Ponce City Market - $150.00
Iconic signs - Atlanta, GA
Limited run of 10 each. (Available)
16x20 frame, 11x14 mat
Ponce City Market, Atlanta
Before it was brick and clocktower, this block along Ponce de Leon Avenue was water and light. Natural springs drew Atlantans to the Ponce de Leon Amusement Park in the early 1900s, while the neighboring ballpark hosted the Atlanta Crackers and the Black Crackers. The noise of carousels and grandstands set the stage for what came next: scale.
In 1926, Sears, Roebuck & Co. opened a Southeast hub here, an industrial giant built for America’s catalog age. Freight spurs slid to its loading bays, orders moved by conveyor and hand, and families came through the ground-floor store to touch what the catalog promised. Over the decades the building expanded to more than two million square feet, a red-brick statement of logistics, retail, and modern ambition.
Retail shifted. The catalog era faded. By the late 1980s Sears was gone, and the city stepped in. Rechristened City Hall East in 1991, the complex traded merchandise for municipal memos. The building never lost its presence, but its purpose dimmed, too large for office corridors, too storied to scrap.
The turn came with a new idea: keep the bones, change the life. Beginning in 2011, the landmark underwent one of the South’s most significant adaptive-reuse projects. Brick was cleaned, windows reopened, timber and steel exposed. The Atlanta BeltLine’s Eastside Trail stitched it back into the city’s everyday rhythm; food halls, studios, and residences returned bodies and voices to the atrium Sears built.
Today, Ponce City Market is a marketplace again, different goods, same energy. The freight docks welcome bikes and strollers; the clocktower marks both meeting spots and memories. What you see in this photograph is not just a facade; it’s a ledger of Atlanta’s cycles: springs to spectacle, catalog to code, decline to re-invention. The building endures because it keeps changing, anchoring a neighborhood that insists on being lived in, not looked at.
If this print finds a wall, let it hold two times at once: the hum of packages that once crossed these floors, and the footsteps that rise through them now.
