The Bleckley Plaza Plan was a proposed engineering project in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Proposed by architect Haralson Bleckley in the early 1900s, the project would have seen numerous railroads in downtown Atlanta covered by a large public plaza that would have run from the Georgia State Capitol to Terminal Station, covering much of The Gulch. The project, while considered at numerous points in the early 1900s, never came to fruition. History The plan for a large plaza was created by Atlanta-based architect Haralson Bleckley in the early 1900s. The impetus behind the plan came in 1906 at a meeting of the Atlanta chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) where the members declared the railroad tracks running between Forsyth Street and Central Avenue in downtown Atlanta were an eyesore that required fixing. The following year, Bleckley, an AIA member, reported back to the chapter with an extensive plan to cover the railroad tracks in downtown with a system of parks and high-rise buildings, raising the street level in the process. Railroads that would be covered as part of the plan included the Central of Georgia Railroad, the Georgia Railroad, and the Western and Atlantic Railroad. This plan, emblematic of the City Beautiful movement of the time, would have included the Georgia State Capitol on the eastern end of the plaza, new public buildings along the north and south sides of the plaza, and a newly constructed French Renaissance skyscraper at the western end that would have housed a city hall, railroad depot, and municipal offices. The plan was discussed in the local newspapers at the time, including The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution in 1909. The plan was reviewed and endorsed by the Atlanta chapter in 1910. That same year, the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce partnered with the Atlanta Real Estate Board to form a Planning Commission for the purposes of seeing Bleckley's plan come to fruition. Along with the Chamber of Commerce, the plan was endorsed by many prominent Atlanta citizens and by property owners who owned land near the railroad tracks. However, the project was opposed by the railroad owners, whose grants had placed the railroad tracks on street level, and by the government of Georgia, which owned the Western and Atlantic Railroad and felt that their air rights were valuable. For several years, the project remained stalled. The project gained traction in 1916, when