A vacant, graffiti-covered corner of Old Fourth Ward near Ponce City Market was converted into a hip haven for pooches in 2024. Atlanta dog-boarding business Barking Hound Village began building a new adaptive-reuse facility at 619 Boulevard -- on the corner where Starbucks had abandoned plans for a drive-thru bistro a couple of years earlier, according to city permit records.
Barking Hound's existing facility sits a few blocks east near the BeltLine's Eastside Trail in Poncey-Highland; whether that location would stay open wasn't immediately clear. The new site adds a 5,500-square-foot addition to a vacant building at the northeast corner of Boulevard and North Avenue, most recently used as a medical facility. Plans from Decatur-based Office of Design call for a modern, 9,000-square-foot structure under a butterfly roof, with green walls covered in fig ivy along parts of the steel-and-glass façade and dog murals elsewhere "to create a vitality and playfulness in keeping with the nature of the building's use."
The half-acre corner lot last traded hands in September 2022 for $2.25 million. It sits less than three blocks from Ponce City Market and the BeltLine's dog-friendly Eastside Trail, roughly a block north of the newly opened luxury complex 555 Boulevard and several other newer affordable housing buildings -- part of a wave of thousands of new intown apartments over the past decade that has, notably, also expanded O4W's canine population. As for the Starbucks that almost was: plans surfacing in October 2021 had promised a 2,500-square-foot building with a snaking drive-thru near the intersection's sidewalks. Boulevard Frappuccinos, in the end, were not meant to be.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published May 2024.
