192811 external_news 1361203056 1475893578 The idea to more intimately link 45 Atlanta neighborhoods through a common trailway began as a graduate thesis at Georgia Tech. In 1999, a city planning and architecture student named Ryan Gravel proposed an overhaul of an abandoned railroad corridor, a 120-page proposal he expected to gather dust. Instead a city councilwoman heard about the proposal and seized on it, using the Beltline as an economic and community development tool. “It’s not only changing the physical form of the city," Ryan Gravel told The New York Times, "it’s changing the way we think about the city.”

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