Scaffolding went up this summer at 250 Auburn Ave., and behind it crews are doing the kind of work that is increasingly rare in Atlanta: painstakingly restoring a building rather than replacing it. The Odd Fellows Building, which preservationist nonprofit Easements Atlanta calls one of Sweet Auburn's most important commercial structures, is midway through a $13.3 million adaptive-reuse restoration funded largely by grants.
The 1912 building was designed by the Edward & Sayer firm in the Jacobean Revival style, and its value is in the details being saved: terra cotta medallions, cast grotesques, and diapering across the facade. The main structure opened in 1912, followed a year later by an annex with an auditorium. Over the following decades the complex became a center of Black Atlanta society, hosting dances and social functions. It was extensively renovated in the 1980s before slipping back into disrepair.
The new use is a nonprofit headquarters and housing. Georgia Works, a donor-funded organization that helps homeless men move toward stable employment, will consolidate all of its operations into the building, including offices and programming space. It currently works out of the Gateway Center on Pryor Street, housing participants in converted jail facilities — a setting the Auburn Avenue building will replace outright.
Residential capacity is set at up to 164 men at a time: 40 spaces for active program participants and transitional housing for 124 recent graduates, living in 60 shared apartments of two or three beds each, according to Invest Atlanta.
The street level is where the project reaches beyond its own residents. Four retail spaces will be offered at below-market lease rates, an explicit effort to add activity along Auburn Avenue and give local businesses a foothold. Most have been spoken for. Georgia Works has letters of intent from nutrition provider Open Hand for a convenience store selling fresh prepackaged meals, and from Atlanta nonprofits Civil Bikes and Bearings Bike Works to share a space. Existing tenants The Skate Shop and Lee's Boutique are expected to consolidate into a single storefront, and a restaurant concept is planned for the fourth space.
The building sits at the northwest corner of Auburn Avenue and Bell Street, about a block west of the Connector — close enough to the highway trench that the Stitch, if it is ever built across those blocks, would land almost at its door.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published September 2024.