Beneath your feet lies one of the strangest urban spaces in America — a buried city that exists only because of a railroad decision made in the 1920s. When Atlanta built viaducts over its railroad tracks in that decade to ease traffic flow through the crowded downtown grid, the street-level businesses along Alabama Street and Pryor Street found themselves below the new elevated roadways, essentially buried under the viaduct decks. The original storefronts, sidewalks, and building facades from the 1890s and early 1900s are preserved beneath the streets above you.
In the 1960s, developers rediscovered the underground network and transformed it into an entertainment district that became enormously popular in the 1970s before declining sharply in the 1980s. It reopened as a festival marketplace in 1989 and has struggled commercially ever since. The space is a time capsule of the original New South commercial district — the bars, restaurants, and storefronts of Victorian Atlanta preserved underground while the city above them was demolished and rebuilt.
Its future remains uncertain, which is itself a kind of Atlanta story: the city is always building over its past, but the past has a way of surfacing.