Levenson’s Guide – The Artery (Marietta Street and Howell Mill Road)

[lethalweapon3]

What Is It:

A primary point-of-entry to games for many Hawks fans, Marietta Street carries a lengthy, storied past in the morphing of Atlanta into the undisputed capital of America’s New South. Rebounding from decades of disinvestment and neglect, stretches of Marietta Street, and Howell Mill Road to its north, are among the most bustling areas for modern Atlanta cuisine and nightlife.

(Guide forthcoming in parts)

~lw3

 

[lethalweapon3]

PART 1 – History:

“Surrender!” News that things weren’t going so well for the graycoats down in Jonesboro, in September of 1864, was slowly seeping its way north to Atlanta, where several railroad lines converged. After months of ongoing battles in the area, with his citizens fleeing alongside evacuating Southern troops, destroyed supplies and ammunition in their wake, Atlanta Mayor James Calhoun realized the jig was up.

 

He convened some prominent citizens, including one former-slave-turned-local-businessman, and set out on horseback from Peachtree Street northwest, via what was then called Marietta Road. This was a primary passage for travelers between downtown Atlanta and Marietta Square in Cobb County, paralleling railroad tracks that served both passenger-train and, later, military activity. Adding to this roadway’s prominence, the very first White settlement in what would later become known as Atlanta, established as Thrasherville, was established on this street in 1839.

Calhoun’s delegation hoped that quick intervention, peacefully ceding his city to Federal military control, would spare the lives of noncombatant citizens and save further damage to private property. General Sherman had divergent ideas, but his March to the Sea would not commence for a couple months.

The mayor’s posse met a Union reconnaissance group traveling from the Chattahoochee River into town, roughly where Marietta Street meets Northside Drive today. The Atlanta delegation’s formal offer of surrender at that spot marked a pivotal point in the strategic and political turn of the Civil War toward the Union’s favor. When Federal infantries arrived after the formal surrender, they were met along Marietta Road by welcoming pro-Yankee sympathizers, and otherwise apprehensive citizens and shopkeepers.

After Sherman’s March, the siege-scarred towns of Atlanta and Marietta were left to rebuild. The push toward industrialization and the convergence of repaired railroad lines made Atlanta an ideal location for the emergence of the “New South” after Reconstruction.

 

No one espoused the virtues of the New South better than Henry Grady, whose 1891 statue now sits prominently in the downtown corridor of Marietta Street, just west of Peachtree. As the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, Grady articulated a vision transforming an “Old South” that “rested everything on slavery and agriculture,” to a more urbanized, industrial “New South,” a “perfect democracy” (for his fellow White citizens, at least), “thrilling with the consciousness of growing power and prosperity.”

Atlanta leaders convened their first world’s fair in 1881, off West Marietta Street, to showcase the American South’s postwar progress. The International Cotton Exposition attracted over 350,000 visitors. Many arrived by way of the city’s first mule-drawn trolley route, having traveled up Marietta Street from downtown Atlanta. After the three-month expo, the massive site alongside the Western & Atlantic Railroad was converted into cotton mills. Accompanying the new textile mills were villages constructed nearby to house the local workers, while trolley services would soon be consolidated and electrified at the site.

Grady perceived an unmet demand for better-educated and trained workers to satisfy the emerging needs of industry, allowing the South to catch up with the industrial revolution up North. To that end, he helped espouse the development of a state-run vocational school in Atlanta. The Georgia School of Technology (now known colloquially as “Georgia Tech”) was sited just east of Marietta Street in Midtown and opened for classes in 1888.

 

A couple years before, at a boarding house on Marietta Street very close to Peachtree, Dr. John Pemberton figured out the formula. At his lab in this house, the wounded Confederate colonel-turned-pharmacist, seeking a healthier and non-addictive alternative to morphine, declared he concocted a tasty syrup infused with caffeine, one he would call “Coca-Cola”.

