Shopping center now. Self-storage building later.
Historic District Shopping Center on Decatur Street is about to come crashing down.
Decatur Street Properties, the shopping center’s landlord, filed a permit with City of Atlanta Tuesday to demolish the property.
Decatur Street Properties will spend approximately $150,000.00 in demolition costs, according to the permit.
Spencer Humphrey, owner of Black Tie Barbecue, one of the shopping center’s tenants, told What Now Atlanta in July Historic District is scheduled to be re-developed into self-storage.
Black Tie Barbecue and other Historic District tenants are forced to relocate.
The Village Theatre, one of the shopping center’s tenants, has already announced it will open down the street at Pencil Factory Lofts.
Decatur Street Properties was not immediately available for comment.
9 Responses
Self Storage?? This is such a massive waste of space in the old fourth ward, especial 1 block from the King Memorial MARTA station!! This should be used for residential.
No, using this as storage means that it will help cement the area as a depressing undevelopable barren wasteland. Great job…I can’t wait to look at this for the next 40 years!
As long as this area is homeless grand central station, no rational thinking human should live anywhere near it.
It’s a terrible use for that location but on the good side of things, self storage facilities don’t have a huge capital cost. When the right project comes along that needs that space, the self storage buildings won’t command a huge price above that of the land itself. The real problem is that in the meantime it’s a rather unappealing land use and will be a negative to the potential of the properties around it.
This is part of the reason why I shake my head when John Portman appologists scream about how great he is for saving downtown from becoming a suburban shopping mall. It would be much easier to tear down a declining mall (it happens all the time) and redevelop than it will be to remove the pedestrian hostile mess that he made with his architecture. I’m going to guess that the total value of his blank wall loving, automobile centric buildings is over a billion dollars. Best we can hope for is having the occasional loading dock turned into a tshirt shop. At least with with self storage facility, it’ll be easy to replace when someone with better vision comes along.
@Jason – you’re spot on with that assessment. This is a sucky use for now, but it won’t be hard to fix whenever the time comes. Hell, maybe when this gets old enough it’ll be converted to cheap artist studios ;).
At least Portman’s buildings bring in thousands of visitors each year to the city and have for 50+ years. So in a sense, he did help save downtown.
Yep, because there was a zero percent chance that anyone would have developed anything else downtown. There were only two possibilities: Portman’s anti-human cartopia or an Atlanta version of ‘Escape from New York’. Now excuse me, I need to go buy a magical rock that keeps away the polar bears.
Portman didn’t prevent anyone from developing ‘anything else’ downtown. Your response is dumb.
What an impulsive, thoughtless use of valuable, promising real estate.