Peachtree Street here carries you through Atlanta's Midtown arts and technology corridor, the city's most concentrated zone of cultural institutions, technology companies, and urban energy. The corridor runs from the Fox Theatre at its southern anchor through the Woodruff Arts Center campus — home to the High Museum, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and the Alliance Theatre — and extends north through the blocks where Georgia Tech's Tech Square campus has become a hub for startup companies and corporate innovation centers. Companies including Google, Microsoft, NCR, and dozens of tech firms have established major operations in Midtown, drawn by Georgia Tech talent and the neighborhood's walkable urban character.
The neighborhood's density and transit access — the MARTA Arts Center station sits at the heart of it — make it one of the few parts of Atlanta that functions as a genuinely walkable urban district. Atlanta is an intensely automobile-dependent city, a product of its postwar sprawl, and Midtown represents an alternative vision of what the city could become. The BeltLine, which connects to Midtown at several points, amplifies that vision.
The city is slowly, imperfectly, building its way toward a different relationship with the streets.