For decades, the half-acre at 110 Broad St. did what most of South Downtown's gaps did: it held cars. As of this week it holds a stage, seating and lawn, and it has a name - Founders Green.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and other officials led a ribbon-cutting at the site, which sits wedged between Broad and Peachtree streets among some of the oldest surviving commercial blocks in the city. The greenspace is built to flex: it can host concerts, watch parties and movie nights, and it is designed to function as a social anchor rather than a passive lawn.
It is the first open greenspace Atlanta Ventures has delivered across a South Downtown portfolio that now runs to 58 historic structures and roughly 16 acres. The group of tech entrepreneurs has spent the past two years converting buildings; Founders Green is the first project that fills in the space between them.
Location does a lot of the work. The park sits directly beside the forthcoming third Atlanta outpost of taqueria El Tesoro and along MARTA's new Rapid A-Line bus route, putting it at the intersection of a food-and-beverage wave and a new transit connection. One of the site's old parking signs was kept and repurposed with a revised meaning - a small joke about what the lot used to be.
The opening is the second South Downtown milestone in as many weeks. Pre-leasing recently launched at 85 Peachtree, the circa-1899 building widely considered Atlanta's original department store and one of the first in the Southeast. Built as the Bass Dry Goods Building, its upper floors sat largely empty for half a century as the surrounding blocks hollowed out; they now hold 26 loft apartments above ground-floor retail.
Both projects are part of a run of openings timed ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which also includes the recently opened Bottle Rocket burger and sushi restaurant on Hotel Row. For a district whose defining feature was vacancy, the sequencing matters: the buildings come back, and then the space between them becomes somewhere to stand.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published May 2026.
