Brick warehouses from the early twentieth century line streets on the edge of downtown.
What Castleberry Hill looks like
Castleberry Hill sits on the southwest edge of downtown Atlanta, where brick warehouses built in the early twentieth century line streets like Mangum and Walker. More than a hundred of them are still standing, most with arched windows and stepped parapets. The district became a federal historic district in 1985 and a City of Atlanta Landmark District in 2006.
Before the warehouses went up, the area was known as Snake Nation, a red-light district. Cotton warehousing and building materials factories moved in through the Civil War years, and the brick blocks that remain are what those industries built. By the early 1990s the district had emptied out enough that a few films used it as a backdrop. Loft conversions began in the 1980s and picked up after the 1996 Olympics. Lofts now make up most of the housing here.
Herman Russell, who grew up nearby, invested in Castleberry Hill's warehouses at a time when other developers were leaving American cities. His company's old headquarters is now becoming the . Castleberry Hill already has one of the largest concentrations of Black-owned businesses in the country. , a soul food spot that opened in 1947 and once hosted Martin Luther King Jr. and Andrew Young, sits inside that same campus at and Fair Street.
The neighborhood holds a monthly gallery walk called the Second Friday Art Stroll, when the storefronts along its main streets stay open into the evening. , a few blocks from the galleries, has a red two story building that houses a bar and deli.
Films shot in Castleberry Hill
For the AMC series The Walking Dead, Rick Grimes rode a horse over the in the season one premiere. An unoccupied building directly across the bridge stood in for a department store rooftop later in the same season.
Taken 3, 2015
Discover Atlanta credits a stretch of rail spur hidden behind the properties on , running from to Haynes Street, with location work going back to the 1980s. Taken 3 filmed here in 2014, and the Fox series The Resident used the same stretch.
What Castleberry Hill can double for
Architectural comparison · the 1890s through the 1930s
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the Tobacco Historic District along Vine Street, where the old R. J. Reynolds factory blocks sit between Chestnut Street and the Norfolk Southern tracks
Winston-Salem's Tobacco Historic District was built at close to the same scale as Castleberry Hill. Most of its buildings are one and two stories of brick with corbelled trim rather than stone ornament. Norfolk Southern's active tracks run along one edge of the district. A loading dock and a passing freight car sit in the same frame there, the way they do behind here. The buildings date from the 1890s through the 1930s, the same decades that produced Castleberry Hill's own warehouse blocks.
Winston-Salem's tobacco buildings are now part of the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter, a redevelopment that put green space, restaurants and shops into many of the ground floors. A frame would need to avoid that landscaping and signage to hold as a plain early twentieth century warehouse block. The buildings also cluster tighter around the old Reynolds factory complex than Castleberry Hill's warehouses do across several separate streets, so a shot of one building works better than one that tries to take in several blocks at once.
Architectural comparison · the early 1900s, when the Watts and Yuille Warehouses went up
Durham, North Carolina, the Bright Leaf Historic District along Peabody Street, home to the Watts and Yuille Warehouses, now known as Brightleaf Square
Durham's Bright Leaf Historic District has brick warehouses from the same period as Castleberry Hill's. The Watts and Yuille Warehouses, built in 1904, are two identical two story Romanesque brick buildings. Their scale is close to Castleberry Hill's own warehouses on , which have arched windows and stepped parapets from the same period. The district is bounded by Peabody Street on one side and the old Norfolk and Western rail line on another, a similar relationship to the spur running behind here. The B. L. Duke Warehouse, built in the same district in the late 1870s, is one of the oldest tobacco warehouses still standing in Durham.
Brightleaf Square is the retail and office conversion of these two warehouses, with shops and outdoor seating filling the courtyard between them today. A frame would need to avoid that signage and furniture to hold as an unrenovated tobacco warehouse block.
Architectural comparison · the 1880s to 1900, when Morris Avenue was Birmingham's main wholesale trade street
Birmingham, Alabama, Morris Avenue, between First Avenue North and the old Railroad Reservation
Morris Avenue was Birmingham's main wholesale district from 1880 to 1900. It is a narrow street of brick warehouses built close to the rail lines that once ran along its south side, close to the working relationship the spur behind has with Castleberry Hill's own warehouses. Morris Avenue's buildings run three and four stories, taller than most of Castleberry Hill's two story blocks. The comparison sits best in a tight shot rather than one that lines up a full building height from each street.
Morris Avenue is paved in Belgian block, not the asphalt on Castleberry Hill's streets. The National Register district removed a later asphalt covering in 1973 to expose the original stone. A shot that includes the road surface would need to cover the paving or avoid it, since that alone would identify the street to anyone who knows Birmingham.
