As part of ongoing Best of Atlanta 2023 coverage, Urbanize’s third-annual Best Atlanta Neighborhood tournament kicked off last week with 16 places vying for the prestige of being called the city’s greatest.
Now, for each Elite Eight contest, voting will be open until noon on Tuesday, allowing anyone time to chime in who’s currently traveling or enduring their family. Please, let’s keep the tourney fun and positive, as one neighborhood rises above the rest in very public fashion. The quest to crown a champion resumes now!
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(5) Grant Park
In first round action, No. 5 seed Grant Park showed Kirkwood the door, capturing 56 percent of 844 votes.
For such a celebrated place to live, relatively little changed around Grant Park in 2023 (unless you count a game-changer BeltLine segment breaking ground as part of the neighborhood). That relative idleness could speak to how awesome Grant Park already is (with one idle, hollow exception), a place where gorgeous Victorians and bungalows soiree with one of Atlanta’s prettiest, most functional greenspaces. If anything, Grant Park added a dash of modern amongst its antiquity, with BeltLine-adjacent townhomes and a large new apartment stack that look plucked from Sweden. Believe it or not, Grant Park has never taken the crown across a decade of these competitions. Could lucky ’23 change all that?
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(13) Reynoldstown
Small-but-mighty Reynoldstown (No. 13) dispatched Decatur in the tourney’s first contest this year, scooting into the Elite Eight with 55 percent of votes.
Across the busy year that 2023 has been, R-town’s most buzz-worthy addition had to be Breaker Breaker, the easy-breezy BeltLine pitstop that’s part of growing Empire Stein Steel. Also along the BeltLine (surprise!) an all-affordable stack of rent-capped homes has recently topped out, while a truly unique motel conversion gets underway for Atlantans who need a boost most. Elsewhere, that penchant for flashy duplexes in Reynoldstown shows few signs of slowing. Longtime followers of this criteria-free contest may recall that R-town valiantly claimed the crown in 2014, as BeltLine hoopla heated up. Could it become just the second neighborhood in history to repeat in 2023? We’ll see.