How an Abandoned Clock Factory Became East Athens' Busiest Saturday Loop
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
For most of the past twenty years, Newton Bridge Road has been a road you drive through, not a road you stop on. It is the quickest cut from the Loop over to the north side, a strip of warehouses and rail spurs that most East Athens residents can navigate with their eyes half closed. If you stopped here at all, it was for one reason: a growler fill at Terrapin.
That changed sometime this year, though not all at once and not with any ribbon-cutting. It changed the way these things usually do, in pieces, until one day the pieces added up to something you could actually spend a Saturday doing without getting back in your car. The last piece fell into place in late July, when Athens-Clarke County's Leisure Services Department opened a new stretch of the Firefly Trail starting at Hancock Road and Spring Valley Road. That single announcement quietly finished a loop that had been building on this corridor for years.
The site at 100 Newton Bridge Road has a history most people driving past it never think about. In 1954, the General Time Corporation opened a 250,000-square-foot production facility here to manufacture synchronous clocks under the WestClox name. The plant ran for nearly fifty years, growing to 350,000 square feet by 1990 before it finally closed and the 35-acre property sat mostly empty at the intersection of Chase, Barber, Newton Bridge and Dairy Pak.
That kind of dead industrial land usually stays dead for a long time in a college town. This one didn't, mostly because Athens-Clarke County built a financial tool around it. In 2020 the county created the Newton Bridge Road Tax Allocation District, a mechanism that lets new development on a site help pay for the public infrastructure around it. As of a 2025 planning filing with the county, more than $55 million had gone into redeveloping roughly fifteen acres of the old WestClox property, and the assessed tax value of the district had climbed by more than $25 million since the TAD was adopted. Those are not abstract numbers. It is the reason a shuttered clock factory now has a working brewery, a corporate office, an apartment community, and a mountain bike park all sitting on the same footprint.
The redevelopment came in phases. Terrapin Beer Company took 68,000 square feet of the old warehouse space and now runs its production and taproom operation at 265 Newton Bridge Road. Wayfair leased 45,000 square feet for a customer care center. In 2024, the 210-unit Flats at General Time opened as the site's first residential phase. Along the way, the property has also hosted smaller, temporary uses like a drive-in movie setup, the kind of thing that only happens when a site has enough open land left to experiment with.
The most surprising piece of the General Time site is the one with no admission fee and no employer badge required. Tucked onto the property is a mountain bike loop and skill park built by MTB Atlanta and now maintained entirely by volunteers with SORBA Athens, the local chapter of the Southern Off-Road Bicycle Association. It is not an Athens-Clarke County park. It exists because a nonprofit of local riders asked for the space and then kept showing up to maintain it.
The layout is modest by design. A wooden skills course runs through small features like teeter-totters and low rollers, and a three-quarter-mile loop trail adds rock features that beginners can ride around rather than through. Helmets are required and motorized vehicles are not allowed, which keeps it a genuinely low-stakes place to try mountain biking for the first time or to squeeze in a lunchtime lap if you work nearby. It is open sunrise to sunset, every day, with no gate and no schedule to check.
Here is the part of this story that actually changes how East Athens residents can use a weekend, and it has nothing to do with beer or bikes directly.
For years, the Firefly Trail in Athens-Clarke County has run about 2.8 miles from downtown out to Hancock Road, then simply stopped. The trail picks back up 1.6 miles inside Winterville, a stretch locals call the Model Mile, but between Hancock Road and Winterville there was a gap you had to drive around. If you wanted to ride or walk the whole thing, you couldn't. You had to load the bike back into the car partway through.
In late July 2026, that gap started to close. Athens-Clarke County's Leisure Services Department opened a new section of trail beginning at the intersection of Hancock Road and Spring Valley Road and running out toward Taylor Lane, extending the continuous, rideable trail further east than it has ever gone within the county. It is not the whole missing link yet, and trail advocates have said the full three-mile connection between Athens and Winterville is still being finished as easements get worked out. But for the first time, someone living near Nellie B or the Newton Bridge corridor can get on the Firefly Trail near home and keep going substantially farther east than they could a year ago.
The Firefly Trail, in one glance: Athens' completed section runs about 2.8 miles from a downtown trailhead near East Broad Street, through Dudley Park, over the 500-foot bridge across the North Oconee River, and across the Trail Creek trestle. The finished trail's long-term vision is 39 miles, connecting Athens-Clarke, Oglethorpe and Greene counties all the way to Union Point.
None of these three things, the bike park, the taproom, the trail extension, is new on its own. What is new is that they now sit close enough together, and connect well enough on foot and bike, that they function as one continuous outing instead of three separate stops you'd plan around a car.
A Saturday that used to require three trips down Newton Bridge Road now looks something like this:
None of that requires driving between stops. That is the actual shift here, not that a brewery or a bike trail exists, but that the distance between them stopped mattering.
Newton Bridge Road isn't the only piece of East Athens that rewards a closer look this year. A few minutes away, Satterfield Park on Cherokee Road remains the anchor for East Athens Little League, with fields for baseball and softball, courts for tennis and pickleball, and a playground that gets steady weekday-evening traffic once practices start up. And back toward downtown, Dudley Park still does the quiet work of tying the whole trail system together, connecting the Firefly Trail to the North Oconee River Greenway and giving the Trail Creek trestle bridge, sometimes called the Murmur Trestle, a proper home inside a 32-acre park with open fields and picnic shelters.
None of these places needed a redevelopment plan to matter. They have mattered for years. What's changed is that they are now easier to reach from each other than they used to be, and that is worth noticing if you already call this side of town home.
If you're the kind of person who tracks these small shifts because you actually live here, that instinct is exactly what makes East Athens worth paying attention to right now. The Jarrett Martin Group spends as much time walking these corridors as we do writing about them, and if you ever want a second opinion on what a neighborhood shift like this one actually means for your street, reach out. We're always up for a walk and a conversation, no obligation attached.
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