In December 1999, Ryan Gravel submitted his architectural master’s thesis conceiving the 22-mile BeltLine to his Georgia Tech advisory board. In the summer of 2001, two of Ryan’s associates urged him to take the bound volume that had been sitting on his bookshelf and ship it to Atlanta city government officials. City Councilwoman (later president) Cathy Woolard took up its cause, gathering the support of Mayor Shirley Franklin, who helped set up a tax-allocation district to fund the BeltLine’s development... “My moment was in 2003, when I realized we might actually build the BeltLine,” says Gravel.
