Ponce City Market Garage Demolition To Begin In February

The development firm that purchased the old City Hall East building said Wednesday it would begin demolition of its garage later this month.

The pending demolition, which will begin three months ahead of schedule, comes as Jamestown Properties has received all the necessary permitting from the city.

Jamestown purchased the building — which is in the Old Fourth Ward and bounded by the BeltLine trail, Glen Iris Drive and Ponce de Leon and North avenues — for $27 million in July of 2011.

The company — and its Atlanta subsidiary, Green Street Properties — plans a $180 million redevelopment of the 16-acre site that will include retail, office and residential components.

“The removal of the 1960’s parking deck marks the beginning of a highly visible and significant effort to reconnect the site to the community through construction of pedestrian and vehicular access points along Glen Iris and North venues," Michael Phillips, Jamestown's managing director said in a statement.

The demolition is expected to take three months and Jamestown said all materials would be recycled.

The parking deck is almost all comprised of concrete and as part of Jamestwown's contract with the demolisher, the concrete must be recycled, Jim Irwin, a Jamestown vice president, told East Altanta Patch.

The garage will be taken down in pieces and hauled offsite for actual demolition, Irwin said. The goal is to minimize noise and debris in the surrounding Old Fourth Ward and nearby Midtown neighborhoods, he said.

Because of that, no street closures are anticipated during the demolition.

"We're going to be working from the outside in, so the staging of the construction will be down within the structure of the parking deck," Irwin said.

Jamestown will not build a new deck; the company will use some of the existing floors in the old City Hall East building and convert them into parking, he said.

The property at 675 Ponce de Leon Ave. originally rose in 1926 as a Sears Roebuck & Co. store and a Sears distribution center for the entire Southeast.

Sears utilized it for six decades, into the 1980s. The city of Atlanta bought “the largest brick building in the Southeast” in 1990, but only used a small percentage of the site. After Jamestown's purchase last year, it was renamed Ponce City Market.