Today's AJC Deja News comes to you from the Thursday, May 23, 1957, edition of The Atlanta Constitution.
WRIT BLOCKS LENOX ROAD’S SHOP CENTER
Visit Lenox Square today and you can shop till you drop. But 60 years ago, a Fulton judge put a stop to the shop when ruling on a lawsuit brought by annoyed neighbors of the new construction.
Judge George P. Whitman Sr.'s May 22, 1957, restraining order against construction of what's become an Atlanta landmark could have had epic ramifications — for anyone who can't live without the Great Tree lighting every Thanksgiving, the return of the Pink Pig each Christmas season or the starting line of the AJC Peachtree Road Race each July 4th, that is.
Credit: AJC PRINT ARCHIVES
Credit: AJC PRINT ARCHIVES
“Judge Whitman set a hearing for 9:30 a.m., June 21, in the non-jury division of Fulton Superior Court to determine if the restraining order should be made permanent,” the May 23 Constitution story, somewhat hidden among a panoply of mostly national headlines, told readers.
The lawsuit didn’t stop progress; the $32 million Lenox Square opened with much fanfare in August 1959 and remains one of Atlanta’s premier malls.
And the surrounding Buckhead/Lenox area, just down Peachtree Road from the mall, is still a developer’s dream.
"A pair of Atlanta-based development firms are joining forces with a Dallas company to build the tallest tower in Buckhead since the Great Recession," the AJC's J. Scott Trubey reported on March 4, 2019.
“Regent Partners and Batson-Cook Development said they have formed a partnership with TIER REIT to develop 3354 Peachtree Road, a planned 44-story speculative office and condo tower overlooking Ga. 400 and the Buckhead financial district. The project has been in the planning stages for several years, and the partners say they intend to start construction before the end of this year and complete the tower in 2022,” Trubey writes.
Such big-picture plans are a far cry from the late ‘50s concerns of the three Buckhead area residents who sought to stop work on Lenox Square. They weren’t thinking in terms of looming towers or condos; their thoughts centered on more straightforward issues.
“The petitioners charged that property would be reduced in value and that the center would constitute a fire and traffic hazard,” the AJC stated.
On July 1, 1957, those arguments failed when Judge J.C. Tanksley dissolved the May 22 temporary restraining order. Construction restarted on what was at the time “the largest regional shopping center south of New York,” according to its builders.
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Today, Lenox Square serves as an anchor in a Buckhead that has seemingly never stopped redefining itself for the past 20 years. Once famed as Atlanta's weekend party district, Buckhead now sports high-end retail, top-flight restaurants and condos marketed to the city's well-heeled.
The AJC's Nedra Rhone and Ligaya Figueras, AJC Food and Dining Editor, noted in their May 15, 2018, feature on the area's new luxe look that "Buckhead has remained one of the wealthiest districts in metro Atlanta. The average home sale price in 2016 was just over $1.1 million. Preserving that cachet is part of what drove one of the largest redevelopment efforts in the area."
The era of bar-hopping has given way to financial planning in the many new office buildings dotting the landscape. Buckhead has gone about as white collar as it gets.
“The Atlanta area has enjoyed several years of corporate job growth following the aftermath of a painful recession. Vacancy rates remain near historic lows for the metro area, pushing office rents higher,” Trubey notes in his March 4 story.
But 60 years back, B.J. Sockinger, Mrs. S.A. Baxter and Dan I. MacIntyre, the three folks who filed suit, just wanted to keep Buckhead/Lenox residential. The developers, the AJC reported, claimed they, too, were seeking to preserve the area — as much as a multimillion-dollar shopping center project would allow.
“We were just finishing a detailed survey to determine which of the beautiful trees could be saved,” E.E. Noble, president of Lenox Square Inc., said in a statement issued to the paper.
Odds are, those trees remain, but only in a Buckhead/Lenox old-timer’s memory. As the AJC’s J. Scott Trubey points out regarding the newest Peachtree Road project, “the future tower will contain about 25 floors, or about 560,000 square feet, of top-end office space and more than 60 luxury condos… [and] will be a sister to 3344 Peachtree, Buckhead’s tallest building.
“The site is the last undeveloped parcel in Buckhead’s financial district.”
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