Arthur Blank Family Foundation

By Stacy Shelton/Staff
sshelton@ajc.com

The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation signaled the viability of Atlanta's proposed Beltline with a $2.5 million grant — the first publicly announced gift to buy parkland along the transit loop. The foundation donated the money to the Trust for Public Land, a national land conservation nonprofit that is leading the effort to acquire 1,400 acres of land for new and expanded parks along a 22-mile ring of mostly unused train tracks around the city.

"It's a serious commitment of serious dollars by a well-known philanthropic institution in Atlanta, " said Jim Langford, state director for the Trust for Public Land. "We hope that it helps move the process forward."

Blank wrote a check for $1.15 million to the trust. The rest — $1.35 million — is a challenge grant, to be paid when $5 million is raised from other sources, according to the foundation.

Blank, Atlanta Falcons owner and the co-founder of Home Depot, said in a statement that the grand, green vision for Atlanta would "take a broad coalition of partners and a great deal of collaboration. . . . We hope that our involvement will serve as an inspiration to others to join the effort."

The trust has not determined how much it would cost to create four new city parks and expand four existing parks, as detailed in its recently completed report.

But 70 percent to 80 percent of the proposed parkland and greenways are already in public hands, owned by Atlanta, Fulton County, the state Department of Transportation or MARTA, Langford said. That leaves anywhere from 280 to 420 acres of the proposed parkland in private hands.

By comparison, Midtown's Piedmont Park is 185 acres.

The trust envisions 2,014 acres in new and existing parks linked in an "emerald necklace."

Elise Eplan, the Blank foundation's vice president for special initiatives, said the family's interest in expanding Atlanta's parks started with Arthur Blank, who remembers what Central Park and other open spaces meant to him growing up in Queens, N.Y.

"They want people, and children especially, to have access to what parks and green space can give them, the role that parks can play in building community, that they are gathering places, " Eplan said.

Two years ago, Blank trustees walked and drove around the Beltline with Ryan Gravel, the Georgia Tech graduate whose 1999 master's thesis spawned the Beltline idea, and former Atlanta City Council President Cathy Woolard, the project's first champion.

Early interest had centered mostly on the public transit component, for trolleys or streetcars, but Blank's people zeroed in on the park possibilities immediately, Eplan said.

"It's a dream project for a city that has focused on growth outward, outward, outward, " Eplan said.

It also fits neatly into the foundation's renewed focus, to concentrate the bulk of its $30 million-a-year charitable contributions to arts, education and park acquisition inside the city of Atlanta. Going forward, the foundation's donations for green space acquisition, called Inspiring Spaces, will be for the Beltline's emerald necklace.

"If you just buy a piece of land and plop it down, it's not part of a system that can change the lives of thousands of people, " Eplan said.