The Old Fourth Ward Beltline Loop Just Stopped Being A Loop

For most of the last decade, a run on the Eastside Trail out of Historic Fourth Ward Park has had a natural turnaround point. You could go north toward Piedmont Park or south past Krog Street Market, but the far end of that southern stretch dead-ended into surface streets, forcing you to double back or detour through Cabbagetown on foot. That changed twice this year. In April, the Beltline opened the final 1.2-mile piece of the Southeast Trail. In June, it opened another 1.9-mile stretch that Beltline officials and the mayor's office are calling "The U." If you live in O4W and haven't ridden past your old turnaround point since early summer, the map under your feet is bigger than you think.

Two ribbon-cuttings, one bigger neighborhood

The first change came on April 16, when the Beltline cut the ribbon on Segments 4 and 5 of the Southside Trail, rebranded the Southeast Trail. That 1.2-mile section runs from Boulevard to Glenwood Avenue, and it finished the full 2.5-mile Southeast Trail connecting all the way from the Krog Street Tunnel to Boulevard Southeast. It also pushed the Beltline's mainline total to 14.8 miles, and gave residents on the O4W side of Krog Street a continuous path into Reynoldstown, Glenwood Park, Grant Park, Ormewood Park and Boulevard Heights, without a car and without a workaround street.

The second, bigger jump came in mid-June, when the Beltline completed Southside Trail Segments 2 and 3, a 1.9-mile stretch running from Pittsburgh Yards on University Avenue to Boulevard. That segment linked the eastside and westside portions of the loop for the first time, creating what Beltline staff and city officials nicknamed "The U": 16.7 continuous miles of mainline trail, plus another 1.6 miles via the Westside Beltline Connector Trail. It's the longest uninterrupted stretch the project has delivered, arriving during the Beltline's 20th anniversary year, and Atlanta timed the finish deliberately, ahead of the FIFA World Cup matches the city hosted this summer.

Here's what that means in practical terms if you're standing at the O4W trailhead near Historic Fourth Ward Park:

That table is the whole point of this post. The Beltline didn't get prettier this year. It got longer, and the direction it got longer in happens to start at your park.

What's actually worth walking to

Mileage is only interesting if there's a reason to use it, and O4W picked up one of those too. The team behind Lucian Books & Wine, chef Jason Paolini along with owners Katie Barringer and Jordan Smelt, brought a second restaurant called Sargent right onto the Eastside Beltline, next door to 3 Parks Wine Shop. Rough Draft Atlanta reported in May that the wood-fired, French-leaning American spot was aiming for an early July opening, with an all-day menu that shifts from lighter sandwiches and salads at lunch to shellfish and roasted meats built around a wood-burning hearth at dinner. Barringer is stocking an expanded retail section with books and magazines on art, architecture and food, a direct extension of what made the original Lucian's a neighborhood draw.

Sargent's domestic and New World wine list, favoring producers from places like New Zealand and Australia, is a deliberate departure from Lucian's more European cellar. That's a small detail, but it tells you the restaurant is meant to be a different kind of stop, more casual, more suited to a Tuesday walk-in than a reservation-only night out. Which is exactly what you'd want beside a trail that more people can now reach on foot.

The park doing double duty

Historic Fourth Ward Park is only 17 acres, but it's carrying a lot of the neighborhood's calendar this year. The 12th Annual Cool Dads Rock Soapbox Derby Festival ran there on August 1, drawing families for a day of homemade racers on the park's paths. That event overlapped with a run of Beltline programming timed to the World Cup, including a three-day O4W Kickoff Festival in June that put a bar crawl across a dozen spots on the Eastside Beltline and Edgewood Avenue.

The park's arts programming runs twice a year rather than once. There's a spring and summer edition that just marked its 14th annual run, and a separate Arts Fall Festival returning later this year, both organized by the Atlanta Foundation for Public Spaces and both drawing upward of 150 painters, photographers, sculptors and other exhibitors into the same green space that anchors the trail expansion. Most Atlanta parks get one signature festival a year. O4W's gets two, and both use the same 17 acres that just became measurably easier to reach from three additional neighborhoods.

If you want the evening version of all this, the rooftop scene hasn't slowed down either. FORTH Atlanta's rooftop lounge looks out over the park and the skyline beyond it, and Moonlight remains the other go-to for a drink with a view before or after a trail walk. Close Company Atlanta, a newer addition known for lemon pepper pockets and affordable cocktails, has given the neighborhood another low-key option that doesn't require a reservation.

The loop worth trying this month

Put it together and you get a walk that didn't exist in this form a year ago: start at Historic Fourth Ward Park, head south on the Eastside Trail past Krog Street Market, continue through the newly opened Southeast Trail segment toward Glenwood Park or Grant Park, something that used to require backtracking to a street, then loop back for a stop at Sargent before finishing at a rooftop table with a skyline view. None of the individual pieces are new information if you've lived here a while. What's new is that they now connect without you having to leave the trail.

The Beltline's own numbers back up how unusual this year has been. The organization's broader 2030 goals, which bundle the finished 22-mile loop together with 5,600 units of affordable housing along the corridor, were reported at 79 percent complete as of the end of 2025. Two of the biggest trail jumps toward that goal landed in the same four months, in your neighborhood's direction, in the same year a World Cup match schedule gave the city a reason to hurry.

If you've been running the same out-and-back on the Eastside Trail for years, this is the summer to try the long way instead. The dead end you remember isn't there anymore.

For those of you thinking further ahead, whether that's about a future move within O4W or helping someone else figure out where a new Beltline segment might land them next, Ginger Pressley knows this stretch of Atlanta block by block and is always happy to talk through what a neighborhood like this actually looks like day to day.