One Man’s Opinion: College Park is metro Atlanta’s best kept secret

The city of College Park, MD is a well-kept suburb of Washington, D.C., home to the University of Maryland, within Prince George County, MD, about four miles from the District of Columbia.  Chances are much better that you have already been to College Park, GA, among the most visited places in our state, you may just not have known you were there.

A bit less than half of the world’s busiest airport, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, its Main Terminal, Delta’s Concourse A, and the southern half of Concourse B, as well as the MARTA transit station and adjacent SkyTrain, connecting to the Georgia International Convention Center (GICC) nearby are all within the city limits of College Park, GA.

A historic, progressive suburb

However, there is much more to this charming ‘burb of just under 14,000 nearby.  College Park is home to the nation’s largest K-12 private school, Woodward Academy, with students from across the region and globe, and with athletic facilities rivaling most NCAA Division II campuses.  The corporate headquarters of Chick-fil-A is in College Park, and the Original CFA Dwarf House and neighboring world HQ of Delta Air Lines and Porsche North America HQ are all nearby in Hapeville, Georgia.

College Park is led by a progressive Mayor, a four-member City Council, and a City Manager system.  By charter, the municipality has a weak Mayor structure (Mayor Bianca Motley Brown), with policy and budgets determined by a majority vote of the Council. and then implemented by the interim City Manager, Dr. Emmanuel Adediran.  For the first time in its long history, the Mayor, City Council, and City Manager, are all African American.

College Park was created by land grant in 1846, and originally named Manchester.  Renamed College Park in 1896, the municipality has the fourth-largest urban historic district in the U.S.  The district has 867 structures on the National Register of Historic Places including monuments, homes, schools, churches, parks, a cemetery, and a rail depot, primarily along Main Street (U.S. Highway 29) and surrounding the campus of Woodward Academy.

Easily overlooked on the way to Hartsfield-Jackson

The renaming was in part due to numerous streets within the historic district honoring leading institutions of higher learning across America including Harvard Avenue, Princeton Avenue, Cambridge Avenue, Yale Avenue, and even Georgia-based Mercer Avenue.  City leaders recently voted to add the names of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s) into the new Six West Development.  Six West is a $1.5-billion project in the pre-development phase, to be built on 311 acres owned by College Park, adjacent to Hartsfield and the city’s historic district, akin to Atlantic Station in Midtown Atlanta, or Avalon in north Fulton County.

College Park’s population is 86 percent African American, and 78% of city residents are renters, versus homeowners.   Part small-town charm, mixed with urban amenities, and occasionally overwhelmed by the booming and adjoining aero-tropolis next door, you may have just inadvertently overlooked College Park in your rush to catch your next flight, just as you never knew that LaGuardia Airport was in East Elmhurst and Queens, New York, or that LAX straddles the cities of Inglewood and El Segundo, CA.

Recently meeting and visiting with a pair of City Council members, Joe Carn (Ward #2) and Jamelle McKenzie (Ward #1) was a delight.  Carn is the senior member of the Council, and a former Fulton County Commissioner and Vice-Mayor.  Carn is responsible for the reclassification and millions in federal assistance funding for airport noise abatement improvements for apartments and multi-family housing across the city.  Joining the Council earlier this year is Jamelle McKenzie, a skilled non-profit executive and trained chaplain, with a prior career with Macy’s and Federated Department Stores.  McKenzie established the Chaplaincy Corps for the College Park Police and Fire Departments back in 2017, shortly after relocating to the city.  Mayor Pro Tem Roderick Gay and Councilwoman Tracie Arnold round out the Council.

Read more from Bill Crane on Rough Draft at this link.

Rising star

A rising star along the metro area’s southern crescent, College Park is a city on the move.   For the many families who spend parts of their fall and spring traveling the nation to help their children select their college campus of choice, College Park is certainly worthy of an afternoon stroll, brunch visit, or pre-trip overnight to make your airport departure that much smoother, as well as your return.   Regular readers and visitors to this space know that I like to share Georgia’s best-kept secrets and places.  College Park easily makes my list of diamonds in the rough, and it won’t take much more than a bit of polishing for this one to really shine.  Watch out, Decatur.

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