Cover Story: The changing face of Downtown Atlanta

On a Tuesday afternoon in Downtown, people shuffle into a dozen or so restaurants on North Broad Street to grab some lunch. Students pack into Ali Baba for a gyro wrap, residents stop by Reuben’s Deli for a pastrami sandwich, and delivery drivers scurry from Dua II Go to drop off piping-hot beef pho to office workers.

Inside Rosa’s Pizza, a lengthy line of patrons awaits crispy New York-style slices and calzones. The restaurant’s employees slide thin-crust pies in and out of the large steel oven and bring them to their customers. The pizzeria’s tables are mostly occupied. John Rosa, the eatery’s 61-year-old owner, can barely get away from the register during lunch hours.

Rosa’s Pizza today struggles to keep up with orders. But the pizzeria hasn’t always experienced that kind of demand. When Rosa began serving slices in 1991, he was the lone tenant on the Downtown block. He closed up shop on nights and weekends. Broad Street’s vibrant street life wasn’t just lacking, it was nonexistent.

“It was very seedy, let’s put it that way,” he recalls, leaning onto one of the restaurant’s red-and-white checkered tables. “There were more homeless, more pimps. The building across the street was all run down and vacant.”

The eatery has been a rare constant in a historic neighborhood where Atlanta was founded, Union troops marched, and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was once arrested for civil disobedience — and that’s undergone a drastic transformation over the past two decades. More restaurants near Woodruff Park are extending their hours. During last year’s Final Four, Rosa opened his place on a Saturday. It’s lively again. There are people and the neighborhood’s changing.

In 2014, Downtown will experience more change than any other year since the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. Dozens of construction cranes are expected to move steel beams in the area between Northside Drive to the west, North Avenue to the north, the Downtown Connector to the east, and I-20 to the south. Two prominent museums will open; a streetcar will begin operation; construction crews are expected to break ground on a new stadium; and Georgia State University will continue amassing real estate. And the future of more than 90 acres of public land remains up in the air.

These projects will transform Downtown’s identity and potentially improve the city center. But it faces long-standing obstacles and lingering concerns: Many residents would prefer basic retail over big-ticket projects; neglectful property owners hinder progress on underused blocks; some visitors consider the area unsafe; homelessness is a problem. And successfully remaking Underground Atlanta might just be more difficult than maintaining the status quo.

The streetcar and all the museums aren’t necessarily enough to make a neighborhood — filled with families, shopkeepers, and everyday people — a better place to live. We know when the grand openings will be held for the megaprojects. But when will Downtown land a grocery store?

In the coming fall, legions of gridiron devotees will descend upon the College Football Hall of Fame. For around $20 per ticket, fans can explore exhibits filled with historic memorabilia, learn about their alma mater’s football legacy, and throw the pigskin on an indoor football field. John Stephenson, the president and CEO of Atlanta Hall Management, the nonprofit tasked with the building’s operations, insists the hall won’t have the typical stodginess found in other similar shrines. By his estimates, approximately 500,000 annual visitors will look at etched glass panels honoring more than 1,000 inductees and touch 55-inch screens playing highlight reels.

Both the three-story, 94,000-square-foot building off Marietta Street and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, located a few blocks north, are scheduled to open before the year’s end. The NCCHR’s newly constructed 42,000-square-foot facility will permanently display King’s historic personal papers and house interactive exhibits starting this month. The two new attractions, plus the eventual redesign of Centennial Olympic Park, could lure even more sightseers Downtown.

“We’re filling in the last two blank spaces,” Stephenson says about both museums from his offices inside the Georgia World Congress Center. “We’ll bring people down here and this area will become more widely known as a destination.”

Atlanta’s hospitality industry, long supported by a thriving convention industry, has seen its reputation as a tourist destination also climb in recent years with the success of the Georgia Aquarium, World of Coke, CNN Center, and SkyView Atlanta Ferris wheel. The Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau reported a record-breaking 40.4 million total visitors in 2012. In January, the neighborhood landed on the New York Times’ list of “52 places to go in 2014.”

The forthcoming ribbon cuttings will likely help garner attention for Downtown. Despite some attractions, NCCHR CEO Doug Shipman thinks many locals are unaware of the area’s concentration of attractions, restaurants, and parks.

??
“A lot of people from Atlanta who haven’t been Downtown in a while are incredibly surprised,” Shipman says. “That’s a challenge to showcase how it’s changed and invite them Downtown. When they do come, their expectations are exceeded, but we need them to try it.”

It’s never been easy for Wendy Darling to buy groceries in Atlanta. She has lived Downtown since 1996 and currently resides in the 101-year-old Healey Building in Fairlie-Poplar, a historic part of Downtown between Woodruff and Centennial Olympic parks. The digital communications specialist relies on MARTA to commute to her offices at Emory University. Downtown lacks a grocery store, she says. Without a car, she makes between a 3- to 5-mile round trip to either Midtown’s Publix or Trader Joe’s.

