True Connectors: Downtown’s Stitch and Buckhead’s HUB404

Ambitious Idea: Central Atlanta Progress President AJ Robinson and Stitch Development Manager Jack Cebe stand in an area that overlooks where the Stitch will be. Photo credit: Ben Rollins

Atlanta’s Connector – the infamous, traffic-clogged stretch of highway running through the heart of the city – is a misnomer. Sure, it’s where Interstates 75 and 85 come together for 7.4 miles. But it splits the city apart.

And that was by design.

As historians know, the Connector was built so that it decimated Black neighborhoods like the thriving Sweet Auburn community, once the center of Black-owned businesses and entertainment. The new road deliberately established a barrier between businesses and their customers. Auburn Avenue never recovered; other neighborhoods, like Buttermilk Bottom and Butler Street, were wiped off the map. Between the construction of the Connector and other urban renewal projects, about 24,000 people were displaced. And the east side of the city was cut off from Downtown.

But Atlanta, as always, has big aspirations. Two major infrastructure projects are in the works that will build acres of parkland atop two major highways – the Connector in Downtown and Georgia 400 in Buckhead, with the Downtown project directly intended to piece some of the city back together. (Another project that would have capped the Connector in Midtown was suspended in July.) Downtown’s Stitch and Buckhead’s HUB404 are swing-for-the-fences projects that will alter the city’s essential fabric, although in different ways. But they also epitomize Atlanta’s penchant for trying to do good by doing well.

The Stitch, or something like it, has been on AJ Robinson’s mind for almost two decades. “When I first came here,” says the long-time president of Central Atlanta Progress (CAP), the civic and business association that’s had an enormous influence on Downtown development, “we felt like there was a need not only to do what we could to reconnect Downtown, basically to right a wrong, but also if you could make these gaps in these neighborhoods more livable, it would have a tremendous economic upside.”

Ambitious Project: Blueprints for the various phases of the Stitch, which will include acres of park space when complete. Photo credit: contributed

Starting Up the Stitch

“We nursed this project along for 20 years,” Robinson says. That’s about the time a similar ambitious idea started to move toward becoming reality. Feasibility studies for a 5.4 acre park, constructed over an eight-lane expressway in downtown Dallas, kicked off in 2004. Since its opening in 2012, Klyde Warren Park has welcomed about 1.3 million visitors each year and hosts food trucks and concerts. The park sits in front of the Dallas Museum of Art and also features a playground and reading area. It’s often cited as an example for the Stitch, and Robinson notes that Klyde Warren sparked development all around it – one of the Stitch’s goals, too.

Several factors have now propelled the Stitch into actual start mode. CAP and the Atlanta Downtown Improvement District, a community improvement district founded by CAP, had done initial feasibility and engineering work that showed the project was technically possible – it’s basically a bridge with some special features, says Jack Cebe, the Stitch’s development manager. Now, says Robinson, CAP and Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens are making affordable housing a priority. “The land and area around [the Stitch] would be a fantastic place for density,” he says. “A lot of people don’t want density. We are ready for [it]. We love density.

“Also, the idea of repairing communities became a big part of the [Bipartisan] Infrastructure [Law]. I give full credit to our congressional leadership, who worked hard to put that in the bill and to get us qualified to receive the money.”

Federal Funding: U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams holds an oversized check written to the Buckhead Community Improvement District for HUB404. With her are Colleen Kiernan, assistant general manager of External Affairs at MARTA; Jim Durrett, executive director of the Buckhead CID; Robert Patterson, president of the North Buckhead Civic Association; and Anthony Rodriguez, executive director of the HUB404 Conservancy. Williams was also instrumental in funding the Stitch in Downtown Atlanta. Photo credit: contributed

“The money” is a $157.6 million federal grant for phase 1 construction, between Peachtree and Courtland streets. Georgia’s Democratic U.S. Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, and U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, whose district encompasses Downtown and who championed the project in the House of Representatives, announced the funding in March. The money was awarded through the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods grant program. Williams also had been responsible for the first federal investment in the Stitch, in 2022, and an additional grant in 2023.

“It’s the largest discretionary transportation grant the region has ever won,” says Cebe. “It’s a really big deal.”

