What Should Go Here?: Pullman Yard

On a recent trip through the Kirkwood neighborhood, I pulled off onto Rogers Street and headed toward DeKalb Avenue.

For the 12 years I've lived in Atlanta I've always heard and read stories about the Pullman Yard, once part of a thriving enterprise that fell into bankruptcy and now is state-owned.

The 100-year-old, 28-acre swath of real estate always seemed to be under "the next big thing" status. After all, Atlanta spent the final years of the 20th century and much of the first decade in the 21st under bevy of construction crane, redevelopment and renaissance.

A lot of those efforts helped East Atlanta Patch neighborhoods. Glenwood Park saw its birth, while East Atlanta experienced a renaissance.

Edgewood welcomed (in the end, at least) the Edgewood Retail District, and other neighborhoods including Cabbagetown and Reynoldstown experienced and continue to see an influx of new residents snapping up homes and restoring them.

Kirkwood, too, has seen resurgence in the last few years.

Despite that, the Pullman Yard seems to just sit there. There have been plans and ideas, of course, from developers and builders.

The Kirkwood community itself has met and formulized plans for its vision for how the site should be redeveloped.

And residents of neighboring communities have had their ideas, too.

"I believe it may be one of the largest unused tracts of undeveloped property within city of Atlanta limits," East Atlanta Patch reader Cyrus Parsifal, wrote in an e-mail, in which he suggested we look at Pullman Yard.

"Either way it would change dynamics of east Atlanta if redeveloped."

Jonathan Lewis, another reader from Lake Claire, suggests it might be repurposed as a sporting complex.

"A bunch of us in the area think it should become soccer fields, perhaps an expansion to the Arizona fields run by AYSA," Lewis wrote. "The historic buildings would get re-used somehow, of course."

The sports-complex idea is one that Candler Park resident David Epstein also pushed recently at a meeting of the Candler Park Neighborhood Organization.

What do you think would be the best use of the Pullman Yard? How would you like to see it and its buildings reuse and or restored?

About this column: What ideas do you have for the revitalization of a building or property?