For the most part, Darling enjoys her tight-knit residential community. It’s grown safer and looks better, in her opinion. But she’s concerned with how development has lagged behind Midtown and other booming neighborhoods. Darin Givens, a Web developer and local blogger, who picked the Healey to start a home with his wife and son after living in Ansley Park, wants more smaller scale, mixed-use developments that offer a variety of businesses. The ongoing projects excite tourist and civic boosters, but they both wish the developments would improve Downtown’s quality of life instead of focusing on visitors.

“I’m so used to it, but with a lot of people, that’s a huge adjustment,” Darling says. “Fellow residents have cars they won’t use except for grocery shopping. They patronize Downtown places and are willing to take MARTA. With groceries, they want to make one trip.”

It might just take museum openings, major developments, and a $100 million transportation project to land a grocery store. Due to the recession, Central Atlanta Progress President A.J. Robinson says those projects will likely need to happen before residents see their needs met.

“The excitement for these projects is going to lead to traditional things that change people’s lives: retail, housing, office buildings,” Robinson says. “This will lead to a positive impact. Perhaps Underground is the place for a grocery store? Perhaps the Civic Center.”

Many residents believe that’s a counterintuitive approach to development. They’re not exactly sure why it happens that way. One of the great hopes of the proposed Falcons stadium and, further off, the multimodal passenger terminal planned for “the Gulch,” the railyard and parking lot near Philips Arena, was that their development would help tie together Downtown. But preliminary plans for the $1.2 billion football complex show more parking than initially expected, stifling the dense, walkable development residents envisioned. Mayor Kasim Reed recently said the Gulch project, which would have created a new street grid and potential neighborhood staples, likely won’t happen during his remaining time in office.

“We need things that’ll fill a void,” says Atlanta Downtown Neighborhood Association President Kyle Kessler, an architect who has lived in South Downtown for eight years. “No need is being met by the College Football Hall of Fame.”

Darling, Givens, and Kessler are part of a growing trend of people who are moving back into cities. For the first time since the 1920s, recent U.S. census data shows urban cores are growing faster than their suburban counterparts. Metro Atlanta is not only experiencing massive jobs growth and a population boom, but residents are moving back into the city limits from its sprawling suburbs faster than other parts of the country. In 2012, the Brookings Institution reported the rate of Atlantans migrating intown ranks higher than any other major U.S. metro area besides New Orleans.

About a decade from now, Reed predicts Atlanta will eclipse the 500,000 population mark and be well on its way to becoming one of the leading cities in the world. He thinks the city will also experience “authentic diversity” — not the self-aware kind that comes with being a city that’s too busy to hate — for the first time in his life. Much of that, he says, hinges on how the city approaches the proposed public and private projects this year. On top of that, he’s publicly acknowledged concerns about potential gentrification and given thought about how to best counter those forces.

On a blank sheet of paper inside his office, Reed scribbles down a rough sketch of his vision for Atlanta: Ponce City Market to the east, the Falcons stadium to the west, four academic institutions marking the Downtown area’s borders, government buildings to the South, and Underground in the middle. He’s recently made similar demonstrations to other reporters to drive home his point. He thinks Downtown could possess an unprecedented energy fueled by more residents, an improved look and feel, and affordability.

The icing on the cake, Reed later says in our conversation, would be a mixed-use development with a high-end grocer that’s “kind of like what you see on the Ponce corridor, across the street from City Hall East, in the city center by Woodruff Park.” He smirks slightly, but remains quiet, when I ask him if that means Underground. “I think we’re going to achieve that objective, we just need the right partner,” he adds.

??
To achieve that vision, Reed will also have to tackle mounting social issues. Atlanta suffers from the highest economic inequality of all major U.S. cities and the worst economic mobility rates among major American metros. Downtown during weekdays is a snapshot of the region’s disparities. Many of Atlanta’s wealthiest movers and shakers are based out of skyscrapers and grab lunch at the posh Commerce Club high atop the 191 Peachtree Tower. A short walk in any direction reveals much of the city’s homeless population congregating around shelters like the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless at Peachtree and Pine streets. Unsheltered men and women sleep under highways, on sidewalks, or in alleyways throughout the area.

“Ten years from now, Downtown is going to be one of the most vibrant and sexiest parts of the city to be in because of affordability,” says Reed, who sees the city headed down that path today. He adds, “The west side is exploding and the east side is exploding. It’s real and organic.”