Ossoff notes that part of his job as senator is to be a “relentless advocate” at the federal level for the state’s big initiatives. “The Stitch has been a top priority for the city of Atlanta, with united support from civic leaders, faith leaders, the business community [and] regional planners,” he says, recalling his efforts to “help everyone connect the dots and ensure this was on a glide path to federal funding.”

The Stitch is an ambitious project, Ossoff says, and as such requires that kind of federal funding. The total cost of the project is estimated to be between $713 million and $750 million. The payoff could be impressive. “The urban core of Atlanta has an opportunity unique among major American cities right now because we are already a world-class city, but the core of our city is, in many ways, a blank slate,” he says. “It is not decisively planned or developed, and that gives us the opportunity to plan and execute its development in an innovative and forward-thinking way.”

And, he adds, “Now the city and the team behind the Stitch have a unique opportunity and a tremendous obligation to execute the project well.”

Big and Green

The core of the Stitch is green space – something sorely lacking in Downtown Atlanta. There are some tiny pocket parks, a few neighborhood-sized spots like Woodruff Park and Georgia State University’s Hurt Park, and Centennial Olympic Park, which is more of a large event space than a green refuge. “Downtown doesn’t have a community-scale park,” says Cebe – something larger than Woodruff’s 6 acres but much smaller than the sprawling 200 hundred acres of Piedmont Park in Midtown.

At about 14 acres, the Stitch will provide both a place to get away from the concrete cityscape and to gather for smaller events. That was the overwhelming desire that emerged from the public input process of the project, Cebe says. “We’ve engaged with over 4,000 people directly,” he says – vastly more than the typical number who get involved in giving feedback and opinions. “People agreed they wanted it to be a community park,” Cebe says. “They wanted it to be very green. They wanted a lot of shade. They wanted a green escape in the center of the city, with a lot of community programming as well.”

Tremendous Upside: Rendering of the Stitch, which planners say will rejoin communities and revitalize downtown. Photo credit: contributed

As far as the engineering goes, “I don’t want to say it’s a cakewalk, because it’s definitely not,” Cebe says. “It’s a major infrastructure project, and it’s complicated, but at its core … it’s a fairly standard roadway bridge with a waterproof layer on top, and then you can build a green roof on top of that.” It will have lightweight “fancy engineered soils,” he says, on top of geofoam, which is kind of like Styrofoam. Other features will include special fire safety systems – “so something like the I-85 fire doesn’t happen there” – and 24/7 camera systems monitoring the park.

Robinson also sees the Stitch’s potential to revitalize Downtown, which is dominated by office buildings and still hasn’t recovered from the COVID-19 shock, despite the recent return-to-office trend. “We have a lot of older office buildings that are struggling,” he says. The project “could raise property values in and around the Stitch, which would bring it more in line with what’s in Midtown Atlanta or even the [Atlanta] Beltline.”

The Beltline serves as both inspiration and cautionary tale – another swing-for-the-fences project that’s wildly successful, though that success has led some critics to say it has resulted in “green gentrification” as pricey structures along the Beltline’s path left little room for affordable housing. (In May 2024, the Beltline said it had reached 66% of its goal to build or preserve 5,600 units of affordable and workforce housing by 2030.)

The Stitch isn’t likely to price people out of their homes simply because there aren’t that many people living Downtown, and the sites that would get redeveloped are mostly parking lots and old office buildings. In fact, Robinson sees the Stitch as a way to draw more residents into the heart of the city. And, he says, “The city, under the mayor’s leadership, is really pushing affordability, as we are. Our Downtown committee welcomes new development and affordability.”

Creating a HUB in Buckhead

Gathering Place: Jim Durrett (left), president and CEO of The Buckhead Coalition and executive director of the Buckhead Community Improvement District, and Anthony Rodriguez (right), executive director of the HUB404 Conservancy, say HUB404 will be a place for the community to come together. Photo credit: Ben Rollins

The extension of Georgia 400 inside the Perimeter in the 1990s didn’t cleave Atlanta’s wealthy Buckhead neighborhood in two, although there were communities that were affected. But there’s a similar issue of connection. Specifically, says Jim Durrett, president and CEO of The Buckhead Coalition and executive director of the Buckhead Community Improvement District (CID), the commercial core of Buckhead doesn’t have a place for people to gather.

