Parks and Recreation
Atlanta’s 343 parks, nature preserves, and gardens cover 3,622 acres (14.66 km2), which amounts to only 5.6% of the city’s total acreage, compared the national average of just over 10%. However, 63% of Atlantans live within a 10-minute walk of a park, placing the city just above the national average of 62%. Piedmont Park, located in Midtown is Atlanta’s iconic green space. The park, which underwent a major renovation and expansion in 2010, attracts visitors from across the region and hosts cultural events throughout the year. Other notable city parks include Centennial Olympic Park, a legacy of the 1996 Summer Olympics that forms the centerpiece of the city’s tourist district; Woodruff Park, which anchors the central business district and the campus of Georgia State University; Grant Park, home to both Zoo Atlanta and the Atlanta Cyclorama & Civil War Museum; and Chastain Park, which houses an amphitheater used for live music concerts. The Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, located in the northwestern corner of the city, preserves a 48-mile (77 km) stretch of the river for public recreation opportunities. The Atlanta Botanical Garden, adjacent to Piedmont Park, contains formal gardens, including a Japanese garden and a rose garden, woodland areas, and a conservatory that includes indoor exhibits of plants from tropical rainforests and deserts. The BeltLine, a former rail corridor that forms a 22 miles (35 km) loop around Atlanta’s core, will eventually be transformed into a series of parks, connected by a multi-use trail, increasing Atlanta’s park space by 40%.
Atlanta offers resources and opportunities for amateur and participatory sports and recreation. Jogging a particularly popular local sport. The Peachtree Road Race, the world’s largest 10 km race, is held annually on Independence Day. The Georgia Marathon, which begins and ends at Centennial Olympic Park, routes through the city’s historic east side neighborhoods. Golf and tennis are also popular in Atlanta, and the city contains six public golf courses and 182 tennis courts. Facilities located along the Chattahoochee River cater to watersports enthusiasts, providing the opportunity for kayaking, canoeing, fishing, boating, or tubing. The city's only skate park, a 15,000 square feet (1,400 m2) facility that offers bowls, curbs, and smooth-rolling concrete mounds, is located at Historic Fourth Ward Park.
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Famous quotes containing the words parks and, parks and/or recreation:
“Perhaps our own woods and fields,—in the best wooded towns, where we need not quarrel about the huckleberries,—with the primitive swamps scattered here and there in their midst, but not prevailing over them, are the perfection of parks and groves, gardens, arbors, paths, vistas, and landscapes. They are the natural consequence of what art and refinement we as a people have.... Or, I would rather say, such were our groves twenty years ago.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafés full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“Media mystifications should not obfuscate a simple, perceivable fact; Black teenage girls do not create poverty by having babies. Quite the contrary, they have babies at such a young age precisely because they are poor—because they do not have the opportunity to acquire an education, because meaningful, well-paying jobs and creative forms of recreation are not accessible to them ... because safe, effective forms of contraception are not available to them.”
—Angela Davis (b. 1944)