtree Road to Pierce Drive.
General location of the new pathway connecting Pierce Drive to Chamblee Tucker Road, with Chamblee's historic downtown area pictured at right. Google Maps
Much of today’s Rail Trail is quickly accessible to more than 1,000 apartments and a groundswell of retail spaces that have sprouted from underused properties along Chamblee’s main traffic corridors in recent years.
“Whether walking, running, or biking,” a city announcement today says, “trail users will view downtown Chamblee’s booming development of businesses, housing, restaurants, and the future site of Fish Bolt Park.”
City of Chamblee
For all its usefulness, however, the Rail Trail initiative could one day seem like small potatoes, if a master-planned trails concept Chamblee has put together with the PATH Foundation and Kaizen Collaborative should come to fruition.
As unveiled earlier this year, that vision calls for four distinctive “zones” of trails, including a BeltLine-style loop at Chamblee’s north end.
Those trails would link together a bevy of north ITP landmarks, job centers, and attractions, including creeks, an H Mart, a CDC campus, a large Toll Brothers development, a farmers market, the massive Assembly Atlanta project, and Plaza Fiesta, a former 1960s shopping mall turned Latin American cultural center and foodie destination that would have direct trail frontage.
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