A vacant corner that has defeated developers for nearly a decade has a new proposal attached to it. According to a Special Administrative Permit filed with the city, a hotel with more than 260 rooms is planned for 524 West Peachtree St. NW, where the 1920s Rosser Building was demolished six years ago. Motto by Hilton is named as one of the brands on board.
Paperwork filed with the Office of Zoning and Development indicates 221 rooms under the Motto flag and another 41 listed as “TPS.” The most striking number in the filing is the parking count: 19 onsite spaces, against 384 permitted. Forty-five bicycle parking spaces are also in the mix. Parking decks sit next door and across the street to the east and south, including a 3,000-space garage directly north that city planners praised as beautiful when it opened in 2021.
The site sits between the Connector and Emory University Hospital Midtown, with historic Baltimore Block next door to the west, a row of 1880s buildings considered Atlanta's first apartments. It sold for $8.4 million in September of last year to an Alpharetta-based LLC called Atlanta Hotel Development. The parcel is under half an acre.
The applicant is Decatur-based BCA Studios, whose portfolio includes hotel projects across the Sunbelt and a dual-branded Hilton in downtown Decatur notable for building no new parking at all, tapping an underused existing garage instead. That approach appears to be repeating here.
Motto by Hilton has been trying to get into the Atlanta market since before the pandemic, attached to the Waldo's development in Old Fourth Ward, which remains delayed more than three years after construction began. This would be a second path in.
The lot itself has a longer history than the proposals that have failed on it. The Rosser Building was designed by prominent Atlanta architect A. Ten Eyck Brown for an automobile distributor, part of the city's old Automobile Row. It later served as headquarters for Eastern Airlines, and from the 1980s until 2012 housed the Rosser architecture firm that gave it its name. Sold in 2015 and left to deteriorate, it was razed in 2018 for a 12-story dual-branded Marriott that never happened, following another hotel proposal a couple of years before that had met the same end.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published September 2024.