Newsroom
Get the story behind the places, faces, and current events shaping the downtownATL district.
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Cabbagetown grew up around the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, built by Appalachian families who grew cabbages in their front yards and cooked them in shotgun houses so close together the whole neighborhood smelled like soup.
Castleberry Hill's story begins with bootleggers, political riots, and a merchant named Daniel Castleberry who helped rebuild the neighborhood after it was burned to the ground. Today it's the National Park Service's pick for Atlanta's most complete surviving warehouse district.
At the 2016 A3C festival, photographer Cam Kirk was building something larger than a portfolio — a visual archive of Atlanta's hip-hop scene that aimed to change the perception of the genre and the city that shaped it.
Twenty years after the 1996 Games, artist John Ryan — the man who designed the most controversial mascot in Olympic history — broke his silence. His message: "What happened to Izzy is not his fault."
The Atlanta-Fulton County Central Library, Marcel Breuer's last completed building, faced demolition calls in 2016. Architects argued that its brutalist design was irreplaceable — and that the building deserved a second life, not a wrecking ball.
The 27th annual Peach Drop brought an estimated 80,000 people to Underground Atlanta on New Year's Eve 2015, with T.I. and Sister Hazel headlining a celebration anchored by an 800-pound fiberglass peach dropping from a tower at midnight.
By 2015, MomoCon had outgrown its Georgia Tech origins and moved to the Georgia World Congress Center, drawing 20,000 attendees and 200 vendors — a family-friendly counterpart to Dragon Con's Labor Day spectacle.
Dragon Con projected a record 57,000 attendees for its 2013 convention — up from 52,000 the previous year — as the pop culture gathering spread across five downtown hotels and spilled into Atlanta's streets for its signature Saturday parade.
A construction crew digging near Centennial Olympic Park in July 2013 pulled a cannonball from the ground — a likely remnant of the 1864 federal siege of Atlanta, when Union forces fired thousands of shells into the downtown area.