 

This non-alcoholic soda version of his “French Wine Coca” was timely, as the city had just passed Prohibition laws in 1886. A beverage featuring this concoction went on sale at a pharmacy soda counter on the Peachtree-Marietta corner, for one costly nickel per glass. The soda counter’s popularity further established Five Points -- the convergence of Marietta, Peachtree, and Decatur Streets, Edgewood Avenue and Whitehall Street (this latter segment later re-named Peachtree, as well, for commercial purposes) -- as the epicenter of Atlanta commerce, and the starting point for many direction queries from tourists and lost souls, for decades to come.

 

Within a decade of Pemberton’s new product development, under the auspices of patent purchaser Asa Candler, Coca-Cola would be marketed in every state in the Union; within another five years, Coke sales would go international. Concurrent with consumer demand, the Coca-Cola Company would grow exponentially, moving its headquarters periodically around downtown Atlanta and, eventually, across from Georgia Tech and astride Marietta Street in Midtown.

New industries were moving in north of Coca-Cola. De-monopolized southern spinoff Standard Oil of Kentucky (“Kyso”) constructed offices just off Marietta on Means Street in 1896. Furniture, buggy, and candy manufacturers soon followed. The area became known as the Bellwood industrial district.

The neighborhood shared its name with a massive Quarry, west of Marietta Street, that originally hosted a forced-labor camp for Fulton County’s Black prisoners and convicts, and a viaduct linking Marietta Street to Bellwood Avenue (the future “Bankhead Highway”, now renamed after Donald Lee Hollowell, a Civil Rights-era attorney who previously helped de-segregate UGA, among many other achievements).

North of here, CSX and W&A (Norfolk Southern) rail lines interlock, and Marietta Street converges west at Howell Mill Road near the Exposition Cotton Mills. This transportation advantage positioned Atlanta, the “Gate City,” economically as a vital distribution center for the New South, well into the turn of the 20^th century.

Howell Mill Road was named in honor of Clark Howell’s original mill, where the road crosses Peachtree Creek in Buckhead. Well before Buckhead was annexed into the city, this area represented the northern-most part of Atlanta, the edge defined by the municipal waterworks and reservoirs bisected by Howell Mill Road.

 

Beginning in the 1910’s, the Howell Mill area was known for the Miller-Union stockyard (Federal laws required animals, transported by trains, to be de-boarded for feeding and watering every 8 hours) and, later, slaughterhouses like the South’s first large meat-packing plant, the White Provisions Company.

The clash of urbanization with raw industry became most stark here. Commuter trolleys switching tracks in this area often paused to allow herds of horses, mules, pigs, cattle, and the like across city streets from the trains to the stockyard.

 

After the turn of the 20^th century, Atlanta’s electrified trolley service expanded to allow residents affordable travel across the city and region, at off-street speeds occasionally exceeding 60 miles per hour. The most active and expedient was the Atlanta/Marietta interurban trolley line, along this corridor, connecting downtown Atlanta with the Exposition Cotton Mills and Marietta Square in Cobb County.

Eventually serving over a million passengers annually, the trolley line’s ridership doubled even more during the WWII period, with its access to the Bell bomber assembly plant in Marietta. Residential growth near Marietta Street, north of downtown Atlanta, was attributable to the rising interests of blue-collar workers in making convenient commutes. Retail establishments serving these communities followed in short order on this street.

Hints of this burgeoning Marietta Street-Howell Mill corridor’s demise became evident even before the onset of the Great Depression. In a process which continued for decades on end, hulking enterprises known for industrial “production” either closed outright or sold their properties to businesses interested in using their buildings for less labor-intensive “warehouse” storage operations.

Electric trolley services in the late 1940s, then rubber-tired “trackless” trolley services in the early 1960s, shut down once the automobile became advantageous for individual households, and following investment in the interstate freeways and US Route 41 (Northside Drive), the latter crossing Marietta Street just north of Coca-Cola and Georgia Tech, near the Surrender of Atlanta site.

