Courtesy of Coro Realty Advisors, LLC
You know what’s difficult? Penning a love letter to the most unapproachable, asphalt-dominated, and generally soul-sucking strip mall on Atlanta’s eastside. Midtown Place is to smart urban planning what Boston is to Southern hospitality—there is no correlation. But Midtown Place is not without its attributes. In this challenging era for retail, when Peachtree Street is pockmarked with vacancies, Midtown Place on Ponce de Leon Avenue bustles: Its storefronts are brimming with options you’ll find virtually anywhere else. Love it, hate it—endure it when necessary—you can’t say Midtown Place doesn’t work to some extent.
Midtown Place, if you’re lucky enough to not be familiar, is that big-box shopping center across the street from Ponce City Market’s front entrance, anchored by a Whole Foods and the Home Depot. One of its lead developers, the controversial Jeff Fuqua, is best known for building such things as lifeless self-storage compounds in walkable places and trying to cram a big-box store into historic Grant Park. At its heart is a sprawling hellscape of scorching-hot surface parking. The lot is notorious for car-booters, who swoop in like vultures and clamp down on wheels for people who dare patronize a business not immediately near their cars. On weekends, the parking lot devolves into a swirling toilet bowl of vehicles, all hostile to people on foot, repeatedly clogging and flushing through one of two insufficient entry-exit points on Ponce. Need a good laugh? Imagine telling out-of-town guests, “Hop in the car, folks—you’ve got to see Midtown Place!”
Afraid I was being too harsh on the shopping hub, I set out for Midtown Place on a temperate Friday evening to run a couple of errands. I drove past the CVS and the busy Starbucks and—as if on cue—saw two blue-shirted car-booters being berated by two ladies in tank tops for, well, booting their ride. When the dust settled, I asked the booters how not to get booted, and they pleasantly explained that if I park in front of Home Depot, I should simply patronize Home Depot. Then they slunk back between the bushes like that Homer Simpson meme.
Now here’s the good stuff: At Midtown Place, you can service basically every part of your anatomy. There’s Massage Envy, Great Clips, The Joint Chiropractic, eyecare, nailcare, waxing services, and a dentist. Good luck getting primped like that at Krog Street Market.
I ducked into TJ Maxx and experienced a revelation. Where else in the ATL, for a hundred bucks and change, are you walking out with a big doughnut-scented candle, a discount bottle of ashwagandha gummies, and four name-brand summer polos? Down at Home Depot, meanwhile, I got a huge bag of decorative rocks for five bucks!
None of this is to call Midtown Place a bastion of affordability or utopia. It’s emblematic of Atlanta hypocrisy; here we complain about car culture and the lack of free parking and, in the same breath, keep big-boxes in business beside the Beltline and lampoon Midtown Place on the way to Whole Foods. It is convenient. And it beats not having it there.
Sufficiently spent, I exited the strip mall, nodded to the booters, and noticed the towers of Ponce City Market. They were lit brightly, peering down on Midtown Place like worried parents into a crib.
This article appears in our September 2025 issue.