“We don’t have significant green space,” says Anthony Rodriguez, executive director of HUB404 Conservancy. “We have Chastain Park, which is fantastic, but it’s not in the middle of the financial district. It’s not where people who live and work in the central core of Buckhead can access [it] easily.”

Like the Stitch, the dream of HUB404 – currently envisioned as 9 acres of green space that would sit atop Georgia 400 and the Buckhead MARTA station, from Peachtree Road to Lenox Road, creating a transit-oriented park to make the area more walkable with links to the PATH400 Greenway Trail and the Beltline – is not new.

Durrett remembers walking down Peachtree Road some 15 years ago with Charlie Ackerman, one of the best-known real estate developers in Atlanta who built Buckhead’s first skyscraper and who was then a member of the CID’s board, and listening to him say the area lacked two things: a cultural institution and “a gathering place of significance, a place for the community to come together. I took that to heart,” Durrett says, “but I was not going to suggest, as a brand-new executive director of the CID, that we should take that on at that moment.”

So it took a while. In 2015 the CID’s board agreed to fund a feasibility study. The verdict? “You could do it,” Durrett says. The CID created the nonprofit HUB404 Conservancy to solicit private donations while the CID pursued public funding. The plan was to start making a fundraising push in late 2019 and early 2020, with the goal of opening the park in 2025. Those dates, of course, hint at what happened next: Everything paused when the COVID pandemic began.

Rodriguez came on board when the project revved up again in 2022, having spent the COVID years finishing the Aurora Theatre’s new $45 million arts center in downtown Lawrenceville – not as a developer but as cofounder of the theater with almost 30 years in the arts nonprofit world. He may seem like a nontraditional choice, but anyone who’s led a successful theater is an experienced fundraiser, and Rodriguez is an enthusiastic champion for HUB404. “When you’re approached by someone who says, ‘Would you like to change the face of Atlanta forever?’ the answer, if you grew up here from the time you were in 5th grade, is yes – absolutely,” he says.

Rodriguez contends that HUB404 is more than a park – it’s a way to build a “better, stronger community.” His theater background is helpful when thinking about what happens after construction, too. “I think I was chosen because I have the capacity not just to raise the money to make this thing happen, but also to program it, so that we can have concerts, commissioned art, goat yoga – we can have a variety of programming that will bring the community together in a way where people can collide.”

Financial District Park: Rendering of HUB404, which will include 9 acres of green space atop Georgia 400 and the Buckhead MARTA station, from Peachtree Road to Lenox Road. Photo credit: contributed

The current costs for the entire project are estimated at about $270 million. While the Stitch has seen the most federal support, HUB404 notched $750,000 in funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2023. Rep. Williams, along with others in the Georgia congressional delegation, secured the funding. The revamped plans and timeline start with a phase 1 construction of a pedestrian and bicycle bridge over the Georgia 400/Lenox Road intersection, which will serve as a gateway into HUB404 and is projected to open in 2028.

The bridge is also part of a CID project already underway, called the Lenox Road Complete Safe Street, that involves a multiuse boardwalk running along Lenox Road, and adding bigger sidewalks, stairs, ramps and lighting in the area. In September, the CID received a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation for the Safe Street project, including the bridge.

Although HUB404 is taking more of a bite-by-bite approach to creation of its deck park while the Stitch is taking gulps, both projects will ensure that Atlanta will look very different in a decade or less. Ossoff and Robinson each say the city needs projects like the Stitch – and HUB404, by extension – to achieve, well, maybe its destiny is too strong a word. But maybe not.

“Like anyone from Atlanta, I’ve spent a lot of time sitting on the Connector,” Ossoff says. “And I’ve always dreamed about what’s possible for Downtown and Midtown. I want Atlanta to truly come into its own as the greatest city in the United States and one of the greatest cities in the world. So this opportunity we have to plan and implement an ambitious, inclusive and future-oriented Downtown and Midtown is something that really excites me.”

Or as Robinson advises, “Make no small plans. Think big because if you can accomplish big things, they have big ramifications. And this is the sort of thing we have to do if we are going to truly be a livable, major metropolitan, capital city.