Atlanta Daily World Building

What it is

The two-story brick building at 145 Auburn Avenue dates to 1912. It takes its name from the Atlanta Daily World, which W.A. Scott founded in 1928 and which became the longest-running African-American daily newspaper in U.S. history. Over the decades the building held all kinds of tenants. In 1918 the Virgil Coffee Company had a ground-floor storefront. In 1944 District V, Atlanta’s first African-American Girl Scout troop, met upstairs, while Club Poinciana downstairs drew performances and appearances by Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong.

How it was saved

A March 2008 tornado tore off the roof, and the newspaper moved out. The empty building then deteriorated for years. When a developer applied for a demolition permit in 2012, more than 1,100 people signed a petition against it, and the Atlanta Urban Design Commission unanimously turned the permit down. In 2013 Gene Kansas and Ben Dupuy bought the building and rehabilitated it with the Historic Tax Credit, turning the upper floor into 1930s-style apartments and reopening the ground floor to street-level businesses. In 2014 the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the project its No. 2 preservation win of the year, and it later won honors from the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation, the Atlanta Preservation Center and the Urban Design Commission.

Before you go

The building has homes upstairs, so it’s best appreciated from the sidewalk. Fit it into a walk along Auburn Avenue that includes the APEX Museum and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park.