Luckie? Or Just Clever?

Charles Molineaux

June 1, 2008

“I t’s a whole different neighborhood,” marvels Tom Smith. “People who haven’t been here in 15 or 20 years wouldn’t know where they are.”

As owner of Layfield Motors on Luckie Street since 1980, Smith has seen the district near what’s now Centennial Olympic Park dramatically transformed.

“The biggest change is all these people who live here now. You see them walking down the street. A few years ago, you wouldn’t dare walk these streets after 6.”

“We really have a critical mass,” declares David Marvin, founder of the Legacy Property Group, which has been developing properties there since the 1990s and  dubs the area the Luckie Marietta District. “We’ve been working for 10 years and woke up one day and realized we really have something now.” 

Marvin points to a spread of new restaurant arrivals – sports bar Stats, upscale steak house Maxim Prime and Boston-based Legal Seafood, promised to open next month – as signs of the district’s broadening appeal.


The onetime wasteland of light industry and kudzu patches along Downtown Atlanta’s Marietta Street corridor stands poised to achieve its potential. Hopeful developers and community activists alike envision a thriving, high density, mixed-use community of residences, restaurants and retail beyond the teeming, short-lived crowds who sweep into Downtown to visit the Georgia Aquarium or Philips Arena.

Like a missing tooth, the space along Marietta and Luckie streets has been an irksome gap in the map between spreading renewal along Downtown’s traditional hub, Peachtree Street to the east and growing assets like the Georgia World Congress Center (GWCC) to the west. Since the opening of his Embassy Suites hotel in 1999, Marvin has been working to move past its history. 

“It was a rough patch, an area of downtown considered unsavory,” he says. “People were a little nervous about walking to the GWCC from their Peachtree Street hotels.”

Marvin ticks off a series of infusions that bolstered prospects for what he calls the “ stepchild of the Peachtree Street corridor” – the original Omni, CNN moving into the Omni and the GWCC’s development. Then, “we found first gear with Centennial Olympic Park and the decision to [redevelop] the Omni [into] Philips Arena,” he says. “That was key.”

Marvin bought into the neighborhood in 1994. Before the Olympics, he acquired five acres along Marietta Street. In what he grants has been a slow process, Legacy created the Embassy Suites, then opened the luxury condominium project Centennial Park West in 2002; and in 2006 reopened the historic Glenn Building as the boutique Glenn Hotel.

Already expanding his own development projects beyond those original five acres, he hopes to coordinate with a next wave of initiatives. “We’re now interested in partnering with other property owners who have similar and complimentary assets and really creating a district.”

Legacy is working to fill its 500,000-square-foot Park Pavilion hotel, restaurant and retail development anchored by the newly opened Hilton Garden Inn and the Legal Seafood restaurant. The promise of the Georgia Aquarium and new World of Coke touched off a flurry of interest and the Centennial Park west/Luckie Marietta area became the focus of several ambitious projects.


The Tuscany Corporation plans to have its 38-story, $60-million Aquarius Tower condos overlook the aquarium from 380 Luckie Street on the north side of Ivan Allen Boulevard. But plans for the Atlantis condominium tower and lofts across Luckie Street, announced in 2005, have been scrapped in favor of a proposed Hard Rock Hotel complex developed by Luckie Street Hotel Partners.

The new Luckie Food Lounge and Charm sundries store have opened on Ivan Allen across from the aquarium. And Legacy is midway through converting its “Marietta Place” property at 300 Marietta Street from a quiet complex of tech-oriented office condominiums into a high-profile “restaurant row.”

Even as promising breaks made the fledgling district’s future seem brighter, progress has been hampered by a rapid succession of setbacks. As the construction of the Georgia Aquarium stirred zealous talk of a coming renaissance in the blighted zone west of the site, it also conjured up dreams of a real estate bonanza, and land prices skyrocketed.
Suddenly the bargain basement rate for a fixer- upper lot along a sketchy stretch of Luckie Street, Jones Avenue or Thurmond Street turned into a premium price.

When Marvin bought his original five acres in the ’90s, the land cost $33 a square foot. At the time, Centennial Olympic Park was under construction and not even Bernie Marcus had conceived his idea for an aquarium.

Flash forward 10 years and the market had gone into overdrive. “As recently as 2004 you were getting $35 to $45 a square foot,” remarks Alan Wexler, president of Atlanta Real Estate research firm Databank. “Now it’s over $100 a square foot as a general rule.”

“The price of property is unreal,” says Smith. He’s gotten surprising offers for his .87 acre between Luckie and Marietta. “They just haven’t hit the magic number yet. Eventually it’ll have to be.”

Can that stifle development? The answer is “yes, but,” Wexler says. “It’s cyclical. If you’r e too high on speculation, at some point it levels off.”

More recently came another blow that has sent bankers and homeowners reeling and crippled development efforts around the state – the sudden drought of investment capital for real estate projects.

“That has been tough for everything,” says Jennifer Ball, VP of planning at Central Atlanta Progress, which has been encouraging development in the area. “Where we are in the market is a place where there are great ideas that would be great assets. You just have to get the financing in place.” 

Then came a more acute jolt for projects on the verge of moving forward – the Georgia Supreme Court’s February decision limiting the use of funds from special Tax Allocation Districts (TADs). As part of the West Side TAD, the program had given a substantial boost to several Legacy properties in the past, but now developers’ ability to use TAD funds for future projects has been sharply curtailed.

The Atlanta Development Authority has been behind many of the TAD initiatives in the Marietta Street corridor. ADA Senior Project Manager Amanda Rhein sees the change as grueling, but not insurmountable. “The Hard Rock Hotel project lost about half its TAD funding, but the developer is moving forward. They’ve been able to value engineer their project and reduce the scope. They also had to go out and seek additional equity sources.”

“It’s just a matter of getting the financing in place, particularly on the private side,” Ball says. “The Aquarius residential tower, like many other condominium projects … they want to make it happen but they have to get the financing in place or pre-sell some condos.”

Suzanne Bair, president of the Marietta Street Artery Association, says, “Now that the TAD money has fallen by the wayside, some of those projects may go south. There’s going to be a bright future.”

Bair says Legacy deserves credit for choosing a challenging approach to find a “win-win” scenario for both developer and community. “Our major concern is that it’s smart growth.  I don’t think they necessarily took the easy route. But long term it will be the biggest benefit for them. They’ve put down some major stakes in the neighborhood. And I get the feeling they plan to be here for a long time.”

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Website exclusive: Read about the new restaurants moving into the Luckie-Marietta District, now online at www.btobmagazine.com.