 

The once-prosperous cotton mills ceased operation in the early 1950s, and residential communities like the mill villages were eventually demolished. In the 1960s, Georgia Tech began snatching up derelict retail properties along the east side of Marietta Street to expand its campus with lightly-used institutional buildings. That encroachment continued in the 1970s, with the clearance of residential properties built for workers at the Atlantic Steel Mill in neighboring Home Park.

 

In the late 1970s, Coke’s new sky-scraping world headquarters placed its front gates at North Avenue but turned its backside onto Marietta Street, interfacing the latter with blocks of blank walls, gated fences and secured parking entrances. By this point, the corridor had become the preeminent pass-through route for north Atlanta drivers traveling to, and especially from, downtown Atlanta. There was little justification for stops in-between, aside from auto repair shops and salvage yards.

 

The economic downturn along the northern stretch of Marietta Street juxtaposed, for a short while, a different story downtown. In the shadow of the Henry Grady statue, the city’s banking elite kickstarted Atlanta’s skyscraper boom in the mid-1950s.

 

Beginning with Fulton National Bank Tower, constructed in 1958 on the site of the picturesque former U.S. Post Office building and City Hall, continuing through the later decades with One Park Tower/Bank of Georgia Building (1961), the First National Bank of Atlanta Building (1966) and Centennial Tower (1975), many of the Southeast’s tallest buildings were being erected within footsteps of Marietta Street, between the Fairlie-Poplar district to its north and the Five Points area to its south.

As freshly merged news outlets, the Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution built their newest joint headquarters in this area, next to the longstanding Federal Reserve Bank. Lunchtime on the 16^th floor at Ivan Allen’s prestigious Commerce Club at Broad and Marietta, featuring its signature ice cream, was the place-to-be among Atlanta’s networking corporate and civic elite, including prominent Black leaders seeking to influence the city’s growth through the Civil Rights Movement era.

That upward momentum shifted during the 1970s as a Tech-grad architect, the recently departed John Portman, and other developers began redirecting Atlanta’s centers of commerce off Marietta Street and more decidedly onto points north along Peachtree Street, featuring more distinctive, postcard-friendly buildings like the Peachtree Plaza, Marquis, and Hyatt Regency hotels among his monolithic office towers. As Peachtree became Atlanta’s premier address, downtown Marietta Street was becoming the place that time forgot.

Widescale office-space abandonment, in favor of Peachtree Center, Midtown, and the northern suburbs, became the order of the day in the ensuing decades, perhaps peaking in 2010. That year, the AJC moved its newspaper operations to Dunwoody near Perimeter Mall, and The Commerce Club merged in with another longstanding business-social club at Peachtree Center. The Federal Reserve relocated to a new white-marble enclave in Midtown in 2001.

 

Construction of the new central passenger rail station for Five Points, in 1979, severed access to the once-vibrant Broad Street commercial district crossing at Marietta Street, hastening the southern downtown area’s decay. The desolate (aside from vagrants, pigeons and rodents) pedestrian plaza, which replaced Broad Street at Marietta, became a signature of the increasingly undesirable nature of this part of downtown.

 

Such squalor, however, was not a deterrent for Tom Cousins (right). The commercial real estate developer acquired the St. Louis Hawks of the NBA and relocated them to Atlanta, on Georgia Tech’s campus, in 1968. Needing a more permanent home for both his Hawks and his future NHL expansion hockey franchise, the Flames, Cousins set out to build an arena complex, and found ample space near the W&A railroad gulch just south of Marietta Street.

 

 

The Omni Coliseum’s siting was no accident. It sat across the street from a truss to a barely-used parking deck that Cousins built, initially, as a link to a future 40-story office tower that never came to fruition. To make his Omni, with its distinctive space-frame roof made of new-age weathering steel, more than just another vapid arena, Cousins enclosed an indoor skating rink around commercial space for offices and consulates next door. Within these environs, he also constructed the Omni International hotel, a standout for lodging in the area, and facilitated what was touted as America’s first indoor amusement park.

