For years, a forlorn building on Atlanta’s south side, known as the “Pink Store,” was an emblem of societal breakdown.
In December 2014, I visited the corner store in the Pittsburgh neighborhood because police were putting a squeeze on it.
I found two heaps of wet teddy bears with deflated balloons on the sidewalk, memorializing two separate murders there in recent weeks, including one with an AK-47. It made city leaders finally say: “Enough!”
The Pink Store had become infamous two years earlier when some punks battered a gay man outside the shop. The young criminals had even proudly affixed their moniker to that location, calling themselves the 1029 Jack City Gang, a reference to the store’s address on McDaniel Street.
The city bought the property to cease the mayhem and the store, now painted white, has sat empty for most of the past decade.
Recently, I noticed that location — 1029 McDaniel — was on a list of addresses being rezoned, so I returned to see the transformation. The city wants to make way for “adaptive reuse,” which translates to creating some kind of store with residences behind it.
“It’s a visible project in the middle of the neighborhood,” said mayoral aide Josh Humphries, the administration’s housing guy. He added that there’s a “symbolic quality” to taking an old building on a well-travelled thoroughfare and “breathing new life into it.”
The city wants to partner with someone to open a small grocery store or restaurant or coffee shop or something.
The neighborhood association and the Neighborhood Planning Unit have supported it, although several residents living near the hulking structure are giving it the side eye. They attended a Zoning Review Board last month to air concerns.
Basically, they fear reopening a business there would give new life to the monster.
“We have many more pressing issues; there is a crime problem in the neighborhood,” Andrea Jackson, who has lived catty-corner from 1029 for three years, told the board. “First, let’s fix that issue.”
Her next-door neighbor, Devon Holloway, a resident since 2016, said: “It’ll completely disrupt the ecosystem of the neighborhood.”
Their argument is the area has been quiet(ish) since the store closed, so why mess with that?
When there weren’t gunshots or police sirens, the neighborhood was plenty quiet. Back in 2014, I canvassed the Pink Store’s block and the next one at the time and found just six of 24 homes were occupied, including the homes where Holloway and Jackson now live.
A city report from 2013 said a third of the Pittsburgh’s 1,571 residences were vacant. The neighborhood had been hollowed out by poverty, crime, an aging population and mortgage fraud from the early 2000s. Fraudsters had sold properties to “straw” purchasers and made a killing.
Holloway’s home, according to real estate records, sold for $235,000 in 2004, then $12,000 in 2014 and $95,000 when he bought it in 2016. The home to his north went from selling for $315,000 in 2006 to $17,000 in 2014 to $331,000 last year.
Credit: Bill Torpy
Credit: Bill Torpy
Pittsburgh, which has had several shootings in the past year, still suffers from an image problem.
In a conversation outside her home, Jackson told me that when her friends hear where she lives, they’ll say: “Oooh, you live in the ‘hood.”
“But in this ‘hood, you can’t buy a house for under $350,000,” Holloway interjected.
The community has seen wholesale change. In the two blocks where I once found 18 vacancies, there are now 22 occupied homes and two vacancies.
Pittsburgh’s 33% vacancy rate from a decade ago is now about 13%, said Tomi Hiers, a vice president with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which has been trying to toss the neighborhood a lifeline for two decades.
The foundation has renovated and built homes there, creating about 70 “affordable” units. It also bought a 31-acre tract from UPS on the neighborhood’s south end and is developing Pittsburgh Yards, which includes a 61,000-square-foot “incubator” for fledgling businesses.
It also sold 13.7 acres of its land to the Atlanta Beltline for future development.
The Beltline, of course, is the force putting communities, even formerly blighted ones like Pittsburgh, into overdrive.
In Pittsburgh, other than the new houses and the Beltline megadevelopments, some green shoots of commerce are popping up.
Credit: Bill Torpy
Credit: Bill Torpy
On McDaniel Street there’s a colorfully painted cluster of three brick buildings housing two different vegan restaurants, one Haitian and the other Caribbean.
“We support each other,” said Emmanuel Francois, who with his wife, Belineda Febe, runs Plant Based Zo, the Haitian eatery. “People think vegan food is rabbit food. They don’t think it can be tasty. But it is.”
Years ago, I ran into Sohna Harzeez, then a recent resident who moved from Cobb County in search of something that wasn’t “a cookie-cutter neighborhood.”
She got that in Pittsburgh. She has since married and lives mostly in a nearby neighborhood but wants to turn her home there into two units, one for her brother.
There’s been lots of talk and worry about gentrification in Atlanta neighborhoods and that has occurred here. But Pittsburgh has been a twist on the traditional story. Here it’s almost entirely young Black professionals moving in.
“Some people have never lived in a historically Black neighborhood,” said Harzeez. “It’s a culture shock for them, even if they are in the culture.”
