Atkins Park's Construction Boom Has One Rule: Don't Touch the Bars

Walk down North Highland Avenue past Atkins Park this month and the block reads like two different renovation projects stitched together. At 842 North Highland, the scaffolding is already gone. New railings. New signage. A stair entry that didn't used to be there. And on the side facing Intown Hardware, a fresh mural from local artist Janice Rago, the kind of finished detail that makes a building look cared for instead of just repainted.

Half a block down at 780 North Highland, it's the opposite scene. Storefronts sit largely empty behind construction fencing, the renderings promising an indoor-outdoor courtyard that doesn't exist yet. If you've lived in Virginia-Highland through a few retail cycles, you've probably already guessed what's coming next: rents go up, the dive bars get priced out, something with reclaimed wood and a $16 cocktail list moves in.

That's not what's happening here. Or at least, not to the bars.

Two addresses, two timelines

The 842 and 780 addresses aren't separate projects. They're two phases of the same portfolio, something the development company behind them, Atlanta-based Third & Urban, has branded the Atkins Park Collection. The firm bought the first phase, roughly 35,370 square feet along North Highland and St. Charles avenues, in December 2024, then picked up a second phase in September 2025 that included Neighbor's Pub's building, City Church, and a handful of infill storefronts between Greenwood and St. Charles. Together the collection covers just over 61,000 square feet across three blocks, with more than $3 million earmarked for building and streetscape work.

The gap between those two rows is the story. One building is a finished proof of concept. The other is the bet the whole project rides on, and it was only slated to break ground in late spring, which means the plywood you're walking past right now is still early days, not a stalled project.

The problem was never the bars

Third & Urban co-founder Hank Farmer lives in the neighborhood, and when he talked to SaportaReport about why his company bought into a strip that already had a healthy nightlife scene, he didn't describe a corner that needed saving from itself. He described one that had quietly stopped functioning for half the day.

"I think we saw an opportunity for some of these buildings that have just been a little bit underutilized," Farmer said, adding that the node had "kind of lost its daytime and early evening services appeal" over the years.

That distinction matters if you actually live around here. Atkins Park after dark has never had a vacancy problem. Neighbor's Pub, Blind Willie's, Limerick Junction Pub, and Dark Horse Tavern are all within walking distance of each other and none of them are going anywhere. What's been missing is a reason to be on that block at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday, and that's the gap Farmer is trying to close with the courtyard and the new food-and-beverage tenants Third & Urban's leasing partners, Bridger Properties, are pitching for 780 North Highland.

There's a quieter clue that backs this up. The Atkins Park Collection does not include the building on the corner directly across from Neighbor's Pub. If the goal were to redevelop the entire nightlife strip, that corner would have been an obvious target. Leaving it out reads less like an oversight and more like a boundary: buy the underused daytime real estate, leave the bars that already work exactly as they are.

Farmer also named the actual physical obstacle standing between the neighborhood and a real daytime crowd, and it wasn't the tenant mix. According to SaportaReport, the biggest challenge he described was the streetscape itself, a busy road with potholes and little available parking. The courtyard concept at 780 North Highland is a direct response to that constraint. Rather than fighting for more sidewalk width along a road he doesn't control, Farmer described building inward instead, a recessed shared space where several small businesses can spill outside without competing with traffic. "It feels kind of safe and pulled back from the street, back from traffic," he said.

The parking meters already disappeared

If you've noticed the meters are gone from the Atkins Park commercial strip, that's not an accident of this project either, and it happened before a single piece of scaffolding went up. The Atlanta City Council signed off on a resolution removing parking meters from the zone, a change intended to make quick stops easier and give retail activity a boost. It's a small, unglamorous move, but it's the kind of policy detail that tells you the daytime pitch isn't just coming from one developer's renderings. The city made the same bet about what this corner needs before Third & Urban finished a single facade.

What's actually on the calendar between now and winter

None of this changes what Atkins Park is for after dark. It changes what else you can do there before the bars open, and the next few months give you a preview of what that might look like once 780 North Highland fills in.

The Virginia Highland District's own calendar has three dates worth knowing if you live in walking distance:

• North Highland Restaurant Week, November 8 through 12, brings prix fixe menus to roughly 20 neighborhood restaurants stretching from Morningside Village down to Atkins Park itself
• Candy Crawl, held the Wednesday before Halloween, sends costumed kids trick-or-treating business to business through the district
• The VaHi Farmers Market, reimagined in 2024, runs Sunday mornings in Highland Woodworking's parking lot with roughly 25 rotating vendors and five local produce farmers

None of those events depend on the Atkins Park Collection finishing. They're proof the daytime foot traffic Farmer is chasing already shows up on a schedule. The bet is that a finished courtyard gives that foot traffic somewhere to land on the other 350 days a year when there isn't a restaurant week or a farmers market pulling people out of their houses.

What this means if you already live here

If you're renting or own a place within a few blocks of North Highland and Ponce, the practical read is this. Your nightlife options aren't shrinking. Neighbor's Pub, Blind Willie's, Limerick Junction Pub, and Dark Horse Tavern were never on the table, and the collection's own boundaries confirm it. What's coming is a slower, daytime layer stacked on top of what already works after dark, built around a courtyard designed specifically to solve the parking and traffic problem Farmer named out loud rather than around.

The timeline is worth watching rather than assuming. A late-spring construction start puts real occupancy for 780 North Highland well into 2027 territory, not this fall. If you're the kind of resident who tracks these things anyway, the tenant announcements from Bridger Properties will be the next real signal, more useful than any rendering, of whether this block actually gets its daytime back.

Virginia-Highland changes in these small, specific ways more often than the big rezoning fights suggest. Knowing which changes are cosmetic and which ones are structural, and which buildings a developer deliberately left alone, is the kind of read that only comes from watching a neighborhood block by block over time.

If you're weighing a move into Atkins Park, Virginia-Highland, or one of the streets nearby and want someone who tracks these corridors as closely as the people who live on them, Ellen Cook can walk you through what's actually changing on the ground, not just what a listing photo shows. Request a personalized buyer consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.