Freedom Park (Atlanta, Georgia)

Freedom Park is one of the largest city parks in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. The park forms a cross shape with the axes crossing at the Carter Center. The park stretches west-east from Parkway Drive, just west of Boulevard, to the intersection with the north-south BeltLine Eastside Trail, to Candler Park, and north-south from Ponce de Leon Avenue to the Inman Park/Reynoldstown MARTA station.

Freedom Parkway, rededicated John Lewis Freedom Parkway in 2018 in honor of local U.S. Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis, is a four-lane limited-access road. It is the westernmost portion of Georgia State Route 10 (SR 10). It travels through the park west-to-east from the Downtown Connector to the Carter Center, where the main road turns north towards Ponce de Leon Avenue, with a branch continuing east towards Moreland Avenue.

In the 1960s, the Georgia Department of Transportation began acquiring land for two east-side freeways. The north-south route would have cut north from I-20 through Virginia-Highland, creating an interchange at I-85 and continuing north as what is now SR 400. The east-west route (part of which is now Freedom Parkway) would run east from the Downtown Connector (I-75/85) to the Stone Mountain Expressway. A cloverleaf interchange for the two was to be atop the prominent hill where the neighborhood of Copenhill was demolished, and where the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum and Carter Center now stands. The east-west portion from Downtown to Copenhill and the north south portion from Copenhill north to the I-85/SR 400 interchange, was to carry the interstate number I-485.

Through purchases and eminent domain, the GDOT assembled much of the central portion of the project land, and had already demolished 500 homes when local protests and lawsuits, and Governor Jimmy Carter finally stopped the project in the 1970s.

That land sat vacant and overgrowing with kudzu for more than 20 years. Shortly after the 1990 selection of Atlanta for the 1996 Olympic Games, Mayor Maynard Jackson brokered a solution allowing the current parkway to be completed out to Ponce de Leon Avenue to the north and Moreland Avenue to the east. The strip of land further to the east, and land along the new parkway segment, was converted into a linear park with the help of PATH. The 207-acre (84-hectare) Freedom Park was officially dedicated on September 19, 2000, with ribbon cutters Jimmy Carter, then-current Governor Roy Barnes, and Mayor Bill Campbell. Since then it has hosted a number of outdoor sculpture displays and is a popular jogging, bike riding, and dog-walking park.

With the 2012 opening of the BeltLine's busy Eastside Trail, which crosses the Freedom Park Trail just west of the Carter Center, the trail became connected to the large citywide BeltLine ring of parks and trails.

In August 2018, "Freedom Parkway" was renamed to "John Lewis Freedom Parkway" in honor of U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a longtime (1961 Freedom Riders, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches) leader of the civil rights movement.

The main portion of John Lewis Freedom Parkway, running east from an oversized interchange with the Downtown Connector (I-75/85) and then north at the Carter Center to Ponce de Leon Avenue (US 29/US 78/US 278/SR 8), is numbered and signed as SR 10. The "John Lewis Freedom Parkway East" portion running around and to the east of the Carter Center is SR 42 Connector, linking it to Moreland Avenue (US 23/SR 42, and the Fulton/DeKalb county line) just north of Little Five Points. This area is considered part of Poncey-Highland, one of the neighborhoods of Atlanta.