SMYRNA, ATLANTA, GA — Smyrna Mayor Derek Norton unveiled plans recently for a downtown redesign that would bulldoze a brick-laden roundabout and build a larger greenspace, parking deck and a three-story brewery overlooking everything in the vicinity.
In the 1980s, when Atlanta was quickly expanding, leaders in Smyrna created a town center in a modified Williamsburg style over the next decade, incorporating a central fountain area surrounded by a library, City Hall, and Village Green for concerts and festivals.
At the time, the changes earned Smyrna the Urban Land Institute’s prestigious Award of Excellence, but now the government feels it is time for a change.
“My vision is an active, vibrant, pedestrian-friendly downtown,” Norton announced in early June, “and I believe the plan … goes a long way towards making that vision a reality.”
However, the mayor’s new vision is not without its detractors. An architect who lives in the neighborhood feels the changes would essentially “de-urbanize” the current city center that she prefers.
Maryam Atassi, a Niles Bolton Associates architectural designer, feels that the changes in plans will create a tourist destination and remove the charms of Smyrna.
“The plan eliminates the human-scaled streets and introduces a new road that will inevitably be an automobile gutter,” Atassi wrote in an email to Urbanize Atlanta. “I’m disappointed to see the east-west street get wiped out. The existing circle foregrounds the civic buildings, [and] the proposed, amorphous green-colored blob is not appropriate for the center of a downtown. Gone is the fine-grained urban fabric that knit the neighborhood together.”
She continued: “If the roundabout is too auto-oriented, I’d rather see it transformed into something like a town square. Whatever the change is, it ought to connect more delicately into the neighborhood context and the underlying framework of streets and blocks.”
The Smyrna City Council is set to vote on the conceptual plans on Monday, June 21. So far, two public input sessions have been held, and a third is planned for this Saturday.
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