 

The amusement park was designed and inspired by Sid and Marty Krofft (the puppeteer/TV producer sibling duo that brought you 70’s Saturday-morning kid-show classics H.R. Pufnstuf, Land of the Lost, and Electra Woman and Dyna Girl).

Unfortunately, the increasingly seedy nature of the surrounding areas (along Marietta Street, and in nearby Castleberry Hill) became a sticking point for not just Flames and Hawks fans, but would-be Krofft-World visitors. The lack of bang-for-the-buck for amusement park goers, relative to the hot new Six Flags Over Georgia in Cobb County, did not help matters, either. The whiz-bang fantasy land of the Kroffts shuttered within a mere six months of its opening.

Cousins’ palace adjoining the Omni sat largely vacant for much of the next decade. He also sold his interests in the Hawks to local media mogul Ted Turner in 1976, and then the Flames to businessmen who relocated the hockey club to Calgary in 1980. But he did maintain, at the Omni complex for many years, a multi-screen movie theater that constantly ran Turner’s favorite flick, Gone With The Wind.

 

Turner was on the lookout for ample business space to suit his growing, around-the-clock, cable news outfit, having outsized his operations near Georgia Tech, and Cousins was happy to accommodate. With the sale of this real estate interest to Ted, Cousins’ beleaguered space was reborn, as CNN Center in 1987. Its ground floor became popular as a food-court hangout, especially during lunchtimes and arena-event days.

 

Foot traffic to the area was also aided by the construction and expansion of America’s first state-owned convention center. The Georgia World Congress Center was situated just north of the Omni complex in 1976, and would grow to become the nation’s largest convention center through the 1990s. The coalescing of these venues as international draws proved ideal for the Atlanta region’s proposals to host the 1996 Olympics, and it shocked many when its bid was granted in 1990. But where would all the sporting events’ visitors congregate during their stay?

 

With Atlanta Olympic committee executive Billy Payne leading the charge, the city and state hastily set about clearing a large swath of vacant and run-down industrial businesses and shops across Marietta Street from CNN Center. The initial phase of construction for Centennial Olympic Park was completed just in time for the Opening Ceremonies.

 

The Omni hosted several medal-winning events. But by this time, the leaking, rust-worn façade and roof, coupled with a lack of luxury suites, made it clear that the arena, not even 25 years old, was already obsolete. As the Hawks’ owner, Turner wanted to accommodate both hoops and a new major-league hockey team in a state-of-the-art venue. Down went the Omni in 1997, and up rose Philips Arena, with its signature ‘ATLANTA’ canopy, largely in the Omni’s place by 1999.

 

Civic leaders wanted the Olympic park to become much more than a footnote to history after the sporting events concluded. Beginning with the opening of the Georgia Aquarium (2005) and continuing with the opening/relocation of museums like the World of Coca-Cola (2007), the Center for Civil and Human Rights (2014), and the College Football Hall of Fame (2014) all within walking distance from the park, the arena/convention center area, and CNN Center, Atlanta fostered a synergy of its highest tourist activities in and around this downtown area. This, with Marietta Street serving as the conduit for millions of annual visitors. A new “Restaurant Row” and additional eateries and hotels would soon follow, effectively expanding the footprint of what Atlantans would come to define as its Downtown.

 

~lw3

[JayBirdHawk]

Good stuff @lethalweapon3.  Fascinating! I Love history and Architecture.

I think we should have a stickied thread in Homecourt for 'non-Hawks' items, miscellaneous info (excluding politics and religion) that will be of interest to the Hawks community.

Not many of the regulars will see and read this.

[macdaddy]

Great story!  I miss the Omni honestly.   The reno at state farm has made it a lot better than before though.  The original design of Philips sucked.

Sad to me that an extensive network of streetcars was just thrown away.   

[JayBirdHawk]

11 minutes ago, macdaddy said:

Great story!  I miss the Omni honestly.   The reno at state farm has made it a lot better than before though.  The original design of Philips sucked.

Sad to me that an extensive network of streetcars was just thrown away.   

My first Omni memory was the 'Trade of Nique for freakin' Danny Manning' so I don't miss that place one bit.

