On Mitchell Street, a painted advertisement for hotel rooms at 50 to 75 cents a night stands as a reminder of the vibrant past of what was once Atlanta's Hotel Row. Steps away, the shuttered Miller's Rexall drug store on Broad Street graced the cover of a 1999 Paul McCartney album.
Jon Birdsong and his co-investor David Cummings, serial entrepreneurs behind Atlanta Ventures, recently acquired 53 buildings and several acres of downtown parking lots across 10 blocks. They envision transforming the properties into a hub for startups and entrepreneurs, calling the project "Startup City." The buildings and land were previously at risk of foreclosure, remnants of an earlier ambitious but unsuccessful effort by a German investor to rehabilitate the century-old structures.
Birdsong stated that the area "was the entrepreneurial center and capital of the Southeast" and emphasized their goal to "revitalize it back to where it was decades ago."