Walk North Highland Avenue past St. Charles on a weekday morning and the street still reads like it always has: Neighbor's Pub dark behind its blinds, Blind Willie's a block down with the marquee blank until evening, sidewalks narrow enough that two people with coffee cups have to angle past each other. Then you hit 842 North Highland and something is different. New railings. A fresh stair entry. A mural on the side of the building, painted by local artist Janice Rago, facing Intown Hardware. Keep walking toward 780 North Highland and, if the timeline the developer announced back in March held, you're looking at a building that's sat mostly vacant for years now being carved open around a courtyard.
Most residents have clocked one or two of these changes without connecting them. The meters vanished from the block last September. The mural showed up sometime this year. Construction at 780 was supposed to start by early summer. Treated separately, they look like three unrelated things a landlord and a city council happened to do around the same stretch of pavement. They aren't separate. They're one plan, executed in a specific order, and the order is the part worth understanding if you live here.
Three Purchases, Two Years, One Address at a Time
The company behind all of it is Third & Urban, an Atlanta real estate firm that also did the adaptive reuse of Westside Paper and Common Ground with New Realm Brewing along the Beltline. It didn't buy Atkins Park's commercial strip in one move. It bought it in pieces, and the pieces tell you how the plan grew.
Phase one closed in December 2024: 35,370 square feet of retail along North Highland and St. Charles avenues. Phase two closed in September 2025, and this is the one that changed the character of the deal. It brought in the building that holds Neighbor's Pub, the space occupied by City Church, and several infill parcels on the block between Greenwood and St. Charles. Combined, the portfolio now runs to 61,120 square feet across three blocks, branded the Atkins Park Collection, with more than $3 million budgeted for building and streetscape work.
What the assembled map does not include is almost as telling as what it does. The building on the corner directly across from Neighbor's Pub sits outside the collection entirely, still owned by whoever held it before Third & Urban started buying. That's a useful reminder that this is a landlord's project, not a neighborhood-wide rezoning. The transformation has an edge, and you can stand on it.
The Same Month the Meters Went
Here's the detail that turns three headlines into one story. The Atlanta City Council resolution removing parking meters from the Atkins Park commercial zone passed the same month Third & Urban closed on phase two: September 2025. That's not a coincidence you'd guess from reading either announcement on its own, since the meter removal was covered as a traffic and business-friction fix, and the acquisition was covered as a real estate transaction. Put the dates next to each other and they're clearly the same campaign, aimed at the same twelve-month stretch of curb.
Third & Urban co-founder Hank Farmer has been candid about the problem the meters and the courtyard are both trying to solve. Describing what happened to Atkins Park's daytime economy over the years, he told SaportaReport the node had
kind of lost its daytime and early evening services appeal.
Farmer isn't an outside investor guessing at the neighborhood from a spreadsheet. He's said publicly that he lives in and frequents the area, which is part of why the fix looks less like a teardown and more like triage: keep the bars that already work, remove the friction that's been keeping daytime visitors away, and build one new kind of space the block has never had.
What's Finished and What's Still Behind Fencing
| Address | Status per Third & Urban's public timeline | What changed or is changing |
|---|---|---|
| 842 North Highland | Announced complete | New signage, railings, upgraded lighting, a new front stair entry, and the Janice Rago mural on the Intown Hardware side |
| 780 North Highland | Construction announced for late spring 2026 | Facade updates and a new indoor-outdoor courtyard ringed by retail suites, aimed at food and beverage tenants |
| Neighbor's Pub building and infill parcels (Greenwood to St. Charles) | Acquired, not yet renovated | Part of the September 2025 phase-two purchase; no public renovation timeline yet |
If you've walked past 780 recently and seen fencing rather than a finished courtyard, that tracks with the timeline Third & Urban laid out back in March. The 842 building was always going to be the quick win, cosmetic work that could wrap in a season. The courtyard is the harder build, and it's the one that actually tests whether the daytime bet pays off.
Why a Courtyard, Specifically
Atkins Park wasn't built for the kind of foot traffic Third & Urban is chasing. The neighborhood's three streets, St. Louis Place, St. Charles Place, and St. Augustine Place, were platted in the early 1900s by Edwin Wiley Grove to get residents to a streetcar stop on Ponce de Leon as fast as possible, not to host outdoor dining. An internal sidewalk called Malcolm's Way still cuts through the block for the same reason it always has: it's a shortcut, not a gathering space. Farmer has pointed to that same layout as the project's biggest obstacle, a busy road, narrow sidewalks, and a shortage of parking that no amount of new signage was going to fix.
The courtyard at 780 is a direct response to that geometry. Instead of trying to widen a sidewalk that can't be widened, the plan pulls activity inward, off the street and into a recessed space where multiple tenants can share outdoor seating without competing for six feet of concrete along North Highland. It's a workaround built around a hundred-year-old street plan rather than against it.
There's already a small precedent for that kind of retreat-from-the-street thinking a block away. North Highland Park, the 0.41-acre pocket park the Virginia-Highland Civic Association bought in 2008 and opened in 2012, sits on the site of a former public library at the corner of St. Charles Place and North Highland Avenue. It's proof the block can support a quiet, sit-down public space even on a street this narrow. The courtyard at 780 is a private, commercial version of the same idea, aimed at the hours the park doesn't cover.
What Residents Will Actually Notice This Fall
No tenants have been announced yet for the 780 courtyard. Bridger Properties, working the leasing side through agents Shelbi Bodner and Lexi Ritter, has said the target is community-focused food and beverage operators, which is a description, not a lease. If you're hoping for a specific coffee shop or wine bar to point to, that news hasn't landed publicly.
What has already landed is the sequencing itself, and that's the part worth carrying with you the next time you walk this block. The meters left first, in September 2025, clearing the most obvious daytime deterrent before a single wall came down. The cosmetic fix at 842 came next, fast enough to be visible within a season and cheap enough to signal momentum without waiting on permits. The courtyard, the expensive and slow piece, is last, because it only works if the two easier moves already got people used to stopping here before dark.
Neighbor's Pub, Blind Willie's, Limerick Junction, and Dark Horse Tavern aren't going anywhere in this plan. Nobody involved has suggested otherwise, and the phase-two purchase that brought Neighbor's Pub's building into the portfolio came with no announced changes to the bar itself. What's being built is a second shift for the same block, not a replacement for the first one.
That's the story a Nextdoor thread about disappearing meters or a photo of a new mural won't tell you on its own. Atkins Park isn't getting a facelift. It's getting a second job.
Sonny Jones tracks changes like these across Morningside, Virginia-Highland, Ansley Park, and Buckhead because they're part of what it means to actually know a neighborhood, not because every corner under construction is a reason to buy or sell. If you're curious how a shift like this one might eventually intersect with your own plans on this block or another, request a private consultation and we'll talk through what we're seeing on the ground.
