A standout piece of 19th-century Atlanta sitting in the shadow of downtown skyscrapers is being marketed as a prime adaptive-reuse candidate. The building at 125 Edgewood Ave., on the southeast corner of Edgewood and Courtland Street across from Hurt Park, has hit the market with JLL, according to Scott Cullen, a JLL Capital Markets managing director. No asking price is specified.
The structure totals just under 7,000 square feet and was completed in 1890 by developer Joel Hurt and businessman Samuel Inman, in the district then known as Shermantown. JLL's listing describes it as one of the last true and relatively untouched Victorian mansions left downtown — a category that has shrunk to almost nothing over the past century.
Its resume is longer than its square footage. Beginning in 1900 it housed one of Coca-Cola's earliest bottling operations, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Across more than a century it has also been a radio service store, a dry goods store, and several pharmacies. Since 1966 it has served as Georgia State University's Baptist Student Union, and JLL reports it is 100 percent occupied today.
That occupancy is worth noting: this is not a derelict shell like the Constitution Building a few blocks southwest. It is a working, fully leased historic building whose owner is testing what the market will pay for a Victorian on a downtown corner in the run-up to the World Cup.
The location does much of the work. Hurt Park sits directly across the street, and Georgia State just announced $107 million in campus upgrades concentrated around Hurt Park and Woodruff Park, funded largely by an $80 million Woodruff Foundation grant. Whoever buys 125 Edgewood would be buying a corner that the university is about to spend heavily on making more pleasant to stand on.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published December 2024.
