Jackson Street crosses Freedom Parkway on a short bridge with downtown at the end of the road below. The Beltline trail runs past the old Sears warehouse.
What Old Fourth Ward looks like
crosses on a short bridge, and downtown is straight ahead at the end of the road below. People stand on the bridge to photograph the skyline.
The parkway sits on ground the state cleared for a freeway that was never built. Land buying for I-485 started in the 1960s and about 500 houses came down before lawsuits and protests stopped the road in the 1970s. The ground stayed empty for more than twenty years. After Atlanta won the 1996 Olympics the city ran along part of it and made a linear park out of the rest.
The north end of the neighborhood is . Sears put up a 2.1 million square foot mail order warehouse and store along it in 1926. The store closed in 1979 and the city kept police and fire offices there until 2010. It reopened as in 2014.
A rail line used to run past the east side of it. The is on that route now, with converted warehouses along one side and new apartment blocks along the other. sits below the market. Its pond is a stormwater basin. The city built it for $23 million instead of the $40 million sewer tunnel it had planned.
runs across the south end. Martin Luther King Jr. was born at 501 and is at 407. Both are inside the national historical park named after him. The Atlanta Streetcar runs down the middle of the road.
Films shot in Old Fourth Ward
The Walking Dead and Baby Driver both shot here, and both of them kept the city as itself.
The Walking Dead, 2010
The shot of Rick riding into the city on a horse was taken from the Bridge, looking west down with the skyline at the end of it. It opens the first episode and it became the poster for the first season. A wrecked train was added along the side of the road afterwards. The bridge is public and there is usually somebody standing on it with a camera.
Baby Driver, 2017
Baby lives with his deaf stepfather in the Odd Fellows Building at 250 . Only the outside of it is in the film. It went up in 1912 as the headquarters of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, a Black fraternal order. Booker T. Washington dedicated it. The production also used near the Downtown Connector for the truck crash after the second robbery.
What Old Fourth Ward can double for
Old Fourth Ward can stand in for a southern city with an interstate through the middle of it and brick warehouse blocks turned into apartments.
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