Avondale Estates Drew This Plan in 1926. It Just Got Finished.

Walk the Town Green on a Sunday morning right now and you will find a line for gelato, kids on the playground, and a farmers market that has run on this same patch of grass every week for years. None of that is new. What is new is what surrounds it: a bookstore with a wine bar, a rooftop patio over a Tex-Mex kitchen, a bike path where a five-lane road used to be, and a hundredth birthday that the whole city is spending eighteen months celebrating.

It would be easy to write this off as a lucky coincidence of timing. A development finished, some restaurants opened, and the city happened to hit its centennial in the same year. But talk to the people running Avondale Estates and a different story comes into focus. City Manager Patrick Bryant said as much at the city's State of the City event this year: much of what residents are seeing right now was drawn up in the 1920s and simply never built. The Great Depression stopped it. A hundred years later, the money and the momentum finally lined up to finish the job.

The Street That Took a Century

Start with the pavement, because the pavement is the clearest evidence. When Avondale Estates was platted in the 1920s, its designers prioritized shared streets built for walking and biking alongside cars. That plan sat unfinished for decades until this April, when the city completed a 1.15-mile Complete Street project along North Avondale Road and East College Avenue. The corridor now runs from Sams Crossing and the Avondale MARTA station, past the Town Green and The Dale, to a terminus near Ashton Place. Part of the old five-lane road became three lanes, freeing up room for a ten-foot multimodal path, upgraded pedestrian and bike crossings, new signals, and repaving from end to end.

Bryant put it plainly: most of what the city is doing now was contemplated a century ago and is only just coming to fruition. That is not marketing language from a press release. It is a city manager explaining why 2026 feels different from 2025, and why the difference traces back to a blueprint older than anyone currently walking that path.

What Filled In Around It

Infrastructure alone does not make a downtown feel alive. The businesses that moved into The Dale, the 24,000-square-foot development next to the Town Green, are what turned a finished sidewalk into somewhere people actually want to be.

Cremalosa Gelato got there first, relocating from elsewhere in Avondale in November 2025. Owner Meridith Ford has said the Sunday farmers market alone drives meaningful foot traffic to her door, since the market sets up on the same pavilion her shop faces. The Book Bird followed, expanding from its original storefront into a larger space that now doubles as a coffee shop and wine bar. Co-owner Brittany Smith has described it as designed for people to read, work, bring their kids, or just sit, not simply browse and leave.

The food and drink side filled in from there. Green Coyote, a Tex-Mex kitchen, and Parma Tavern, an Italian-leaning spot with a wood-fired pizza oven, both operate under MooCoo Group, the Atlanta company run by Rob Caswick and Jeff Newsham. Above Parma sits Bar Top, a rooftop bar with a covered patio looking straight down onto the Green, plus an indoor fireplace and a private event space. A second-floor nail salon, Sugar Polish Nail Bar, and a new dental practice from Dr. Jalpa Birdi rounded out the building, which tells you something about what a Downtown Development Authority actually wants from a project like this: not just restaurants, but the ordinary errands that used to require a drive.

A few blocks over in Tudor Village, the corridor kept moving. Last Dance held its soft opening this summer in the space that Rising Son occupied for roughly a decade before closing in late March, citing lease terms and rising rent. Four chefs, including Kathryn Fitzgerald, Joshua Fryer, Patrick Daugherty, and pastry chef Chris Marconi, built a farm-to-table menu that runs from whole fish to a liver éclair and a lamb schnitzel, with a brunch program of house-made bagels that followed a few weeks after opening. It is the kind of handoff that happens in every commercial district eventually. What makes it notable here is the pace: one storefront closing and reopening as part of the same wave of change hitting the Complete Street corridor and The Dale in the same twelve months.

The Birthday That Explains the Timing

None of this was scheduled around the centennial. The Dale broke ground in late 2023. The Complete Street project ran for roughly twenty months of construction before finishing this spring. But the city's charter turns 100 on August 25, 2026, and the celebration built around that date runs from this past August through January 2028, which means the anniversary is landing directly on top of the busiest stretch of physical change the city has seen in years.

The kickoff came on August 28 with a street festival on Franklin Street between Pine and Olive, featuring art installations on the city's history, live music, and a working 1924 letterpress at Methane Press down the block. The following night brought a ticketed, adults-only Centennial Gala at the Lake House, complete with a 1920s dress code, a centennial beer brewed by Wild Heaven, and a display called Avondale Estates in 100 Objects. More is coming. The city has set aside stipends for community-led centennial projects through January 2028, and future dates on the calendar include a lantern parade and a city picnic next year, closing with a ceremony at the Avon Theatre.

Bryant summed up the through-line better than any press release could: the goal is to tell the story of the city's first hundred years while pointing at what the next hundred look like. Given that the sidewalk outside The Dale was designed before the Depression and only just got built, that is not a metaphor. It is a description of what is actually happening on North Avondale Road this year.

How to Actually Use This Fall

If you live here, the practical question is less about history and more about what to do with your weekends between now and the holidays. A few things are worth putting on the calendar:

• The Avondale Estates Farmers Market runs every Sunday, year round, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the Town Green pavilion, shifting to 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. once winter hours start November 1.
• The Weekend Wind Down concert series returns to the Green on September 13 with a Hispanic Heritage Month kickoff show from COT Band, followed by dates in October and November through the fall.
• Pilates on the Green continues on select Saturday mornings at 9 a.m., a low-key way to use the same lawn before the Sunday market crowd shows up.
• The Book Bird's calendar includes several recurring clubs, among them one dedicated to nonfiction and one built around banned books, worth checking if you want a reason to be at The Dale on a weeknight instead of a weekend.

None of that requires anyone to be shopping for a house. It requires living here and paying attention, which is really the point. The version of Avondale Estates that shows up in a quick internet search, the tidy list of restaurants and a mention of Tudor Village architecture, misses the actual story: a small city finishing a plan it drew before most of its current residents were born, and choosing to mark its hundredth year by finally building the town its founders sketched out and then couldn't afford to finish.

You can read more about the centennial calendar directly from the City of Avondale Estates, and CBS Atlanta's recent coverage of The Dale's opening businesses is worth a look if you want to hear directly from the owners quoted above.

If you're already part of this neighborhood and ever want to talk about what any of this means for your street specifically, not just the Town Green, the team at Atlanta Turtle Group knows Avondale block by block. Let's start a conversation.