Atlanta on WACN 21 News

The 10 best ice cream spots in metro Atlanta, ranked

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Summer in Atlanta runs on ice cream. The good news: the metro has more serious ice cream shops than at any point in the last decade.

Here’s my ranked list, from best to best-but-not-quite-as-best.

1. The Varsity — Midtown

The original location, open since 1928, is the platonic ideal of an Atlanta ice cream shop. The frosted orange (a Technicolor orange-vanilla milkshake) is the only correct order. Yes, the hot dogs are also great. That’s a separate list.

Six restaurants to try this July, from a Vietnamese omakase to a Decatur seafood house

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Atlanta’s restaurant openings this summer are unusually strong and unusually varied. After a sluggish stretch in 2024 and early 2025, the scene is back.

Here are the six openings I think are worth a booking — and one I’d skip.

Worth booking

1. Phở Bằng — West Midtown

The first dedicated Vietnamese omakase in Atlanta is also the first restaurant from chef Khánh Lê, who spent four years at NYC’s Di An Di. It’s an 8-seat counter, $145 a head, six courses that lean hard on regional Vietnamese flavors but skip the usual phở-and-bánh-mì hits. Bookings opened last week; the next available Saturday is August 16.

Hartsfield-Jackson sets new record for busiest day in airport history

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 05:30:00 -0400

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport logged its busiest day ever on Thursday, with 268,412 passengers moving through its terminals — a 4 percent jump over the previous record set in July 2019, the airport announced Friday morning.

The single-day total was driven by a confluence of factors, airport officials said: the kickoff of summer travel season, a major convention at the Georgia World Congress Center, and FIFA World Cup match-day traffic from fans heading to Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

BeltLine's Southside trail gap is finally closing. Here's what's opening — and what isn't.

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:00:00 -0400

The Atlanta BeltLine’s Southside trail — long mocked as the gap where the city’s signature greenway project abruptly ends in southwest Atlanta — is finally within sight of completion.

Atlanta BeltLine, Inc. confirmed Wednesday that the two-mile segment between the Oakland City MARTA station and the West End MARTA station is on track to open to pedestrians and cyclists by mid-October, ahead of the originally promised 2027 deadline.

For the residents of some of the city’s most park-poor neighborhoods, the news is real. It’s also a long time coming.

Piedmont Park gets major renovation, including a new public pool

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 16:00:00 -0400

Piedmont Park, Atlanta’s most-visited green space, is getting a top-to-bottom renovation that will close most of the park for nearly a year.

The $48 million project begins September 1, 2026 and runs through August 2027. The work will add a public swimming pool (Atlanta’s first in a generation), a redesigned playground, new restrooms throughout the park, and a complete overhaul of the park’s aging plumbing, electrical, and irrigation systems.

The Piedmont Park Conservancy, which manages the park under a long-term agreement with the city, is leading the project and funding about 70 percent of it privately. The remaining 30 percent comes from a 2024 parks bond passed by Atlanta voters.

Georgia's film industry rebounds, but Atlanta's grip is slipping

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 13:00:00 -0400

Georgia’s film and TV production industry is in the middle of a strong rebound — but the growth is happening outside Atlanta for the first time in a generation.

The state booked $4.4 billion in film production spending in the first half of 2026, up 22 percent from the same period last year, according to numbers released by the Georgia Department of Economic Development on Tuesday. The full-year 2026 number is on track to exceed the all-time high set in 2022.

Atlanta's high school football scene is quietly having its best season in a decade

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Metro Atlanta high school football is having a moment.

Three teams from the metro are ranked in the MaxPreps top 25 going into the 2026 fall season — Buford, Grayson, and Westlake — the most the metro has had in any year since 2014.

It’s a notable result for a metro that, despite producing a steady stream of NFL talent, has rarely had multiple teams competing at the national level in the same season.

Atlanta man exonerated after 22 years in prison, lawsuit against city begins

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:00:00 -0400

Marcus Holloway walked out of the Fulton County Jail at 4:47 p.m. Friday — 22 years, 3 months, and 11 days after he was arrested for a murder he has always said he did not commit.

DNA testing on a cigarette butt found at the original crime scene — never tested at trial — excluded Holloway as a contributor. A second test on a hairshaft found on the victim reached the same conclusion. The Fulton County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit moved to vacate the conviction within hours of receiving the lab reports.

Georgia Supreme Court rules in favor of Atlanta in long-running water rights case

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:00:00 -0400

The Georgia Supreme Court ruled 6-1 Monday that Atlanta’s current water-withdrawal permits from Lake Lanier are valid, ending — for now — a 14-year legal fight over the metro area’s most important water source.

But the court’s reasoning was narrower than Atlanta had hoped, leaving the door open for future challenges as the region grows and as upstream states press for stricter limits.

The case

The suit was brought in 2012 by Alabama and Florida, both of which sit downstream on the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) river basin and have argued for decades that Atlanta’s withdrawals from Lake Lanier — built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s — leave too little water flowing south.

What Atlanta's economy actually looks like in 2026

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 07:00:00 -0400

By the numbers, metro Atlanta’s economy is in the best shape it’s been in 20 years.

Real GDP is up 3.4 percent year-over-year, the strongest growth of any major US metro
Unemployment is 3.1 percent, the lowest since 2000
Job growth has run positive for 41 straight months
Median household income is up 5.2 percent year-over-year to $78,400
Population growth is the highest of any US metro, with the metro adding roughly 70,000 new residents per year

These are the kind of numbers that economists describe as “the strongest economy of our lifetimes” — and they’re real.

MARTA board approves long-delayed bus network redesign. Here's what's changing in August.

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:00:00 -0400

MARTA’s board of directors voted 8–2 Thursday to approve the long-delayed NextGen Bus Network redesign — the first top-to-bottom overhaul of the agency’s bus map in roughly 40 years.

The new network goes live August 24.

If you ride MARTA buses in Atlanta, your route is almost certainly changing. Here’s what to know.

What’s getting better

The redesign follows a “high-frequency grid” model that has become standard in peer cities like Houston, Seattle, and Denver. The principle: concentrate service on a smaller number of routes that run every 15 minutes or better, every day, all day.