On Downtown’s east side, Georgia State University has slowly gobbled up large swaths of the neighborhood. The continued expansion of the 32,000-student institution has helped the onetime commuter school remake itself into a more traditional college. To continue that push, administrators have laid out a master plan that calls for the razing of Kell Hall, a retrofitted parking deck that’s housed classes since 1946, to create a central greenspace for the school.

New facilities such as the $82.5 million Humanities Law building at the corner of John Wesley Dobbs Avenue and Park Place and a $25.5 million science park are set to open in 2015. This week, GSU President Mark Becker unveiled a proposal to convert Turner Field into a 30,000-person football stadium and its adjacent sea of parking lots into a southern campus anchored by a $300 million mixed-use development. He eventually plans to expand the school’s housing capacity from 4,000 to 10,000 students, starting this fall with the One12 Courtland tower that’s expected to house hundreds of students. But he doesn’t want the academic institution to take over the neighborhood.

“We don’t want Downtown to only be Georgia State,” Becker says. “We have no interest in buying or occupying everything. We want to see Downtown thrive not only in terms of what we’re doing, but what’s filling in around the school.”

Becker instead sees the school taking a similar path to the way New York University transformed Greenwich Village. By expanding its footprint, he says the prestigious academic institution managed to alter, albeit with pushback from local activists, the lower Manhattan neighborhood’s direction.

“Now what you find is a mixing of residents, businesses, and the university,” he says. “That’s certainly our vision.”

Becker’s hopes could soon come to fruition. Last summer, Coca-Cola announced the launch of a 2,000-employee IT center in SunTrust Plaza. Invest Atlanta, the city’s economic development arm, is partially subsidizing $85 million in renovations to the mostly vacant Equitable Building and helping turn the nearby Flatiron Building into a startup incubator. More than 23,000 residents have filled more than 95 percent of Downtown’s existing units. Faced with overwhelming housing demand, and only a handful of various projects such as the 250 Piedmont Avenue’s and the ‘’Atlanta Daily World building’s residential conversions on deck, new residential projects might follow in the next few years. That could lead to a proportionate and healthy amount of students, residents, and employees if done right. And it could help make the neighborhood more affordable as well.
Harvey Newman, professor emeritus at GSU, says the university’s footprint has helped fill the void left during the business community’s exodus from the city’s central business district for Midtown, Buckhead, and the Perimeter area. Since then, the student body’s presence has poured into Fairlie-Poplar, enabled Broad Street establishments to stay open longer, and breathed life into the Woodruff Park area. He sees that impact continuing, but insists that the school can only be one part of that equation, not the entire solution, for the area to reach its full potential.

“We’ve had a transformative effect on this part of Downtown,” Newman says. “There’s room for more retail and more stores could pop up. It can be enhanced and expanded.”

For more than two years, city crews have prepared for the Atlanta Streetcar’s impending launch. Before the year ends, four sleek, modern trains will shuttle riders in a 2.7-mile figure eight loop throughout Downtown. Sightseers, workers, and residents will be able to hop on the energy-efficient blue-and-green trams and make their way from Centennial Olympic Park to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. historic site. It may not cut down on travel times — it’ll take as long to walk the route as it does to catch the next train — but it could help spark development and make people’s lives more convenient.

??
City officials including Atlanta Deputy Chief Operating Officer Tom Weyandt are betting that the on-street tracks will attract developers to vacant Fairlie-Poplar lots that have sat underused. James Shelby, the city’s planning and community development commissioner, envisions new entrepreneurs filling empty storefronts along Auburn Avenue because of the project. Several business grants, including one to subsidize rent for pop-up shops and another to match funding for building façade improvements, are providing incentives for current and prospective business owners. They want the initial route to expand eventually and connect to the Atlanta Beltline, north and south along Peachtree Street, and Zoo Atlanta.

“We’ve got a decaying urban core, we’ve got traffic congestion, we’ve got people who want a more walkable lifestyle and want to live Downtown,” Atlanta Streetcar Executive Director Tim Borchers says. “As soon as you put federal investment into a major area, the private sector follows because you can’t move it. This is a long-term investment.”

The city says early signs of the streetcar’s economic impact are pointing in the right direction. Reed points to an estimated $375 million in public and private development has taken place within a quarter mile, or about a five-minute walk, of the rail. Within three years, the city’s hospitality industry is expected to grow by $2.5 billion.

On the streetcar’s heels, City Hall’s forthcoming decisions regarding the sale of three large public-owned properties in and around Downtown — Turner Field, the Civic Center, and Underground — could bolster the efforts. It’s unclear what could replace the aging stadium, performance venue, and entertainment complex. But city officials know it’s a rare chance to re-imagine what happens on nearly 90 intown acres.

“It’s a unique opportunity the city has in a similar way that we did with the Olympics,” Atlanta City Councilman Kwanza Hall says. “This is our next moment to strike while the iron is hot.”

