The city of College Park, Md. is a well-kept suburb of Washington, D.C., home to the University of Maryland, within Prince George County, and about four miles from the District of Columbia.Chances are much better, though, that you have been to College Park, Ga., easily among the most visited places in our state – you may have just not known you were there.
A little less than half of the world’s busiest airport, Hartsfield- Jackson Atlanta International Airport – its main terminal, Delta’s Concourse A, and the southern half of Concourse B, as well as the MARTA transit station and adjacent SkyTrain connecting to the nearby Georgia International Convention Center – are all withinthe city limits of College Park, Ga.
But there is much more to this charming burg of just under 14,000 nearby. College Park is home to the Woodward Academy, the nation’s largest K-12 private school, with students from across the region and globe and with athletic facilities rivaling most NCAA Division II campuses. Chick-fil-A’s corporate headquarters are in College Park, along with the restaurant chain’s original CFA Dwarf House, as are the world headquarters of Delta Air Lines and Porsche North America HQ in nearby Hapeville.
College Park is led by a progressive mayor, a four-member city council, and city manager system.By charter, the municipality has a weak mayor structure (Mayor Bianca Motley Brown), with policy and budgets determined by a majority vote of the council, which currently are then implemented by interim City Manager Dr. Emmanuel Adediran. Significantly, for the first time in College Park’s long history, the mayor, city council, and the city manager areall African American.
College Park was created by land grant in 1846 and originally named Manchester. Renamed College Park in 1896, the municipality has the fourth-largest urban historic district in the U.S.The district has 867 structures on the National Register of Historic Places, including monuments, homes, schools, churches, parks, a cemetery, and a rail depot, primarily along Main Street (U.S. Highway 29) and surroundingthe campus of Woodward Academy.
The city’s renaming came in part due to numerous streets within the historic district honoring leading institutions of higher learning across America, such as Harvard Avenue, Princeton Avenue, Cambridge Avenue, Yale Avenue, and the Georgia-based Mercer Avenue.City leaders recently voted to add the names of Historically Black Colleges and Universities into the new Six West Development, a $1.5-billion project in the pre-development phase to be built on 311 acres owned by College Park, adjacent to Hartsfield and the city’s historic district, akin to Atlantic Station in Midtown Atlanta, or Avalon in north Fulton County.
College Park’s population is 86 percent African American, with 78 percent of city residents being renters, versus homeowners.Part smalltown charm mixed with urban amenities, and occasionally overwhelmed by the booming and adjoining aero-tropolis next door, you may have inadvertently overlooked College Park in your rush to catch your next flight, just as you might not know that LaGuardia Airport is in East Elmhurst and Queens, NY, or that LAX straddles the cities of Inglewood and El Segundo, Calif.
Recently meeting and visiting with a pair of College Park City Council members – Joe Carn (Ward #2) and Jamelle McKenzie (Ward #1) – was a delight for me. Carn is the senior member of the council and a former Fulton County commissioner and vicemayor. He is responsible for the reclassification and securing of millions in federal assistance funding for airport noise abatement improvements for apartments and multifamily housing across the city.
Joiningthe council earlier this year was McKenzie, a skilled non-profit executive and trained chaplain with a prior career at Macy’s and Federated Department Stores.In 2017, McKenzie established the Chaplaincy Corps for the College Park Police and Fire Departments shortly after relocating to the city.Mayor Pro Tem Roderick Gay and Councilwoman Tracie Arnold round out the College Park council.
A rising star along the metro area’s southern crescent, College Park is a city on the move.For the many families that spend parts of their fall and spring traveling the nation to help their children select their college campus of choice, College Park is certainly worthy of an afternoon stroll, brunch visit, or a pre-trip overnight to make their airport arrival and departure that much smoother.
Regular readers and visitors to this space know that I like to share Georgia’s best-kept secrets and places.College Park easily makes my list of diamonds in the rough, and it won’t take much more than a bit of polishing for this one to really shine.Watch out, Decatur!
