Preservationists work to save Atlanta’s historic English Avenue church

One among English Avenue’s most fascinating buildings — a four-walled stone construction lacking home windows and its roof however stuffed with potential for the traditionally Black neighborhood — might quickly be protected against demolition.

Driving the information: On Wednesday, the Atlanta City Design Fee will resolve whether or not to award historic protections to the Outdated St. Mark AME Church on James P. Brawley Drive.

Why it issues: Neighborhoods experiencing speedy gentrification like English Avenue and Vine Metropolis are significantly liable to dropping the houses, church buildings and different buildings that performed particular roles in communities’ histories.

Catch up fast: Designed by architect Charles Hopson and inbuilt 1920 with Stone Mountain granite “fitted collectively by hand like a puzzle with beaded mortar joints,” the constructing performed an vital function in English Avenue residents’ non secular, civic and social lives over the a long time.

• St. Mark AME moved into the constructing — initially the house of the Western Heights Baptist Church — in 1948. The stone construction hosted commencement ceremonies for prime schoolers and leisure like womanless weddings and Tom Thumb weddings.

The church moved to Campbellton Street within the late Seventies, and within the mid-Nineteen Nineties Winston Taylor, a pastor and architect, purchased the location. Taylor partnered with the Atlanta Preservation Heart to hunt historic designation standing to guard the constructing from demolition.

What’s subsequent: Taylor is working with Georgia Tech college students to design a glass roof for the construction, he informed the Saporta Report, and he hopes the historic designation will assist increase funding.

Editor’s word: We corrected the identify of the road the place the historic constructing is positioned to James P. Brawley Drive.