Boulevard Crossing Park: The BeltLine Southeast Trail's Anchor Park
Most BeltLine visitors know Piedmont Park or the Eastside Trail's restaurant strip. Fewer know the quieter anchor park where the Southeast Trail passes between Reynoldstown and Grant Park — a former industrial corridor doing stormwater work under a skate plaza and open lawn.
Published July 6, 2026Before it was a park, the site was known informally as Model City Park, a smaller and rougher green space wedged between rail lines and light industrial land in the gap between Reynoldstown and Grant Park. When the BeltLine's Southeast Trail alignment was finalized, this stretch became one of the corridor's obvious anchor points — a place with enough open land to build a real park rather than just a paved path passing through backyards and warehouse loading docks.
What the redesign added
The rebuilt park kept the connective function but added the features that have become standard for newer BeltLine anchor parks: a stormwater detention pond that captures runoff from the surrounding streets and rail corridor, a skate plaza, open lawn space, and a formal trailhead where the Southeast Trail crosses Boulevard. The detention pond does the same basic job as the lake at Historic Fourth Ward Park, just at a smaller scale suited to this section's watershed — it holds water during storms rather than letting it all run downhill at once, and it's landscaped rather than hidden, so the engineering is visible rather than buried under a parking lot.
The skate plaza is a notable departure from the passive lawn-and-path design of most Atlanta BeltLine parks. It reflects an intentional choice to build for teenagers and young adults specifically, in a corridor that otherwise skews toward joggers, cyclists, and dog walkers. It's a small thing, but it changes who actually uses the park at different hours — skaters in the afternoon and early evening, runners and commuters passing through at rush hour.
Its role in the Southeast Trail
The Southeast Trail segment through this stretch connects Reynoldstown's rail-adjacent industrial blocks — many now converted to breweries, studios, and light manufacturing — with Grant Park's residential streets and eventually the trail's link toward Grant Park itself and the zoo. For BeltLine users doing the Southeast Trail end to end, Boulevard Crossing Park functions as a natural rest point: it's roughly at the midpoint of the segment, has shade, benches, and public restrooms, none of which are guaranteed along every stretch of trail elsewhere on the corridor.
The park also sits close enough to the Atlanta Beltline's Reynoldstown/Grant Park intersection with the Southside Trail's eventual connection that it functions as something of a junction point for the broader loop, even in years when the Southside Trail segment itself remains only partially built. Trail users planning a longer BeltLine ride should treat it as a reliable waypoint rather than a final destination, though it holds up fine as a destination on its own for a shorter outing.
Visiting
Parking is limited directly at the park — most visitors arrive on foot or bike via the BeltLine trail itself, or park in the surrounding Reynoldstown or Grant Park residential streets and walk in. Like other BeltLine detention parks, the pond's appearance shifts with recent rainfall; a visit a day or two after a storm shows more standing water and a more active-looking wetland edge than a visit during a dry stretch.
For current BeltLine trail maps and segment status along the Southeast Trail, the Atlanta BeltLine Partnership publishes updated route information, which is useful since construction on adjoining segments changes from year to year.
The industrial history underneath the lawn
Before either version of the park existed, this stretch of Reynoldstown sat adjacent to active rail yards and light industrial operations that defined the neighborhood's character for most of the twentieth century. The area's transformation into brewery and studio space in recent decades has run alongside, rather than replaced, the working rail lines that still cut through the area — a reminder that Reynoldstown's identity as an industrial neighborhood didn't disappear so much as get repurposed. The park's proximity to active rail infrastructure is still noticeable to visitors, with train horns and the occasional passing freight audible from the trail.
That industrial legacy also shaped the soil and drainage conditions the park's designers had to work with. Former rail and light-industrial sites often carry contamination or compacted, poorly draining soil that complicates straightforward park construction, and the detention pond design here had to account for those realities rather than building on a blank, naturally well-drained parcel the way a park built on undeveloped land might.
A meeting point for two distinct neighborhoods
Reynoldstown and Grant Park have historically developed with somewhat different characters — Reynoldstown more industrial and, in recent years, more oriented toward breweries and creative studio space, Grant Park more residential with an older Victorian housing stock. Boulevard Crossing Park sits close enough to the boundary between them that it functions as informal shared territory, drawing visitors from both directions rather than reading as belonging distinctly to one neighborhood's park system.