[lethalweapon3]

 

PART 2 – MARIETTA STREET AND HOWELL MILL ROAD, TODAY (AND A LITTLE OF TOMORROW):

The waves of investment and disinvestment bear fruit today in a corridor that has patches of activity between downtown Atlanta and West Midtown, or what is today known as the Westside. Marietta/Howell Mill has become the backbone of the emergent Westside, but we should begin by traveling outward from downtown at Five Points.

If you’re looking to discover signs of the distant past, like Jacob’s Pharmacy at Marietta and Peachtree where Coca Cola was first served, you would be hard pressed when walking around Grady’s statue. If you’re even looking for signs of the recent past, it may be hiding in plain sight. A notable example, the 41-story First National Bank skyscraper at this corner was lopped in half and sheathed in white marble. The former bank office was later remodeled, and it stands today as the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University.

 

The present-day influence of GSU around this stretch of Marietta is unmistakable. A couple blocks north of Marietta along Broad Street, away from the soccer-field-topped MARTA Five Points Station, students and teachers flock to fill the now-platformed street at lunchtime. New school buildings in the vicinity reflect the college’s expansion from Marietta Street all the way east to the interstates, helping generate a livelier, weekday-long activity center in the Fairlie-Poplar District.

 

The signature of this downtown corridor’s modern turnaround is presented by the Glenn Hotel, a Modern Classic office building from the 1920s at Marietta and Spring Street, redeveloped in the mid-2000s. Now under the Autograph Collection of Marriott Hotels, the Glenn is notable not just for its swanky rooms but its Skylounge, a party-friendly patio that offers arguably the most fascinating rooftop view of the northward skyline that Atlanta has to offer.

 

The hotel sits diagonally across the Marietta/Spring Street intersection from Centennial Tower, home to the Atlanta Hawks and Atlanta Dream ownership groups. All of this is situated where Thrasherville, the pre-Civil War settlement, once thrived. A marker stands in front of the old Federal Reserve (now State Bar of Georgia) building on Marietta.

The friendliness of the corridor at a pedestrian scale begins one block west of the Glenn, at Centennial Olympic Park Drive (and Dominique Wilkins Way). The park and the Ferris wheel eye, plus the freshly renamed and remodeled State Farm Arena and CNN Center, are all within a couple blocks walking distance from this point. The park recently expanded, in part to provide a greater face along Marietta Street.

The seas of surface parking lots that once served arena and convention center patrons are all but about gone in what is known locally as the Luckie-Marietta District (Luckie Street formerly stretched from Fairlie-Poplar out to Marietta Street, in the days prior to the Park expansion). Just beyond the convention center and the Omni International hotel is the College Football Hall of Fame. Replacing the parking catacombs that once connected the GWCC and the recently imploded Georgia Dome, decks of auto parking floors are now tucked neatly behind the Hall of Fame.

 

Another multi-tiered car deck prominently faces across from Restaurant Row. The tourist-trappy (but PPV-event-friendly) sports bar STATS Brewpub was among the first to settle in here, on one side of Marietta Street west of Baker Street. Popular pregame and postgame crash-spots that also serve decent helpings of food and beverages include Twin Smokers BBQ, Der Biergarten, and Max’s Coal Oven Pizzeria, all jointly owned and managed, along with STATS and the parking deck. The beer garden and the sports bar offer patio dining. Waffle House is among the Row’s latest tenants.

Downtown Atlanta went through a drought of new lodging construction in the post-Olympic age, but the 2008 opening of Hilton Garden Inn across from the aquarium, and the 2015 opening of Hyatt House directly on Marietta marked a shift. For folks that enjoy finer dining to accompany their hotel stays, there is Glenn’s Kitchen on the first floor of the Glenn Hotel. the Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse adjoining Embassy Suites at Centennial Olympic Park.

