Virtual Tour of Cabbage Town - Atlanta

Krog Street Tunnel - Cabbage Town

I am a geek for walkable neighborhoods. Anything that allows me to feel like I’m part of a community—local eateries, galleries, gathering spaces—draw me in like a moth to a flame. Atlanta in my opinion is not the most walkable city, but it has its enclaves; it’s little nooks and neighborhoods within the city.

Cabbage Town is a great bohemian annex in Atlanta. It is one of the neighborhoods that lay adjacent to Atlanta’s center city district. It’s like an eye in the center of the metropolitan storm of Atlanta and its traffic.

Its history lies in the community’s anchor industry and main architectural structure: the now-renovated Fulton Cotton Mill. After the mill closed in the late 70s and many of its residents left, it created an economic vacuum and fertile ground for artist and musicians to move in due to the low cost of living. And like many neighborhoods, this avant-garde culture brought popularity to the once tiny town within a city.

With rents on the rise due to Atlanta’s booming economy in film production and other industries, Cabbage Town is becoming much more of a boutique neighborhood. Residents admit that they themselves would not currently be able to afford homes had they bought just five years earlier.

And along with this boutique feel comes those who would live in the neighborhood for the novelty of living in Cabbage Town, while not honoring what made the neighborhood so wonderful to live in to begin with: the sense of community.

While walking down Cabbage Town’s streets it is not uncommon to see residents walking dogs orout for a run, while taking time to stop and talk to one another and greet each other by name. There is definitely a culture to this tiny town that residents want to maintain.

That culture was created partly due to the fact that there are only a few different ways to enter Cabbage Town despite the fact that it is in the middle of a metropolitan area. In the past it meant that people coming into the neighborhood either lived there or were coming there for a specific purpose. Now, in an Atlanta that is becoming more dense with not only apartment buildings, dining establishments, and work/play spaces, the traffic in Atlanta is causing city dwellers to use Cabbage Town as a throughput for getting from one part of the city to another.

And in the middle of this city wide traffic conundrum is the Krog Street Tunnel. Connecting Cabbage Town to Inman Park is a beautifully and artistically graffiti tagged railway underpass. As far back as the 1980s, artists have painted these walls, but recently the Krog Street Tunnel has garnered attention as an Atlanta artistic staple. It, more than anything, is a symbol of Cabbage Town and its legacy. It’s beautiful and defiant, a collaborative and cohesive ever-changing work that has grown not out of corporate ambition, but out of artistic and community involvement and expression.

And this is the heart of Cabbage Town, an organic community of DIYers and builders, artist and musicians, entrepreneurs and city-dwellers. In your travels and in your wanderings, if you are able to make it to this neighborhood, sit in one of its bars or coffee houses, strike up a conversation with either barkeep or patron, and be charmed by a colloquial touch in the middle of metro Atlanta. In the link above, I have included a link to a 360° Interactive Virtual Tour. Click on the informational buttons that bring up text and video that offer more data on the community and explore the image by moving it around with your mouse or finger.