2012 Groundbreakers - The Future Issue - Atlanta Magazine
 
 
Groundbreakers 2012

Author Rebecca Burns

  • Rebecca Burns

    Deputy Editor

    Burns has contributed to Atlanta magazine since 1995 and worked on staff in various capacities, including serving as editor-in-chief from 2002 to 2009. She returned to the magazine in August 2012 after several years as director of digital strategy for Emmis Publishing, the magazine's parent company. Her career merges interests in media's future and our region's past. She's the author of three books on Atlanta history and at work on her fourth—an account of the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917. She co-curated the Atlanta History Center exhibit "Atlanta Magazine, 1961-2011: 50 Years of the Changing City" and produced the accompanying award-winning digital media project. An adjunct professor of journalism at Emory University, Burns is a frequent speaker at civic and community events. She lives in Cabbagetown with her husband, the designer and illustrator James Burns.

Profiles from the August 2012 issue

Ponce City Market

For repurposing the past—2 million square feet of it

by Rebecca Burns
On August 2, 1926, Sears threw a party and 30,000 Atlantans showed up, frantic to peek inside the new 750,000-square-foot retail center on Ponce de Leon Avenue, where all of the 35,000 items in the iconic Sears Roebuck catalog were on display. “If ever there was a doubt in the minds of Atlantans that the company actually kept in stock the thousands upon thousands of articles . . . that doubt was erased after a tour through the building,” enthused an Atlanta Constitution reporter. It was built in a record six months by more than 2,000 workers, and Sears pumped $2 million into the construction job market. That’d be $26 million today; no wonder Mayor Walter Sims was on hand to hoist a flag atop the 232-foot tower. Read More