Freedom Park

This guide to Freedom Park in Atlanta starts on a stretch of pavement called Barnett Street, a road that technically still exists though every house on it is gone. It traces the 1964 plan for an eight-lane freeway that led Georgia's highway department to demolish roughly five hundred homes, the yearslong freeway revolt organized by residents of Morningside and Virginia-Highland, and the two decades the cleared land sat empty before Atlanta's Olympic bid turned it into today's park. Look for the stubs of old streets near the playground as you walk.