New developments, filled storefronts, and increased foot traffic could add life to Downtown. Reed sees the public projects, with the help of the private sector, as a way to make people think twice about a place long viewed as an “area of weakness and doubt.” For years, many Atlantans have considered the neighborhood to be unsafe and unsavory. Look no further than the French government’s 2013 warning urging its citizens to avoid Downtown at night. That dodgy reputation grew after real estate investors and private developers placed their projects farther north on Peachtree Street in Midtown and Buckhead.

Reed thinks Downtown has made strides to get past the negative perceptions. He attributes much of that to the city’s sizeable investment in public safety and new police officers. That progress is reflected in Downtown’s crime statistics. Between 2009-2013, police records show a 34 percent drop in the neighborhood’s major reported crimes. On top of that, the mayor has controversially clamped down on Five Points vending to change the way people experience the area. It’s often the first thing tourists see in the city after exiting MARTA from the Atlanta Airport.

“Five Points was an embarrassment,” Reed says. “When I would recruit businesses to Five Points, the visual look of the area killed us.”

Despite major criticisms about the way he treated vendors, the mayor says getting rid of one of the city’s biggest “eyesores,” and providing street salesmen with, in his opinion, a fairer and more affordable process, has helped convince developers to give the area another look. He says people will have more interest in living and working in the heart of the city.

“They’re only coming back to safe city centers and urban cores,” Reed says as he defends his approach to Five Points and other parts of Downtown. “The investment we made in public safety, when we made it, is the linchpin. If we had continued to have these outsized crime incidents people couldn’t explain, and the public couldn’t see that when those happened that someone was going to pay, none of this would happen.”

Four blocks south of Rosa’s Pizza, longtime Atlanta resident Patrick Myers quietly watches from a chair on the sidewalk as men and women ramble down South Broad Street. Not many people, aside from the regular drug dealers and a rare passerby, are out on this dreary, rainy day. But the 45-year-old maintains his post in the heart of South Downtown, a former commercial hub that was once home to major department stores, local retailers, and black-owned businesses.

“It was almost like being home,” Myers says. “You could find everything you want right here in this street. It was good times back then. It’s gotten worse.”

Over nearly two decades, the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Broad Street” has watched the once-bustling artery decay into its current state. He’s seen grocers close, liquor stores shutter, and a poultry store turn off its lights. Only a few places such as Miller’s Rexall Drug, a natural remedy shop open since 1965, have remained.

South Broad Street has shown some signs of a rebound. The block’s brightly painted murals, courtesy of Elevate and Living Walls’ public art efforts, make it feel like less of a concrete jungle. But the street still has a long way to go before shops reopen, more residents move into lofts, and drug deals stop taking place. Like many of the area’s desolate thoroughfares, which include abandoned buildings, towering government complexes, and unfilled surface parking lots, the street remains notably absent from the list of proposed developments.

“It used to be a lively street with personalities,” says Richard Miller, longtime owner of Miller’s Rexall Drug. “Then owners, once dependent on the business in their own property, sold shops and become less involved in neighborhood. Second- and third-generation owners left and have no vested interest in the area.”

These days, Myers can regularly be found outside Mammal Gallery, a new DIY arts and music space located at 91 Broad St. It’s home to co-founders Chris Yonker and Brian Egan’s pastel-striped performance venue that’s attracted concertgoers and artists to an otherwise derelict block.

“Starting a Downtown business is a source of pride,” Egan says. “We’re inserting culture into a place that’s devoid of it.”

Yonker, frontman of local indie-rock group Hello Ocho, says he initially foresaw difficulties in convincing people to venture Downtown. Yet Egan says their experiences have been far different. People actually began attending shows at the once-abandoned nightclub for local and national events. More than safety concerns, they’ve seen the quality of events and promotion determine how many people show up on a given night.

Mammal Gallery’s early success has convinced at least one other tenant, Eyedrum, the shape-shifting underground arts organization, to strongly consider relocating to six empty storefronts near Forsyth and Mitchell streets. They’re mulling an enticing deal from LAZ Parking, the building’s current owner, who’s hedging that more business will lead to more revenue, to lease the space for $1 per year for the next seven years.

After opening last September, Egan and Yonker now want to buy the building to stay in South Downtown for the long haul. The co-founders, whose arts space has the support of local residents, see the opportunity as a chance to build a new community in a neighborhood in dire need of such efforts. But first it starts with getting more residents, shop tenants, and visitors into the area.

“It could be what EAV has become, a tight-knit community with a daytime grocer, reading room, and coffee shop,” Egan says. “Local vibes, no Taco Bell. It’d be nice to have people living down here and a place where artists can live and work.”

Yonker has a simpler hope for Broad Street moving forward: “I see us having neighbors.”’’