The Atlanta Municipal Market at 209 Edgewood Avenue SE turned 100 years old in October 2024, and on Friday, October 18, the city threw it a party. Mayor Andre Dickens delivered remarks at 10:30 a.m., Unexpected Atlanta led free historical tours at 10:15 and 11:45, and the merchants - butchers, produce stands, and the lunch counters that have made the market a downtown institution - kept the samples coming all day.
The building the city was celebrating opened in 1924, but the market is older than its roof. It began in 1918 as an open-air curb market on Edgewood Avenue, in the years after the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917 leveled much of the surrounding district. The city enclosed it six years later in the brick building that still stands, and it has operated continuously since - through segregation, when Black vendors were confined to the curb outside (the origin of the 'Sweet Auburn Curb Market' name), through the decline of the neighborhood after the Downtown Connector cut through it, and through the slow revival of the past two decades.
That revival is why the centennial mattered beyond nostalgia. The market's stalls have become an incubator for downtown food businesses, and its central location - a short walk from the Georgia State MARTA station, near the Sweet Auburn Front Porch housing development, and a short walk from the King Center - has made it the neighborhood's de facto community room. Reconnecting Sweet Auburn, the district's study of the harm the interstate did to the neighborhood, held its first public meeting in the market three weeks after the birthday.
The party was organized by Central Atlanta Progress and the Atlanta Downtown Improvement District, which promoted it in the October 16, 2024 Downtown Navigator alongside a very different downtown institution turning a year older: Doggy Con at Woodruff Park.
The market did not stand still after the candles were blown out. In June 2026, days before the World Cup, it cut the ribbon on four new restaurant vendors, the latest additions to a food hall that was doing the food-hall thing seventy years before anyone called it that.
Source: Downtown Navigator, October 16, 2024 (Central Atlanta Progress / ADID), published October 16, 2024.
