Shotgun and cottage houses from a 19th century mill village, with the brick mill still standing at the center of the neighborhood.
What Cabbagetown looks like
Cabbagetown sits between Oakland Cemetery to the west and the CSX rail yard along Tennelle and Wylie Streets to the north, with Reynoldstown across Pearl Street to the east.
Jacob Elsas built the here in 1881, on the site of the Atlanta Rolling Mill. He recruited his workforce from Appalachian Georgia and put up one- and two-story shotgun and cottage houses around the mill for them to live in, on streets narrower and blocks shorter than the rest of the city.
Many of those houses are still standing. Some are simple one-story shotgun cottages under gabled roofs, on streets like . Others are taller and more elaborate, with wraparound porches, like the two-story house on or the Victorian on that sits behind a stone retaining wall.
The mill employed 2,600 people at its peak, then closed in the late 1970s. The neighborhood declined until artists began moving in during the 1980s, around a photo gallery on . Beginning in the mid-1990s the mill itself was converted into loft apartments. A fire during that renovation trapped a crane operator on the roof in 1999. A firefighter rescued him by dangling from a helicopter, live on television.
is still the commercial strip, with Little's Food Store operating there since 1929. At the edge of the neighborhood, the connects Cabbagetown to Reynoldstown and Inman Park under the rail yard, covered in graffiti and one of the city's best known street art sites.
Films shot in Cabbagetown
The production behind Dumb and Dumber To built a fake residential street on a vacant lot at and Pearl Street in 2013, a few blocks from the . The mill itself was still vacant when Trespass shot there over the winter of 1991 and 1992, years before its conversion into lofts.
Trespass, 1992
Trespass filmed at the s over the winter of 1991 and 1992, when the mill was still vacant and derelict. The production used it as an abandoned warehouse. The building in the photograph is the same mill, since rebuilt into loft apartments. Two more recent productions used it in that later form. A loft inside it became the Fab Five's shared home base on the Netflix reboot of Queer Eye, and the comedy What Men Want filmed at the Cotton Mill Lofts in 2018.
What Cabbagetown can double for
Documented · present day
Rhode Island
The production behind Dumb and Dumber To built a temporary residential street on a vacant lot at the corner of and Pearl Street in 2013, standing in for a Rhode Island street in one scene of the film. The crew put up new facades rather than filming among Cabbagetown's own houses. The set came down once shooting wrapped.
Cabbagetown's real streets carry the shotgun and Victorian cottage architecture of a Southern mill village, so the production left them out of frame and built fresh facades on an empty lot instead. A wide shot of one of Cabbagetown's actual streets would not pass for New England.
