Ponce City Market Attracts National Preservation Kudos

A year before it’s fully open, Atlanta’s favorite mega-flip has piqued the interest of national preservation aficionados. The blog PreservationNation traces the interesting history and bright future of the Old Fourth Ward’s former Sears, Roebuck & Company distribution center in a piece titled “Ponce City Market: Atlanta’s History in the Making.” With 1.1 million square feet of retail, office space and residences, the Jamestown Properties’ undertaking will be the largest adaptive-reuse project in Atlanta’s history. “But as much as the sheer size of the project impresses,” the author writes, “the delight is in the details.”

The article stresses the uniqueness of the project — from the rescued rail trestle, to the 46,000-gallon steel water tank that’s being reused — and its reverence for the past. While discussing America’s trend toward bland development the last couple of decades, Jamestown Properties’ vice president Jim Irwin drops this warm morsel for the urbanist mind: “This plague of sameness has really stripped away a lot of what is special and authentic about places. [But] I think there’s a real curiosity about history, about the things that have a sense of permanence and place.”

(Full disclosure: We tipped PreservationNation off to the PCM project, because their mission of featuring “stories, news, and notes from the National Trust for Historic Preservation as well as the wider preservation movement” sounded cool. And because Atlanta’s most interesting projects deserve some national love, right?)