A century ago, South Downtown was Atlanta's front door. Then people and businesses moved away, leaving it, in the words of one WABE feature, "a shell of what it once was." Now, with the 2026 FIFA World Cup bearing down, there's a plan to bring it back — and the merchants who never left have a clearer view of that arc than almost anyone.
"I love this view right here," Atlanta Ventures CEO David Cummings told WABE, standing among the neighborhood's mix of old and new. "You got ultra modern Mercedes-Benz right in front of you. You got new skyscrapers coming up from Centennial Yards." He calls Atlanta Tech Village — his company's startup hub anchoring the district — the community's anchor, with the broader plan aimed at turning 10 city blocks and more than 50 buildings into what he describes as an innovation district for living, working, and playing.
The buildings themselves carry the neighborhood's memory. Friedman's Shoe Store has specialized in Italian and exotic-skin footwear since 1929, and third-generation president Brett Teilhaber has been coming to South Downtown "since he could crawl." He remembers when the streets were full: "People walking around, businesses open, four or five restaurants on the street, Oli's Trolly cart on the corner ... it was an active neighborhood." As nearby malls like Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza opened, that activity drained away. "One business after another started falling and the area became empty," said Aziz Palas, who has run Sunrise Fragrance in the neighborhood since 2000 and watched security concerns follow the vacancies. Teilhaber puts it plainly: "The most important thing is security, because if people are afraid to come downtown, they won't come downtown."
The turnaround traces back to 2016, when a German real estate firm began buying property and testing the neighborhood's viability — the effort that Atlanta Ventures eventually took over, continuing the work alongside longtime tenants rather than displacing them. Teilhaber sold his 37,000-square-foot building to Atlanta Ventures and, by the end of that year, planned to move into a smaller space in the same area. "We're hunkering down and want to be part of the growth and part of the new spirit and part of the revitalization, part of the Phoenix of downtown," he said. "I never thought in my lifetime that I'd see this transformation, which is awesome." Employees like Jay Slaughter, who works at a local clothing store, see the same thing from a different angle: "Anytime you are redeveloping and not displacing the inhabitants, we count it a win-win."
Cummings, for his part, isn't just courting World Cup crowds. "People have a lot of preconceived notions over the past decades about downtown, and my biggest ask is really for metro Atlanta, our locals, to come rediscover downtown," he said — with the tournament itself framed as "a grand opening party" for a neighborhood that's been quietly rebuilding for years before the world showed up to notice.
Original reporting by Julien Virgin for WABE, published January 30, 2025.
