PCM Heralded As Top New Attraction — In the World!

Tuesday, January 28, 2014, by Josh Green

From the outset, the developers of Ponce City Market have said the massive adaptive-reuse project would carry enough cache to become a tourist attraction. The editors at Travel + Leisure magazine apparently got the memo. The 1.1 million square-foot flip in the Old Fourth Ward has landed on the magazine’s 2014 list of “World’s Coolest New Tourist Attractions.” And it has impressive company. PCM joins 22 noteworthy projects from around the globe, including a beachfront museum in Rio de Janeiro, a vertigo-inducing skywalk in the Canadian Rockies and One World Trade Center in New York City.

With its Central Food Hall modeled after Chelsea Market, boxcar bar and rooftop garden with mini-golf, PCM promises to be a “multiuse beacon of regenerative cool,” the magazine writes. But Travel + Leisure isn’t the only non-local media to take note of PCM recently. In December, the PreservationNation blog certified PCM the largest adaptive-reuse project in Atlanta’s history and stressed that certain aspects — such as the 46,000-gallon steel water tank that’s being reused — could lend the project an enduring uniqueness. At the time, a Jamestown Properties official called PCM an antidote for the “plague of sameness” that’s befallen America’s cities.