Glimpsing Inside City Hall East
Decatur Metro | April 19, 2010If you’re like me, most of your most vivid nightmares take place inside large, vacant buildings.
However, you don’t need to be questionably sane to admit that you’ve long been intrigued by the hulking, vacant City Hall East (aka Atlanta’s old Sears warehouse) sitting nonchalantly along Ponce de Leon Ave across from the old location of the Atlanta Crackers Stadium.
“What the heck is inside that place?”, you might have asked yourself, emerging from Whole Foods with an $8 salad and an Honest Tea. “A small town constructed out of old, unshipped, prefab Sears catalog homes? Millions of unused “& Roebuck” signs? A murderous henchman hoping to chase you down a long, dark, endless corridor?”
Well, wonder no more disturbed and curious types! Creative Loafing’s Scott Henry and Joeff Davis to the rescue!
The two recently received access inside the brick behemoth – before the property is turned into lofts – and documented a small portion of what’s still behind those trillions of windows.
Henry wrote the article, Davis took the pics. MUST SEE.
Photo above taken by Joeff Davis/Creative Loafing. Used with permission.
Incredible. I want those card catalogs. And all the old hardware.
Agreed! I want to LIVE in that building and recreate Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but instead of chocolate, I was impress people with rooms filled with interesting junk.
Surely they’re not going to just throw away all of those boxes with the core samples in them? The boxes look to be made of beautiful pine planks– I bet a re-use construction firm would buy them to re-purpose them into floors. They’d be gorgeous!
Other than that, I must confess it would seriously creep me out to be in that place after dark.
GARAGE SALE!!!
I have been in there several times to get finger printed…a story for another time…
The place always smelled bad.
Reminds me of the photos I have seen here:
http://www.sweetjuniperphoto.com/search/label/detroit%20public%20schools
You could have gotten fingerprints done at Decatur PD – a much more pleasant experience.
Lots of asbestos.
So wait, they’re turning them into lofts? Or is that just the rumor? I’d be interested to hear about a time line for that project.
When I was a boy I used to shop at that Sears with my Dad. He loved Sears. The retail departments occupied the bottom two or three levels. They looked like any other department store. I always wondered what the rest of the building looked like. I think it was a major hub for the catalog distribution maybe that’s why there’s all those old parts.
Years later I worked for the GSU architecture department and would go into some of the buildings GSU was thinking of buying. They were often abandoned and quite scary, sort of like the buildings in Bladerunner, dripping water, odd noises.
I remember going shopping there too, in the late ’60s. First time (as a visitor from the sticks) in a multi-tiered parking garage. That was more exotic than the huge store.