Photo Essay: Atlanta's Ponce City Market
Back in 2013, we covered a massive and exciting project down in the Big Peach: the redevelopment of the old Sears, Roebuck & Company distribution center into Ponce City Market (PCM). The result—more than 1.1 million square feet retail, office, and residential space in Atlanta’s Fourth Ward—is the city’s biggest adaptive reuse project ever.
The first wave of openings began in 2015, and as the city began to fully embrace its newest cultural hub in December, local architect and photographer Blake Burton reached out to us with a collection of photos of the space's transformation.
Fresh out of architecture school at the height of the recession in 2009, Burton took a job in Atlanta’s asset management office supervising the cleanup of what would become PCM. Convinced the building would be demolished, Burton preserved what he could of the building through photographs.
When word came that Jamestown Properties had purchased the building and was planning a complete adaptive reuse, Burton asked permission to continue his documentation. With five years of unlimited access, he built a comprehensive photo record of the building and its transition, which he hopes to publish in book form.
We’ve provided a sampling of his work in the slideshow below.
photo by: Blake Burton
In 1990, the city of Atlanta bought the site with the intention of centralizing its departments and programs. A few offices like the Parks Department eventually relocated, but the building was so massive and the concept so complicated that only about 10% of the facility was ever in active use.
photo by: Blake Burton
The complex eventually served as a major staging area for the 1996 summer Olympics, but by 2010, City Hall East, as it was then known, was costing taxpayers roughly $600,000 a year just to sit vacant.
photo by: Blake Burton
“One of the key components of our ability to make the investment that we are, of course, is the historic tax credit program,” Jim Irwin of Jamestown Properties told me in 2013. He added that value of the credits were estimated at around $35 million at the time.
photo by: Blake Burton
“We carried the building through almost complete schematic design and pricing and approvals necessary [before closing on the purchase] to feel good that we were going to be able to make the building work from a modern function perspective and also be able to honor the history and tell that story in an important way,” said Irwin.
photo by: Blake Burton
The price tag for the redevelopment of PCM is reported at as much as $325 million.
photo by: Blake Burton
PCM's food hall will host at least 23 vendors and restaurants when it is fully leased.
photo by: Blake Burton
"We are taking painstaking care to not clean it up too much, not to strip the patina away from the building. We want people, when they walk through the building, to really experience what it’s been like for the last 90 or so years,” Irwin told me in 2013.
photo by: Blake Burton
Another aspect of the project, which is modeled in part after New York City’s High Line, is a new bridge that connects the site to the Atlanta Beltline, a multi-billion dollar, 22-mile linear park that will circle the city once it’s complete.
photo by: Blake Burton
"It’s a place that has character and it’s not just the next big glass high rise. So all of those [historical elements] really create a culture and create a community, which is really at the heart of what we’re trying to do," Irwin told me.
photo by: Blake Burton
The roof of PCM will host a small amusement park, though it is not scheduled to be completed for some time.
