If you live in Virginia-Highland, you already know the shape of the old complaint. The Atkins Park stretch does great after 7 p.m. Neighbor's Pub, Blind Willie's, Limerick Junction, Dark Horse Tavern, all within a two-minute walk of one another. Then daylight arrives and half the storefronts read as papered-over glass. That gap between night energy and day activity has been the neighborhood's quiet frustration for years.
That gap is closing this year, and not by accident. One owner is consolidating the block. A wine bar has already opened where a burger chain closed. A Virginia-based burger operator is moving into the space Taco Mac held for nearly fifty years. The City Council pulled the parking meters. The Beltline finally connected at Ponce. Taken together, these aren't scattered updates. They're a coordinated reset of the North Highland corridor from a nightlife node into a full-day district, and if you own a home here it is worth understanding who is behind it and what the calendar looks like.
The Atkins Park problem, said plainly
For a stretch surrounded by some of the most sought-after residential blocks in intown Atlanta, the retail row has been surprisingly patchy. Urbanize Atlanta described the historic retail row as pockmarked with vacancies, a strange reality given the demographic goldmine around it. Third & Urban co-founder Hank Farmer, who lived and worked in the neighborhood, put it in terms locals will recognize: the node had lost its daytime and early-evening appeal, and several buildings had drifted into underuse.
That is the baseline against which everything below should be read.
The quiet land assembly you probably missed
Third & Urban is a locally based firm that purchased the first phase of what it now calls the Atkins Park Collection in December 2024, totaling 35,370 square feet along North Highland and St. Charles avenues, then acquired a second phase in September 2025 that includes Neighbors, City Church, and infill pieces of the block between Greenwood and St. Charles avenues. The combined footprint runs to 61,120 square feet across three blocks, and the plan calls for more than three million dollars in building and streetscape improvements.
| Phase | Closed | What's included |
|---|---|---|
| Phase 1 | December 2024 | 35,370 sf along North Highland and St. Charles |
| Phase 2 | September 2025 | Neighbors, City Church, infill parcels between Greenwood and St. Charles |
| Improvements | Late spring 2026 start | ~$3M in facades, streetscape, indoor-outdoor courtyard at 780 N Highland |
The 842 North Highland building has already received new signage, railings, upgraded light fixtures, a new front stair entry, and a mural by local artist Janice Rago on the Intown Hardware side of the building. The larger move is at 780 North Highland, the mostly vacant piece of the strip. Farmer told SaportaReport he is aiming to bring in three to five local businesses, including a roughly 3,000-square-foot full-service restaurant in the back, arranged around an interior courtyard that pulls seating back from the street and works around the neighborhood's narrow sidewalks. Retail leasing is being run by Shelbi Bodner and Lexi Ritter of Bridger Properties.
If you have wondered why the same storefronts sat empty for years, the answer was ownership. Several long-tenured owners simply were not sellers. That has changed, and the pace of change on the block should accelerate in the second half of 2026.
What has actually opened, and what is next
Two openings anchor the near-term calendar, and they matter because they are filling the two most visible dark windows on the strip.
So. Fox opened July 2, 2026 at 1017 North Highland. The 50-seat, wine-forward restaurant comes from Myles Moody and Rachael Pack, the husband-and-wife team behind Kinship Butcher & Sundry, and takes the corner that Farm Burgers vacated at the end of 2025. The name is short for Southern Fox, a nod to the muscadine and scuppernong grape, with a natural wine program led by Pack and a hyper-seasonal à la carte menu from Moody focused on locally sourced proteins and produce. The building itself is worth a glance next time you walk by. Building owner Lynn Dewitt has noted the corner has served the neighborhood in one form or another for a hundred years, starting as a Standard Oil filling station and later Herrington Service Station before being converted into a restaurant space.
Jack Brown's Beer & Burger Joint is on its way to 1006 North Highland, one block south. A building permit application filed with the City of Atlanta shows the burger operator is moving into the space Taco Mac's original location held for close to fifty years before announcing its closure, with an opening expected in summer. This will be the first Atlanta location for the Virginia-based chain, which opened its first restaurant in Harrisonburg in 2009 and now runs more than twenty locations across six states, mostly in the South and Southeast, with a menu built around American wagyu burgers and craft beer.
The pairing tells you something about how the block is being repositioned. A serious wine program at one corner. A burger and beer operator with a fifty-restaurant playbook filling the largest, most conspicuous vacancy. Neither is a nightlife concept. Both need daytime and early-evening traffic to work.
Two policy changes that read smaller than they are
Retail comebacks are usually described in terms of tenants. The two moves that will probably have the largest effect on foot traffic on your block are not tenant moves at all.
The first is parking. The Atlanta City Council unanimously approved a resolution in September to make parking on all city streets in the area free, aiming to create more uniform enforcement, reverse the tide of retail vacancies, and pull more customers back to the district's shops, eateries, boutiques, and bars. If you have watched a friend circle for ten minutes and then bail on dinner, you understand why this matters more than the size of the change suggests.
The second is the Beltline. The long-sought Atlanta Beltline connection at Ponce is finally in place, a link between the Virginia-Highland commercial corridor and the Eastside Trail that had been more than a decade in the making. The practical read for a resident is that walking or biking from your front door to the Ponce crossing and onto the Eastside Trail is no longer a workaround. It is a direct connection, which puts North Highland retail within a comfortable Beltline distance of Ponce City Market and Krog for the first time.
Morningside Village, one intersection north
The same investment logic is playing out at the district's northern anchor. Morningside Village, the roughly 50,000-square-foot collection of buildings straddling North Highland, will receive new lighting, landscaping, paint, awnings, and artist murals from owner 26th Street Partners, along with improved wayfinding and what the firm calls distinct crosswalks to define the village as a cohesive district. Doc Chey's, a tenant there for close to thirty years, is part of the refresh.
The forward look is bigger still. The team behind The Chastain in Buckhead has announced a second concept, Alere, opening in 2027 at 1397 North Highland in the space most recently occupied by Nowak's Cantina. Chef Christopher Grossman has described the atmosphere as shedding the constraints of classical fine dining while keeping his ingredient-driven approach. That is a serious culinary signal for a space that has cycled through concepts for a decade.
The larger question sitting behind all of it
The redevelopment residents talk about most is Amsterdam Walk, at the southern edge of the neighborhood. Portman filings with the Atlanta Department of City Planning show nearly 700 residences plus commercial space in the pipeline, with phase-one filings calling for a half-dozen buildings, two parking garages, and additional Beltline links. Whatever your view on the scale, the arithmetic is what it is. Several hundred new households arriving within a five-minute walk of the retail row is exactly the daytime demand Third & Urban's plan is built to catch.
That is the thesis. Every one of these moves reads as its own headline. Read together, they describe a single project: putting the day back into a district that had drifted into being only a night one.
A short calendar to keep in your head
- Now open: So. Fox at 1017 N Highland
- Summer 2026: Jack Brown's expected at 1006 N Highland
- Late spring through 2026: Atkins Park Collection construction, courtyard at 780 N Highland
- In parallel: Morningside Village facade and streetscape refresh
- 2027: Alere at 1397 N Highland
- Longer horizon: Amsterdam Walk phase one
If you have lived here long enough to remember three different tenants at the Farm Burgers corner, or the arc of Nowak's into Nowak's Cantina and out, this is the first stretch in a long time where the direction of travel on the corridor is legible in advance. That is worth knowing whether you are planning your Saturday or thinking about the long-term shape of the block you live on.
When you are ready to talk about what any of this means for the value of your home, Team Ellis has spent decades watching this exact corridor evolve, and we would be glad to walk the block with you.
