![]() We’re delighted to provide an outdoor experience for Atlantans who are looking for safe ways to reenter the shopping and dining environment. ![]() And we also serve as an intown hub for Midtown employees and college students looking for a delicious lunch, Atlanta United fans in need of the new kit, or just families in search of a day at the movies and then dinner. We continue to see regional visitors, such as for school or holiday shopping traditions. We see more than 11 million visitors to our property each year, and those guests are looking for options like our flagship retailers, our convenient and diverse restaurants, or to take part in one of our 300-plus property events each year. ![]() Holmes: Since it debuted, Atlantic Station has been an attraction for visitors traveling in from other cities and states and those making their way from surrounding suburbs. ![]() Is Atlantic Station still a regional attraction, as it was in 2005? Or has the advent of other developments from PCM to Halcyon made it more of a neighborhood, Midtown, or intown hub? Next week, it’s worth noting, the property will launch a new website and ad campaign branding it as “The Heart of Atlanta.” Answers have been edited and condensed for space, with some context added. On the eve of its milestone birthday, we caught up officials now taking the reins on Atlantic Station’s future-Holmes and Kristie Ray, director of marketing-for a Q&A about the nearly 3-million-square-foot project’s reboot, its influence, recent challenges, and the uncertain future ahead. Garzia left Hines this month to join CIM Group and lead retail, restaurant, and entertainment leasing for the multi-billion-dollar redo of The Gulch downtown, which suggests CIM bigwigs believe he got something right in Midtown. “This project is going to change more in the next 24 months than it has in the past decade,” Nick Garzia, Hines’s former director of leasing, told this magazine in early 2018. But as the city’s economy and development surged from recessionary depths, a pivot came when Houston-based Hines acquired Atlantic Station for $200 million in 2015-and bold predictions about a new day weren’t far behind. It was criticized for being a chain-heavy outdoor mall, an elevated island disconnected from the intown fabric, a hub of unruly teens and petty crime, and then an urban shopping district that piped in country music in an attempt to clean up its image. But Atlantic Station’s evolution hasn’t avoided turbulence, especially as the recession took its financial toll. That blueprint echoes today in places like Avalon, Forsyth County’s Halcyon, and The Battery. ![]() “We’re not the same Atlantic Station we were in 2005-or even in 2010, or 2015,” Cornell Holmes, the property’s general manager, said this week.Ītlantic Station set the regional template for how a massive, walkable, open-air hub of shops, eateries, trendy flats, hotel rooms, and office towers could be whipped up from scratch. Which is all to say: Times have changed, and especially in the past three years, Atlantic Station has been changing with them. Atlantic Station’s initial retail lineup included-longtime Atlantans, prepare to giggle-The Grape, Guess?, Claddagh Irish Pub, FOX Sports Grill, that big place with “cheesecake” in the name, and other bygone hotspots. Braves veteran Freddie Freeman was a sophomore in high school, and Hawks dynamo Trae Young had just turned seven. There was no Georgia Aquarium (it opened a month later), no Ponce City Market, no buzzy BeltLine restaurants, no Atlanta United, no Great Recession, no COVID-19. Heralded as the nation’s largest brownfield redevelopment at the time, the private Midtown property overlooked a much different Atlanta. ![]()
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