Atlanta’s Fairlie-Poplar in the 1980s vs today
I found a 1983 photo of Poplar Street at it’s intersection with Fairlie Street that perfectly lines up with one I took in 2015 when my family lived in this part of Downtown. The change in the street might not be clearly visible – basically there are restaurants, apartments, businesses and GSU facilities on this block now whereas the use of the buildings in 1983 was a little more sparse.
This top photo came from the GSU digital archives. It’s part of a series of photos of the Fairlie-Poplar area that was taken for an AJC series in 1983 that explored the massive – and not entirely successful – undertaking of the time to turn around the disinvestment going on in the area. Offices were emptying as the main business center of the city moved north into Midtown and Buckhead, and small businesses were struggling to make a buck with the loss of street life.
You can read about the effort in this article from the 1983 series. Here’s a telling quote from it:
Approximately $70 million in private capital has been invested since 1978 in the Fairlie-Poplar redevelopment project — the area around two streets in the heart of downtown Atlanta where planners aim to restore “human scale” amid megastructures and high-rise office towers. CAP estimates that $20 million of the funds have been spent on building renovations.
As I understand it, the investments did not pay off as intended in the short term. The story I’ve gotten from long-time business owners and office workers in this district is that Fairlie-Poplar remained a pretty grim place up until after the Olympics in the late 1990s when the street-scaping done for the games coupled with a big investment from Georgia State University to finally have a positive impact.
GSU now has several buildings in in the district that are in use and student activity in general has pumped a great deal of vibrancy into the area. The other great thing that happened in the late 90s to early 2000s is that a few of the office buildings here (which were struggling to find tenants) were converted to residential apartments. Bringing in that mix, so that the district now has offices, residents, students and stores, was the key.
In that bottom photo you can just barely see our son walking down the sidewalk. To my knowledge, we were the only family with a school-aged child that owned a home in Fairlie-Poplar at the time.
There are not many apartments here large enough for a family, so bringing in more would really require some of the surface parking lots in the neighborhood to get developed as new housing with multiple bedrooms. That’s my dreamy dream.
