Virginia-Highland's Missing Link to the Beltline Finally Got Built

Walk to the northwestern corner of the Ponce de Leon bridge over the Eastside Trail and you'll find a steel ramp dropping down toward the shopping center at Midtown Place. The surface underfoot is poured concrete, not the serrated metal grating used on the Beltline's older ramps, a choice made specifically to spare dogs' paws on the descent. Railings run the length of it. Stairs sit alongside for anyone who'd rather skip the switchback. It looks, on first glance, like any other piece of trail infrastructure.

It isn't. That ramp had been sitting on a planning document since before the Eastside Trail itself opened in 2012, years before Ponce City Market was even a construction site. For over a decade, anyone walking from the Village at Virginia and North Highland toward the trail had to either backtrack to a signaled crossing or pick their way along a stretch of Ponce with no dedicated connection at all. The ramp finally opened this January, closing a gap that outlasted three different construction timelines.

A Decade of Almosts

The delays weren't small ones. A start date targeted for summer 2021 slipped. Real construction didn't begin until summer 2023. From there, the finish line kept moving, pushed back repeatedly as the surrounding 0.68-mile streetscape project along Ponce, new sidewalks, signal upgrades, resurfaced bike lanes, worked its way toward completion alongside it. Urbanize Atlanta had already run one story in November 2025 calling the connection "almost real." The follow-up, in January, finally got to drop the qualifier.

Even after opening, the ramp has needed some fine-tuning. Beltline construction updates from March and April noted the crossing was temporarily closed more than once while crews adjusted grating panels and railing mesh, the kind of punch-list work that trails this size tend to need in their first months of real foot and bike traffic. The connection itself is built. The hardware around it is still getting dialed in.

What Changes When Two Halves of a Neighborhood Actually Touch

For most of the Eastside Trail's existence, Virginia-Highland has functioned as two adjacent but only loosely connected worlds. One is the commercial village around Virginia and North Highland, the streetcar-era shopping and dining strip that's anchored the neighborhood since the 1920s. The other is the trail corridor itself, running along the western edge toward Piedmont Park and Ponce City Market. They border each other on a map. On foot, they've required a workaround.

That's the actual shift here, and it's easy to miss if you're only counting it as one more finished construction project. Before this ramp, someone leaving dinner in the Village and heading for the trail, or coming off the trail and heading in for a coffee, was routed around the gap rather than through it. Now there's a direct line. It's a small distance on a map and a real difference on a Tuesday evening.

The Corner Filling In Around It

The timing lines up with a bit of commercial turnover on the same stretch. Farm Burgers closed its location at 1017 N. Highland Ave. at the end of 2025, and the corner isn't sitting empty for long. Myles Moody and Rachael Pack, the team behind Kinship Butcher & Sundry a few blocks away, opened a 50-seat wine-forward restaurant called So. Fox in the space this spring. The name is short for Southern Fox, a nod to the muscadine grape, and the menu leans on Pack's natural wine program alongside Moody's hyper-seasonal cooking.

The building itself has been feeding people, one way or another, for a century. Building owner Lynn Dewitt described the lot as having started life as a Standard Oil filling station, then expanded as Herrington Service Station for decades, before it was converted into the restaurant destination it's been ever since. So. Fox becomes the latest tenant on a corner that's rarely changed use, even as it's changed hands.

It's not the only kitchen news on this stretch. Kinship's original bodega-style butcher shop, a few blocks over, is also expanding into a second location in Grant Park this fall, tripling its footprint and adding a full seafood butchery counter alongside the meat program that made the original spot a neighborhood fixture.

Free Parking Meets a Free Trail

The Village has picked up one more piece of friction removal this year. Atlanta City Council voted to strip the parking meters along the Atkins Park commercial stretch, the block anchored by Atkins Park Restaurant, which has held what's reportedly Atlanta's oldest liquor license since 1927. The stated goal was to make it easier for people to pull in and shop or eat without feeding a meter. Paired with the new Beltline ramp a few blocks away, it means both the drive-in and the walk-in approach to the Village got a little less annoying at almost the same time, without either project being planned around the other.

What Isn't Finished Yet

None of this means the corridor has settled into its final shape. Selig Enterprises has advanced a rezoning proposal for a cluster of aging commercial buildings it owns near the corner of Ponce and Bonaventure, just across from the Hotel Clermont. The plan calls for up to 375 apartments and 10,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, with the building capped at roughly 150 feet, or about 14 stories, along Ponce before stepping down closer to the single-family homes behind it on Maiden Lane. Fifty-seven of those units would be priced as affordable housing under the city's Beltline Overlay requirements.

The project cleared the city's Zoning Review Board stage this past summer, but according to a presentation the developer gave the Virginia-Highland Civic Association, construction wouldn't wrap until 2031 even under an optimistic timeline. No firm start date has been set. It's worth knowing about if you're trying to picture what this end of the neighborhood looks like five years from now, but it's not something that changes anyone's Saturday morning walk today.

The Walk Itself

What's actually different right now is narrower and more concrete than any of the larger development conversation around it. A ramp that took longer to build than some residents have lived in the neighborhood finally connects the Village to the trail. A hundred-year-old corner started feeding people again this spring under a new name. The meters that used to line Atkins Park are gone. None of these things required each other to happen, and none of them are finished evolving, but together they've made the short stretch between North Highland Avenue and the Eastside Trail a genuinely different walk than it was a year ago.

If you haven't taken it yet, it's worth the five minutes. Start at the triangle where Virginia and North Highland meet, head toward Ponce, and follow the new ramp down to the trail. You'll notice the concrete under your feet before you notice anything else, and once you do, you'll understand exactly who that detail was for.

Virginia-Highland changes in small, specific ways more often than the big headlines suggest, and Ellen Cook keeps an eye on the ones that actually affect how the neighborhood feels to live in, not just the ones that show up in a listing description.