SoNo (South of North Avenue) is a sub-district of

downtown Atlanta Downtown Atlanta is the central business district of Atlanta, Georgia, United States. The larger of the city's two other commercial districts ( Midtown and Buckhead), it is the location of many corporate and regional headquarters; city, county ...

Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States Georgia may also refer to: Places Historical states and entities * Related to the ...

, just south of Midtown. The area was defined and named by T. Brian Glass while working on a rezoning committee with Central Atlanta Progress in 2005 in order to better establish an identity for the area and give it a hipper image. SoNo refers to the area of Downtown bounded by North Avenue on the north, Central Park Place on the east and the

Downtown Connector In Downtown Atlanta, the Downtown Connector or 75/85 (pronounced "seventy-five eighty-five") is the concurrent section of Interstate 75 and Interstate 85 through the core of the city. Beginning at the I-85/ Langford Parkway interchange, ...

(Interstate-75/85) on the west and south. Ongoing

urban renewal Urban renewal (also called urban regeneration in the United Kingdom and urban redevelopment in the United States) is a program of land redevelopment often used to address urban decay in cities. Urban renewal involves the clearing out of blighte ...

efforts in the new neighborhood seek to establish a chic cultural identity for the underdeveloped area, as well as reunite the Midtown and Downtown commercial districts (which have remained mostly divided since the construction of the

through the heart of the city), including a proposed "interstate cap" over the highway that would extend Mayor's Park south along

Peachtree Street Peachtree Street is one of several major streets running through the city of Atlanta. Beginning at Five Points in downtown Atlanta, it runs North through Midtown; a few blocks after entering into Buckhead, the name changes to Peachtree Road a ...

to Baker Street. SoNo is home to several attractions, including Emory University Hospital Midtown, the

Atlanta Civic Center The Atlanta Civic Center was a theater located in Atlanta, Georgia. It closed in 2014. The theater, which seats 4,600, regularly hosted touring productions of Broadway musicals, concerts, seminars, comedy acts, and high school graduations an ...

, Shakespeare Tavern and the Bank of America Plaza, the city's tallest building. It also is home to the historic Baltimore Block and Rufus M. Rose House. SoNo's centerpiece Renaissance and Central Parks were also the site of Atlanta's annual

Music Midtown Music Midtown is a large music festival that was held in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, annually from 1994 to 2005, and—after a six-year hiatus—returned in 2011. During its original run, the festival ran for one weekend each year. The event ...

festival, before moving to Piedmont Park.

Public transport Public transport (also known as public transportation, public transit, mass transit, or simply transit) is a system of transport for passengers by group travel systems available for use by the general public unlike private transport, typi ...

ation is provided by MARTA with buses and with the north-south rail line serving the Civic Center station.

History

In the last decades of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th, Peachtree Street was a street of elegant mansions — the Rufus M. Rose House being the last remaining example in what is now SoNo. These gradually were replaced by commercial buildings, large churches, apartment buildings and boarding houses and by the end of the 1920s the transformation was complete. With suburbanization in the mid-20th century, the area went into a period of decline. When given its name and new image by T. Brian Glass while working on a rezoning committee with Central Atlanta Progress in 2005, SoNo had not yet participated substantially in the renaissance of either downtown to the south or Midtown to the north. The area from Piedmont east to Central Park had a different history — this developed as the Buttermilk Bottom slum area, which was razed in the 1960s. Most of the land then remained empty, the Convention Center (built 1967), now the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center, being an exception. FInally, in the mid-1980s new, mostly mixed-income projects were built on the land, while some of the land was used for today's Renaissance Park.

References

{{coord, 33.4558, -84.231, display=title Neighborhoods in Atlanta