Most people who live around Sessions Street describe their location the same way: a short walk from the Square, tucked into one of Marietta's oldest pockets, close enough to Kennestone Hospital that a very online real estate agent once joked you could get there by golf cart. All of that is true. But it misses the more interesting fact sitting under their feet.
Sessions Street isn't adjacent to the Mountain to River Trail. For a stretch of a few blocks, it is the trail.
Follow the M2R's actual mapped route north out of downtown and it runs up Kennesaw Avenue, cuts over on Tower Road, picks up Roselane Street, and Roselane simply becomes Sessions Street before continuing past the Brumby Lofts toward the pedestrian bridge over North Marietta Parkway. That routing comes straight from the Cobb Life Magazine feature that traced the path when the M2R first opened in 2018. If you live on or near Sessions Street, you are not a short drive from a trailhead parking lot. You are standing in the middle of a regional trail that the City of Marietta describes as running 13.5 miles from Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park to the Chattahoochee River, with 3.5 of those miles inside city limits.
That distinction changes what a weekday actually looks like here.
Most trail write-ups treat the M2R as a destination you drive to, the way you'd drive to a park entrance. But the section that passes through Sessions Street was never designed as a destination. It's a connector, laid down through an existing residential street rather than routed around it. The trail doesn't skirt the neighborhood. It borrows the sidewalk.
That's part of why locals involved with the Marietta Arts Council have called the M2R the city's own version of the Atlanta Beltline: a corridor that stitches neighborhoods and small businesses together on foot rather than delivering visitors to a single trailhead. The comparison holds up better here than almost anywhere else along the route, because Sessions Street still functions as a normal residential block. Porches face the sidewalk. Driveways empty directly onto the path. The 2018 opening didn't rezone anything. It just formalized a walk people were probably already taking.
The practical upshot: if your front door lets out onto Sessions Street, your commute to the trail is zero. You're not loading a bike rack or hunting for the Kennesaw Mountain visitor center lot. You step off the curb and you're already on the same paved stretch that carries the annual M2R Trailfest and its public art installations each spring.
Two businesses sit right on this stretch, and both of their histories only make sense once you understand the street doubles as trail infrastructure.
Sessions Stand & Brasserie started as a small walk-up window on the corner of Campbell Hill and Sessions, run by Katie and Micah Pfister, who also built The Butcher The Baker and WR Social House on the Square before turning their attention north. In August 2023, the shop made a move that looked minor on a map and wasn't: it relocated roughly two hundred feet across the street into a larger space with indoor and outdoor seating, a children's play area, and a bar program that includes an Aperol Spritz and a rotating spritz flight. The distance was nothing. The shift in what the space could hold was significant. Sessions Stand kept its coffee partnership with Smyrna's Rev Coffee Roasters through the move, so the espresso didn't change even though everything around it did.
The old walk-up building didn't sit empty. Micah Pfister had a pizza oven in storage for more than a decade, and once the bakery moved out, he had a building sized for exactly one thing: a tiny wood-fired pizza counter with a walk-up window and almost no indoor seating. Micah-Angelo's Pizza opened in early August 2024, and Pfister has been upfront that the whole operation runs on instinct rather than formula. He's described the shop's white sauce as something he built without knowing the standard recipe, and the result became one of the more talked-about slices in Cobb County anyway.
Neither business was built to pull in trail traffic from across town. Both were built for people already moving through on foot, which on this block means the same people day after day.
If you live in the Sessions Street Lofts, on Church Street, or anywhere in the historic pocket between Cherokee Street and Campbell Hill, the loop that's already part of your week probably looks something like this:
None of this requires a car. That's the part easy to take for granted if you've lived here long enough that it stopped feeling notable.
The trail's northern half, from Sessions Street up toward Kennesaw Mountain, is the well-paved, well-signed section. Riders and walkers consistently describe it as the smoother direction to travel, with clear M2R markers most of the way. The southern half, past the Square and toward Brown Park and the old city cemetery, is a different story. Trail reviewers on TrailLink describe that stretch as harder to follow, with gaps where the path simply reverts to sidewalk and road shoulder. The Georgia Conservancy, which has partnered with the city on trail improvements, still describes the route as nearly complete except for a few remaining southern segments in unincorporated Cobb County. If your plan is a there-and-back walk or ride toward the mountain, you're fine. If you're hoping to cover the entire 13.5 miles down to the Chattahoochee in one clean shot, budget for some improvising once you clear the cemetery.
Micah-Angelo's has its own quirks worth knowing before you build it into a routine. The shop is closed Mondays and Tuesdays, seating is limited enough that most people end up on the patio or taking pies home, and there's no dedicated parking at the building itself. None of that is a flaw. It's a byproduct of a tiny pizza oven going into a space sized for a walk-up coffee window, in a location where most customers arrive on foot anyway because they're already out on the trail.
None of this is a secret exactly. It's printed on trail signage, mapped by the city, and documented in a local magazine feature from years ago. But most people who live here still describe their street in relation to the Square, not the trail, because the Square is the more obvious landmark. The trail is quieter about announcing itself. It just runs down the sidewalk.
That's the thing worth sitting with if you're already part of this stretch of Marietta. The short walk to coffee, the pizza with no seating to speak of, the tennis courts at Lewis Park, none of it is separate from the M2R. It's all the same corridor, and it happens to run past your front door.
If you're a longtime Sessions Street regular curious how your specific address or lot fits into this stretch of Marietta, or if a neighbor down the block is weighing a move and wants someone who actually knows which direction the trail runs cleanly, the team at The Carlson Orange Team is happy to walk it with you. Talk to Your Real Estate Family.
