Adaptive Reuse: Building Atlanta’s Future from Its Industrial Past

What happens when a part of the city built for one era outlives its original purpose?

Along Atlanta’s BeltLine Westside Trail, Lee + White offers one answer: don’t automatically tear it down. Give it something new to do.

Today, Lee + White is a 23-acre mixed-use destination filled with restaurants, breweries, offices, retailers, recreation, health services, technology companies and gathering spaces. But beneath all of that activity is another Atlanta—the industrial city that once depended on railroads, warehouses, manufacturing and distribution to keep its economy moving.

That history hasn’t disappeared. It has become part of the design.

Before the BeltLine: Atlanta’s Warehouse Row

The buildings that make up Lee + White were largely constructed during the 1950s and 1960s, when this section of West End was an active industrial and warehousing district. The buildings served as production, packaging and distribution facilities for regional grocery businesses. Their location was practical: the rail corridor running alongside the property connected them to a much larger transportation and distribution network.

In other words, what we now experience as the Atlanta BeltLine helped shape this property long before there was a BeltLine.

The former rail corridor was one of the reasons warehouses belonged here in the first place. Decades later, its transformation into the BeltLine Westside Trail would once again change what these buildings could become.

As Atlanta's industrial patterns shifted, many of these warehouses lost their original purpose. By the time redevelopment began in 2015, the opportunity wasn't simply to fill empty buildings. It was to reconsider how an obsolete industrial landscape might become useful to the city again.

Adaptive Reuse Instead of Starting Over

The answer was adaptive reuse—the practice of giving an existing building a new purpose while retaining as much of its useful structure and character as possible.

The first phase of Lee + White was designed with the involvement of Atlanta-based Kronberg Urbanists + Architects, which provided architecture, urban design, development guidance, and zoning and policy work. Rather than treating the warehouses as obstacles, the design took advantage of what was already there: large building volumes, open interiors, industrial materials and the unusual relationship between the buildings and the former rail corridor.

Large new openings were cut into the warehouse buildings to connect interior spaces with shared outdoor areas and the BeltLine. Existing structures were adapted to accommodate modern mechanical, electrical, plumbing, sprinkler and life-safety systems. In buildings such as 1050 White Street, new structural steel was inserted inside the existing structure while new storefronts and overhead doors were carefully cut into the existing brick exterior.

The result doesn't disguise the site's industrial past. It allows you to see it.

Later redevelopment phases continued that philosophy. A 2020 master plan by Smith Dalia Architects envisioned additional creative offices, retail, public spaces and stronger connections between the buildings and BeltLine. Building 929, for example, transformed a former warehouse into more than 100,000 square feet of loft-style office and commercial space while retaining the building's high ceilings, open volumes and industrial character.

This is preservation through use. Instead of freezing the buildings at one moment in history, adaptive reuse allows their architecture to continue participating in the life of the city.

Why Keep the Old Buildings?

Preservation doesn't always mean restoring a building to exactly what it looked like decades ago.

Sometimes preservation means recognizing the qualities worth keeping—the brick walls, structural systems, proportions, materials, industrial scale and relationship to the surrounding neighborhood—and designing new interventions around them.

There is also an environmental argument for doing so. Existing buildings contain enormous amounts of embodied carbon: the energy and emissions already invested in extracting materials, manufacturing components, transporting them and constructing the building. Reusing viable structures can avoid some of the material consumption and demolition waste associated with tearing down a building and starting again.

But there is a cultural benefit too.

Old industrial buildings tell us something about why a neighborhood looks the way it does. At Lee + White, the warehouses make sense because of the railroad. The railroad helps explain the area's industrial development. And the transformation of that railroad into the BeltLine helps explain the site's newest chapter.

The architecture becomes a physical timeline of Atlanta's changing economy.

Why Mixed-Use Makes Sense Along the BeltLine

The BeltLine was never envisioned simply as a recreational trail. Its larger ambition has been to connect neighborhoods, transportation, parks, jobs and economic development around a 22-mile loop of Atlanta.

That makes mixed-use development especially important.

When workplaces, restaurants, shops, services, recreation and public spaces exist near one another, a place can support activity at different times and for different reasons. Someone might arrive at Lee + White for work in the morning, meet someone for lunch, visit a healthcare provider, walk the BeltLine, shop from a local business or meet friends for dinner—all without each activity requiring an entirely separate destination.

Lee + White's location makes those connections particularly interesting. The development has roughly half a mile of BeltLine frontage, multiple direct trail entrances and sits about 0.4 miles from the West End MARTA station.

The architecture therefore isn't functioning as an isolated commercial development surrounded only by parking. It is becoming part of a larger pedestrian, bicycle and transit network.

One of the most telling design decisions in the project's first phase was actually something that wasn't built: Kronberg Urbanists + Architects reports that the redevelopment ultimately resulted in a reduction of approximately 1,300 parking spaces from what otherwise would have been required—the largest such reduction on the BeltLine at the time.

That changes the question from How many cars can we bring here? to How many ways can people reach and experience this place?

Designing for More Than a Destination

Mixed-use development, however, is only successful if the people living around it can benefit from it.

The developers behind Lee + White have described their vision as creating a place where people can shop, play, dine, work and live, while also providing practical services that serve the surrounding community.

That intention can increasingly be seen in the mix of uses. Alongside restaurants, breweries and entertainment are organizations and businesses including healthcare, schools, nonprofits, offices, fitness facilities and emerging local retailers.

The property's Container Village takes that idea a step further by providing smaller-format retail spaces intended to lower the barrier to brick-and-mortar locations for startups and small businesses. Lee + White's owners have also placed the property within the West End Community Improvement District, where participating commercial property owners help fund initiatives related to infrastructure, beautification, economic development and public safety.

Ackerman and MDH have said their larger goal is for Lee + White to recognize the history of West End while becoming both a community gathering place and a hub for business. They have also emphasized seeking community input as the development evolves.

That commitment matters because redevelopment along the BeltLine raises an important question for Atlanta: When investment arrives in a neighborhood, who is it ultimately designed to serve?

A Building Doesn't Have to Stay the Same to Preserve Its Story

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Lee + White is that its transformation isn't finished.

These buildings have already moved through several versions of Atlanta. They were built around an industrial transportation system, became part of a declining warehouse district, and now sit beside one of the city's most significant public-space and mobility projects.

Their newest purpose is dramatically different from their first—but the architecture connects those chapters.

That is one of the possibilities of adaptive reuse. Preservation doesn't have to mean preventing change. Good preservation can allow change to happen without requiring a city to erase itself first.

Lee + White gives Atlanta a place to ask what that approach might look like elsewhere.

As the BeltLine continues to reshape neighborhoods and attract investment, the question isn't simply what new buildings Atlanta can construct along it. It is also what existing places we can reconsider, reconnect and give another life.

Good preservation can allow change to happen without requiring a city to erase itself first.

Sometimes the most sustainable—and most distinctly Atlanta—building may be the one that's already here.