Best Atlanta Neighborhood 2024, FINAL FOUR: East Atlanta vs. West End

Josh Green

Fri, 12/27/2024 – 15:02

As part of ongoing Best of Atlanta 2024 coverage, Urbanize’s fourth-annual Best Atlanta Neighborhood tournament kicked off last week with 16 places vying for the prestige of being called the city’s greatest.

Now, for each Final Four contest, voting will be open until noon Monday. Please, let’s keep the tourney fun and positive, as one neighborhood rises above the rest in very public fashion. The quest to crown a champion resumes now!

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(4) East Atlanta

Recap:

East Atlanta-nah-nah-nah breezed by College Park in this tourney’s initial round. Then it banded together and edged red-hot downtown by the slimmest of margins in Elite Eight action earlier this week.

Pellerin Real Estate; designs, TSW architects

Usually a tough out in year-end neighborhood tournaments (and the overall Champion in 2016), East Atlanta garnered enough reader nominations this year to land a strong No. 4 seed. Which makes sense, given the buzz around several EAV projects this year (and what could have been the most rollicking East Atlanta Strut festival to date in September). Artist Greg Mike transformed a 1980s church in the village into a modern-gothic temple to creativity, while commendably old-school designs for mixed-use development on a small scale came to light on a vacant East Atlanta corner. Elsewhere, frequent village investors Pellerin Real Estate are bringing an infill project (see above) with dozens of new homes to a site where little more than a void in EAV’s vibrancy existed before. Not too shabby.

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(8) West End

Recap:

Arguably the best end in town, two-time champ West End showed Poncey-Highland the door in Round 1 action, then toppled mighty Midtown (the No. 1 seed) earlier this week.

West End’s Lawton Street, as shown in 2022. Google Maps

West End notched a relatively seismic year as development proposals go. The 800-pound gorilla in that room is, of course, the redevelopment of Mall West End. After three false starts, the mall’s extreme makeover appears to have finally found its footing (with city backing) to turn 12 acres of parking lots into about 900 units of mixed-income housing, 125,000 square feet of retail (with a grocery store), and much more, beginning as soon as next year. Around the corner, an eye-catching apartment proposal has emerged near West End’s MARTA stop, while a pickleball emporium and more is in the pipeline along a new (and needed) Beltline stretch now in planning. Bonus points to West End in ’24 for joyously welcoming Atlanta Streets Alive back to SW ATL—not once, but on three different occasions.