How a Ford assembly plant became part of Atlanta’s adaptive-reuse trend
On Atlanta’s Ponce de Leon Avenue you can stand in one spot and see three of the coolest adaptive reuse projects the city has to offer: Ponce City Market (originally a Sears building), the Eastside Beltline (originally a freight rail line), and Ford Factory Lofts. This post is about the latter.
The 150,000 square foot Ford building was built in 1915 as an assembly plant for early Ford cars, such as the Model T.
It sits beside a former freight rail line (which now the Eastside Beltline), and there used to be a rail spur to deliver items directly into the building.
In later years it was used as storage space for the US military. The photo above shows the Ford building in 1968, likely during its storage phase, though according to the sign there’s also an Army reserves training center inside.
(BTW, when I look at that 1968 photo, all I want in the world is to sit in Irene’s Cafeteria, on the left, and have a Schiltz and a short order plate.)
Here’s the scene in 1985 as the structure was being gutted for its conversion to 122 residential lofts with retail on the bottom:
In the foreground is a sign promoting a new Kroger supermarket. That became the “Murder Kroger” of local lore.
Ponce de Leon Avenue has changed a lot over the years, and the Kroger building is now gone to make way for a big mixed use development. But the old buildings that became Ford Factory Lofts and Ponce City Market -- and the railway that became the Beltline -- are still around, with new uses. Also, the facade of the Ford building is a beautiful thing to walk by, with its old bricks tying us to the city’s past:
Though other warehouse-to-loft conversions were happening in the city in this same time frame, with some notable ones in Castleberry Hill, I can’t help but believe that the high visibility of the Ford lofts sitting on this heavily-used street was inspiring to Atlantans. Perhaps it piqued interest in adapting old structures in the city for reuse
What this area looks like now
Here are a couple of my own Instagram photos to show what this stretch of Ponce looks like today, with the enormous Sears building now realized as Ponce City Market (converted to residences, offices and retail in 2011–14), sitting across the Beltline from the Ford Factory Lofts.
