Will Someone Please Just Revive South Downtown Atlanta
Decatur Metro | November 3, 2011If you haven’t yet done so, you might want to check out Thomas Wheatley’s cover story in Creative Loafing this week, which does a most excellent job of summing up the unresolved “problems” with Atlanta’s biggest revitalization project – “south downtown”. After detailing the area’s vibrant past…
Grocery stores sold everything a person would need to make three meals a day, as well as specialty items such as pig’s feet to pig heads. At Roy’s, where you could select a live chicken, get its head chopped off, and watch the decapitated fowl run around the store. Another shop sold “rat cheese” — cut from a block of sharp New York cheddar — for rodent traps or sandwiches. Yet another bar-be-qued chicken.
…and less vibrant recent past…
Nearly 30 homeless men and women huddled together, resting underneath the long ramp leading to the Garnett Street MARTA station. Others slept on the steps of the police department headquarters in the shadow of the city jail. Even more wandered the streets, asked motorists passing through for help, or stood alone in parking lots.
…Wheatley starts to think about possible solutions and dives head first into a Pandora’s Box of urban fun…
Everyone’s in agreement about the key ingredient needed to help south downtown grow: more people. Which raises the obvious question: How do you coax new residents and tourists to a historic area that has very few vestiges of its glorious past, offers little in the way of decent shopping, and which becomes a ghost town after workers hop in their cars at 5 p.m. to head to the ‘burbs? How do you build retail when the number of residents hasn’t reached critical mass and probably won’t if such basic amenities as grocery stores aren’t nearby? It’s a chicken-or-egg scenario, one that leaves many interested parties scratching their heads.
h/t: ATL Urbanist
Wouldn’t it be great if some of the success of Castleberry Hill crept northwest over the RR tracks, and the growth of GSU seeped over southwest a little? There’s cool stuff going on around this area, but not in it. Except of course Lunacy.
*northeast
“Success of Catleberry Hill”?
I am sorry, but its a nice little niche. Not a success story. Especially now with the economy.
It is a nice little niche, so how is that not a success story? I didn’t say it was by any means perfect or complete.
Castleberry Hill is certainly a success when you consider the retail and residential presence there now compared to 20 years ago. I remember exploring CH after shows at the nearby Homage Coffeehouse on Trinity Avenue circa 1993. Despite a small number of people living in lofts, the place looked then pretty much like most of South downtown looks now: fairly abandoned.
Now it has businesses like No Mas Cantina, Bottle Rocket, Sweet Tooth’s Dessert Bar, the Wine Shoe, Elliot Street Pub and many people living in the lofts and condos. Sure, several places have closed in the past couple of years, but that’s the way a recession treats a still-developing area. Overall, I’d say it’s doing well and headed in the right direction.
And I agree with JonC — I think it would be great if that success would creep over the tracks and into South downtown.
For the great architecture and gridded streets alone, there’s a huge potential for growth and improvement in South downtown.
It will be interesting to see how the transit hub in the “Gulch” affects this area, if and when it ever gets done.
Support this new downtown holiday event benefiting Children’s Healthcare like the old Festival of Trees.
http://christmasonpeachtree.com/