Doug Hooker, CEO of Connector Park Foundation Inc., issued a statement Tuesday afternoon saying the project was on hold because of a lack of government support.
Dan Cathy, chairman of Chick-fil-A, started a foundation for Atlanta’s Connector Park seven years ago. The “bold vision” would have constructed a 12-acre deck over the Downtown Connector between North Avenue and 5th Street in Midtown. It was envisioned to be a community gathering place and feature a venue for live performances.
“Because Atlanta’s Connector Park would be built over a federal highway, it must be constructed and owned by a public entity,” Hooker wrote in a statement. “With a number of exciting infrastructure projects happening in the region and across the state, there is currently no public partner with the capacity for this project, so we must bring this chapter of its planning to a close and suspend our work at this time.”
Atlanta’s Connector Park did work with local, state and federal leaders, and it completed preliminary engineering, park design, pavilion design, financial modeling and funding analysis, as well as studies of the environmental and economic impacts and security.
Hooker said the team developed “a high degree of certainty that this project can be built, how much it will cost, how to pay for it and the long-term benefits it can bring to our community and environment.”
However, it was unable to secure a public partner to champion the project.
“We want to thank our congressional delegation, the leadership of the U.S. and Georgia Departments of Transportation, the State of Georgia, the City of Atlanta and all the community and business leaders who have lent their time and support to this incredible vision,” Hooker wrote. “Because of passionate effort of the small and talented ACP team, there is a clear blueprint for a future public-private partnership to bring this transformational project to life, should future leaders desire to do so.”
Two other projects to cap Atlanta highways are still in progress — the Stitch in downtown Atlanta would bridge the area from the Civic Center MARTA Station to the Civic Center and the HUB404 project in Buckhead that would be built over Georgia 400.
Sigh. We can’t have s*** in downtown Atlanta.
The Stitch is very much needed. Bringing midtown and downtown together and cleaning up that area with abandoned and older buildings is extremely important. Atlanta is a thriving city and will continue to thrive with projects like The Stitch. Let’s not wait until 2026. Let’s start now!
This project was far less useful than the Stitch anyway. If Cathy truly cares about the future of Atlanta he’d start fundraising for the Stitch. The Buckhead project, like most Buckhead projects, is a joke and a distraction from truly pedestrianizing Atlanta.
if all the government bodies were for it, whom should we pin blame on? the more park space we have in ATL the better.
I like the added green space but combining two US interstates was not a brilliant idea. In Austin, the freeway through downtown has a double deck express lane so cars that are not exiting into the CBD can move from south downtown to north wo causing congestion. We don’t have a “city bypass” loop around the city so this would be the next best thing. If you’re driving to FL from TN bypass all midtown downtown exits and ride above the local traffic and let them reenter main traffic flow south of University Ave to the south and after Northside and at 400 on 85 to the North. Find another place of the park and relieve the worst traffic in the city.
The governments are probably thinking about the long term liability and maintenance of the project. Like when a piece of the park collapses on the freeway, who is liable and who fixes it? Likely the government has to pick up the tab. They should have built a tunnel through downtown instead of cutting a freeway but it was hard to have that kind of vision back in 1960. These kind of projects would be great but there’s probably other areas of concern like repairing old bridges that need to be addressed first. It almost seems like building flyover lanes to replace the highway would make more sense. Then they could just fill in the existing connector.