Marietta Street makes a decidedly northward bend beyond the Hyatt House at Marietta and Ivan Allen Boulevard. As travelers parallel the street and the adjacent CSX railway that constrains it, they may not feel like they’re in Kansas anymore, but they’re not in downtown much longer, either. With the street wedged between CSX and the Coca-Cola HQ, the transition from downtown to the West Midtown, or Westside area gets quite desolate. With 30-minute frequencies, MARTA Bus Route 26 runs down Marietta and West Marietta Streets, and may be the best means of traveling while on foot between downtown and West Midtown. Bike and scooter rentals aren’t hard to find here at either end.

Signs of life pick back up where Marietta intersects with Means Street and the Regents Drive entrance to Georgia Tech. Upscale student loft housing has become all the rage in the renaissance of the Westside, and new lofts here are displacing old comedy clubs and stripper bars.

 

For those into the visual arts, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center on Means Street has free exhibitions during the daytime, every day except when they’re closed on Mondays. There are also year-round performing arts events at the Ferst Center for the Arts at Georgia Tech, which is simplest to access from the Regents Drive entryway. Local black-box theatrical productions and independent art galleries are easy to find in the area. Marietta Street’s neighborhood association adopted the nickname, “The ARTery”, placing emphasis the arts-oriented options north of downtown along this corridor.

Reasonably priced full-service food options are in the immediate area as one travels toward, and north of, Northside Drive. The Florida-based barbeque chain 4 Rivers Smokehouse recently renovated an old firehouse here. It shares the corner with one of Atlanta’s favorite breakfast outlets, the cash-only Thumbs Up Diner, and the Atlanta outpost of Charlotte’s famous Amelie’s French Bakery and Cafe (unlike the original, this one is not open 24 hours, so check ahead for opening times).

One place that IS open 24 hours, on weekends, is Delia’s Chicken Sausage Stand, which followed up their popular location in East Atlanta with a second stand here on Marietta, just north of Northside Drive. Delia’s is directly across the street from the Surrender of Atlanta historic marker.

 

When predicting the next neighborhood renaissance, at least in this town, look for the opening of a coffee shop in the middle of seemingly nowhere. That’s what happened when Octane Coffee Bar set up shop at the industrial junction of Marietta, West Marietta, and Howell Mill in 2003.

Quickly becoming Atlanta’s favorite independent shop for drip coffee and espresso, Octane (now run by Birmingham’s similar Revelator Coffee) drew yuppie crowds from Georgia Tech and places well beyond, drawing the eager eyes of many real estate developers. There is virtually no establishment in this area with a lightbulb on, today, that was operating 15-20 years prior, hardly even a decade ago.

Building upon the Tech nexus, right after Octane came numerous student-oriented apartments and loft housing developments. The most expansive, WestMar (a play on “West Marietta”) Student Lofts, replaced the Exposition cotton mill site, and shuttles pupils around the clock to Tech, GSU and the Atlanta University Center. Now teeming with hundreds of university students and young adults, the upgrade to retail and restaurants in the immediate area would be soon to follow.

Whether you’re seeking out Vietnamese food in an Old Saigon setting (Le Fat), late-night Mexican (bartaco), or one of the city’s lauded gourmet burgers (Bocado), you’ll find an option along this brief stretch of Marietta Street, south of Octane.

The scene begins getting more upscale north of the coffee shop, along Howell Mill Road. Student apartment living here is now joined by rentals of the “luxury” variety, with popular eateries at street level. Folks nostalgic, yet hungry and thirsty, can enjoy grade-school-themed decor at the PS 404 gastropub, the only “Public School” chain restaurant on the East Coast, while a 40s-style office setting sets the scene at breakfast hotspot West Egg Café. Six Feet Under Pub and Fish House (named for its original location across from Oakland Cemetery) has one of its establishments a block east of Howell Mill, the seafood restaurant and bar having one of the best upstairs patio views.

 

Perhaps a last vestige of the past in this corridor is the corner dive bar, Northside Tavern, where cans of PBR and live nightly blues legends have been in great supply since 1972. The tavern sits awash in construction cranes for new residential towers in virtually every direction, particularly in the area now named the Westside Provisions District.

