Westside Park

This guide to Westside Park in Atlanta opens with a riddle: why the city paid around forty million dollars for an empty granite pit. It traces nearly a century of quarrying at Bellwood Quarry, the company Vulcan Materials that ran it in its final decades, and the 2006 sale that handed the abandoned hole over to Atlanta rather than another buyer. You'll hear about the engineers who bored tunnels two hundred feet down to connect the quarry to the water system, and the reasoning behind turning a hole in the ground into backup supply. Look over the railing at the sheer granite walls that once gave up their rock by the truckload.