The
village’s era as a party haven is over
Chances are the first inkling
most Atlantans will have of the transformation
of Buckhead won’t come from the cranes overhead.
Or the sight of a 27-story office tower rising
out of the ground at one of the city’s most
prominent intersections. Or the signs on West
Paces Ferry Road trumpeting the future site
of Atlanta’s newest ultra-luxury hotel. Or even
tantalizing rumors of towers designed to lure
the super- rich with high-rise condos priced
$3 million and up.
No, the realization that something
big is happening will likely sink in at a more
basic level, down where the rubber hits the
road - - Peachtree Road, to be exact. It’ll
come when the chorus of jackhammers starts to
pound away at the asphalt of Atlanta’s most
famous street early next year, when orange cones
begin to sprout like mushrooms and hard hats
become an everyday sight.
Looking down from his office on
the 16th floor of Tower Place, Scotty Greene
talks about the impending roadwork below him
in the kind of upbeat terms that suggests he’s
rehearsed for three years’ worth of tense encounters
with impatient commuters. “We need to make Peachtree
Road live up to its name,” says Greene, executive
director of the Buckhead Community Improvement
District. “The traffic will be bad for a while,
but traffic is emblematic to an area’s success.”
That’s the kind of Chamber of
Commerce spin that has justified a lot of dumb
decisions when it came to growth and development
in Atlanta. This time, Greene insists, they
are trying to get it right, with an ambitious
mission to transform Buckhead Village from the
party central hotspot it used to be to something
akin to Rodeo Drive plumped down on Park Avenue.
The cornerstone of the plan is
a Peachtree Road you soon won’t recognize.
The CID has been quietly working
for more than a decade to-ward the goal of turning
Buckhead’s main traffic artery into a grand
boulevard, complete with trees, benches and
that rarest of commodities, at least in Atlanta:
a landscaped median strip where its yellow line
now lies.
The CID’s original concept behind
the $20 million Peachtree Boulevard project
-- beyond easing traffic congestion -- was to
prepare Buckhead for future growth, to keep
it ahead of the curve.
The curve, however, seems to have
caught up with Buckhead. As if you hadn’t noticed,
Buckhead is booming with new construction. By
the most recent reckoning, at least two dozen
major projects -- representing millions of square
feet of new office space, condos, apartments,
hotel rooms and retail space -- have been announced
for Buckhead. The most eye-catching entries
include:
• The new St. Regis, a luxury
hotel that has a reputation as a refuge for
celebrities and millionaires and is certain
to keep Buckhead on the radar of the international
jet-set.
• The Mansion, a 50-story skyscraper
that will house a luxury hotel, two restaurants
and 28 floors of condos starting at $3 million.
• The Sovereign, a 50-story office-and-condo
tower near the northwest corner of Peachtree
Road and Ga. 400 that, at 635 feet, will be
Buckhead’s tallest building.
• Cityplace -- easily the most
over-the-top proposal yet -- a series of nine
40-story towers containing 3,800 luxury condo
units that is proposed on vacant land sandwiched
between Lenox Square and Roxboro Road.
For the first time in living memory,
there is agreement among business leaders, politicians,
planning experts and even homeowners that the
growth spurt will make Buckhead not just bigger,
but better.
The combined impact of the Peachtree
Boulevard project and the new buildings going
up -- as well as the increasingly likely prospect
of a streetcar system running up the spine of
the city -- promises to transform Buckhead into
a true urban center where the car is no longer
king and workers, residents and shoppers alike
will mingle on wide, tree-lined sidewalks.
“What’s happening now in Buckhead
is something that’s taking place all over the
country as people are moving back to urban centers,”
says Jim Durrett, executive director of the
Livable Communities Coalition, a quality-growth
thinktank based in Atlanta. “In 10 years, Buckhead
is likely to feel very different than it does
now.”
Perhaps so, but this rosy vision
seems a world away from the Buckhead of only
a few years back, a place where late-night shootouts
and stabbings had, in the popular imagination,
turned Atlanta’s ritziest zip code into an upscale
version of Dodge City.
In a very real way, the notorious
party scene that had come to define the area
had to die so Buckhead could be reborn.
