The march of intown gentrification continues
with swath after swath of previously unused or blighted areas being repurposed
into hip and dazzling new playgrounds.
The newest entrant is the new Echo Street West
project, a 19-acre reimagining of an area near Mercedes Benz Stadium and the
historically Black neighborhood of English Avenue. The redo will soon include a bevy of live-work-play
options including retail, office, restaurant and hotel along with multi-family
housing and even an artist colony.
Within
the burgeoning new mini-city comes the Westside Motor Lodge, a 3-acre
campus that converted three vacant auto repair shops, four shipping containers and
even an abandoned 1982 Mercedes Wagon into a restaurant, bar, cocktail lounge,
event space, game room, beer garden, shuffleboard courts along with cabanas,
fire pits and a food truck. And it's all
near the Atlanta Beltline's westside trail so you're connected to other parts
of town as well.
Attitude abounds—it's got that roadside
motor lodge feel but also feels high-design with just enough bougie not to be
pretentious. Elizabeth Feichter (formerly of Atlanta Food and Wine
Festival) and Kelly Campbell of Southern Culinary and Creative (Gather 'round, Epicurean Atlanta) are behind the project so they
understand how to put on a show and curate up some good stuff.
The
restaurant offers up Southern comfort food fare like burgers, meat-and-three
plates, hearty bowls and southern veggies like okra and collards. With a talented
bar staff led by bar manager Kelsey Kenny and Kellie Thorn expect cocktails shaken,
stirred and even on draft, loosely named for iconic rock songs. The event and retail space, Idlewild, occupies the other part of the building and features dart boards and lounge
areas used for meetings, dart leagues, and pop-up shops. A game room with ping
pong, foosball, and tabletop shuffleboard adds to the fun and live music comes off a stage created out of the three
remaining shipping containers, with the courtyard beyond the beer garden
featuring shuffleboard courts, cabanas and picnic tables, fire pits and
Adirondack chairs, and space for a food truck.
The ambitiousness
of the project is commendable—the indoor/outdoor sprawl of the compound will be
in full splendor when the spring warmth returns but there are plenty of indoor
escapes in the coming weeks to enjoy this new retreat on what was just recently a dead zone.
