Snellville’s 9-building town center wraps construction, lands brewery

The pantheon of made-from-scratch city centers around metro Atlanta has a new entrant.

The City of Snellville and its development partners announced today The Grove at Towne Center—a centralized, live-work-play hub in the works for well over a decade—has completed construction where Scenic Highway meets U.S. Highway 78, a popular route between Atlanta and Athens.

Spread across nine buildings and 18 acres about 25 miles from downtown Atlanta, the $140-million project marked a public-private partnership between Snellville, national commercial real estate company CASTO, and Atlanta-based MidCity Real Estate Partners. It’s considered a walkable new social and jobs center for a century-old city that had lost almost all of its original structures over time.

Project leaders also pulled back the veil today on a “milestone” tenant—Crooked Can Brewing Company, a Florida-based, award-winning brewery and food hall operation founded in 2014.

For Crooked Can, the Snellville operation will mark its third, following brewery and market/food hall concepts in Winter Park, Fla. and outside Columbus, Ohio.

According to Snellville officials, Crooked Can is scheduled to open by the end of this year, followed by several food vendors in the market/food hall portion shortly after that. The second floor of the two-story market building will be used as event space.

“From the beginning, our commitment has been to create a vibrant and dynamic gathering space for our community,” Snellville Mayor Barbara Bender said in an announcement. “Having an amazing operator like Crooked Can decide to bring their first location in the state [here] is so exciting to witness and be a part of.”

The Gwinnett County city of 21,000 has been kicking the tires on plans for a mixed-use downtown hub like Suwanee’s since city councilors adopted a masterplan back in 2011. At one point, city leaders envisioned creating Snellville’s version of Krog Street Market for a concept with “market” in the name. But in early 2021, ground finally broke on a town center with a much larger scale.

At the core of the project is a commons portion with a splash pad, pavilion, and outdoor seating that’s representative of a chestnut oak grove where Snellville businesspeople met in the early 1900s.

Other components include: 288-unit multifamily building The Tomlin (with a row of townhomes); Northside Medical Snellville hospital; Thrive Coworking; a 750-space parking deck (more than 1,000 spaces were built overall); Gwinnett County’s Elizabeth H. Williams Library; and several food-and-beverage concepts.

Another facet is the first phase of the Snellville Greenway, a planned five-mile multi-use trail wending up to Lawrenceville.  

Head to the gallery above for more context and The Grove images.

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