Castleberry Hill, the district you have entered, grew up in the 1990s as an arts district inside a former wholesale and light industrial district just southwest of downtown Atlanta. The neighborhood's warehouse buildings, constructed from the 1890s through the mid-twentieth century, were colonized by artists seeking large, affordable studio spaces — a pattern familiar from SoHo in New York, the Pearl District in Portland, and arts districts across the country where industrial vacancy becomes creative opportunity. Castleberry Hill developed a monthly art stroll, gallery openings, and a community of studios that made it Atlanta's most concentrated arts district through the 2000s.
The neighborhood sits within walking distance of the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which opened in 2017 as one of the most technically sophisticated sports facilities in the world, home to the Atlanta Falcons of the NFL and Atlanta United FC of MLS — a soccer team that has drawn some of the largest crowds of any MLS franchise and signaled Atlanta's emergence as a genuine soccer city. The stadium brings massive foot traffic to the neighborhood on game days, which has been both an economic opportunity and a displacement pressure for the artists and residents who established the community. Castleberry Hill is working through the contradictions of being a creative district adjacent to a billion-dollar sports complex.