Little Five Points, the intersection you have reached, has been the counterculture heart of Atlanta since the 1970s, its most persistently alternative commercial district. The intersection at the center of the district gets its name from the convergence of five streets — Euclid Avenue, Moreland Avenue, McLendon Avenue, Colquitt Avenue, and Austin Avenue — creating a commercial node that has sustained vintage shops, record stores, tattoo parlors, independent bookstores, bars, and music venues for half a century. Little Five Points emerged as an alternative district in the 1970s when the neighborhood's low rents attracted artists, musicians, and young people who were looking for a version of Atlanta that operated outside the mainstream.
The Variety Playhouse, a concert venue on Euclid Avenue, has been one of Atlanta's most important music stages since 1977, hosting performers across every genre. The district has seen repeated predictions of its demise as rents rise around it, but it has proven more durable than most alternative commercial districts — perhaps because its character is so deeply established and because it serves a need that no other Atlanta neighborhood fills in quite the same way. On a weekend afternoon it is vivid, loud, and uncompromisingly itself.
That is not nothing.