Fast-casual restaurant YEAH! Burger is a go-to place on Howell Mill for the burgers-and-fries set, touting its locally sourced and organic ingredients, while their veggies-and-grain-bowl cousin Upbeet is across the street. Around the corner from Upbeet, in the Westside Ironworks development, is Barcelona Wine Bar, featuring Spanish tapas and Mediterranean specialties.

Named by Eater Magazine as one of “America’s 38 Essential Restaurants” in 2017, Miller Union keeps a hint of this area’s industrial past in its name while serving South Georgia-inspired dishes. Around the corner is arguably the area’s most well-regarded high-end seafood and oyster bar, The Optimist.

 

If you’ve never tried your hand at duckpin bowling (smaller pins and balls, three rolls per frame), Belgian feather bowling, or Toad in the Hole (I don’t wanna know), you and friends can find some fun at a gaming parlour called The Painted Duck, in the new Atlanta Stockyards development across from Miller Union. Call ahead for availability and look for the speakeasy-like entrance.

 

You don’t come to the Westside Provisions District looking for quick pre-game bites. Rather, this hotspot below the Water Works is where to go when you’ve got time to spend and money to burn. Around formally for just over a decade, since its earlier days hosting the famed local restaurants Bacchanalia and Star Provisions, Westside Provisions is now the centroid of Atlanta’s playground for the trust-fund young-adult and upwardly-mobile dating sets, and it’s a go-to spot for the well-established, upper-echelon Atlantans who want to feel as though they’re slumming it on occasion.

 

“If Blade Runner was a Bar”, is all the catchphrase anyone needs to check out the atmosphere, Asian fusion street food and cocktails at Little Trouble (huge neon sign above). 2016’s “VICE Guide to Atlanta” insists, “the people watching at LT can’t be beat,” although that sentiment could fairly extend all around Westside Provisions.

Local favorite Taqueria del Sol has a longstanding Mexican-inspired eatery here, and speaking of which, expect long standing lines of happy patrons awaiting their turns at casual places like this, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams and Five Daughters Bakery.

Mainstay JCT Kitchen & Bar, the original eatery from local chef-legend Ford Fry’s restaurant empire, offers patio seating overlooking the busy railroad the bisects the District, and an upstairs bar with a picturesque Midtown skyline view, while serving upscale versions of Southern comfort food classics. There’s also Ormsby’s for more of a neighborhood tavern scene with traditional bar games like darts, shuffleboard and billiards. Across the tracks is Fry’s Marcel restaurant, considered a local standout among steakhouses. Ostensibly for recent security reasons, several higher-end restaurants in this area expressly do not accept cash for payment, so be sure to have a credit or debit card handy.

Retail options abound here as well, for high-end home goods, furniture and clothing. Outlets for chains Anthropologie and lululemon are interspersed across the District, on both sides of Howell Mill Road. Local fashion power couple Sid and Ann Mashburn have a haberdashery and boutique, respectively, tailor-made for men and women. There is both valet and surface lot parking for District shops, as well as a busy-all-night free parking deck on the south end of the railroad bridge. Street parking in the area, particularly of the free variety, is becoming vastly harder to come across.

 

Excuse all the construction! Following decades of post-industrial neglect, the city of Atlanta continues to invest substantially in the Westside, in this “Artery” corridor, on nearby Northside Drive, Huff Road and beyond. By result, places noted here only scratch the surface of what you can find north and south of State Farm Arena’s and the CNN Center’s doorstep, and what you will find in the coming years. Renderings for mixed-use complexes above are either newly open, or planned to complete construction and open, within the next couple years.

With thousands more residents, commuters and intown visitors finding new accommodations here, the “New South” is rising like a fiery phoenix, on Marietta Street, on West Marietta Street and on Howell Mill Road, in ways Mayor Calhoun, Asa Candler, and not even Henry Grady could have fathomed. Heck, as far as Hawk-fan travelers go, this isn’t even Josh Smith’s Marietta Street anymore.

 

~lw3