How Atlanta offers much more than just the world’s busiest airport, attracting a growing number of tourists with its architecture, history, food and art
- Atlanta, in the US state of Georgia, is ditching its reputation as merely a place to change planes, with visitors increasingly exploring its other highlights
- Places of interest include the World of Coca-Cola (the drink was created in Atlanta), leafy Inman Park, the sprawling Ponce City Market and the Beltline
Seventy-five million passengers navigate the terminals at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport each year, but most are only passing through Georgia, touching down in the world’s busiest airport – home of Delta Air Lines – before catching a connecting flight.
But change is afoot. Increasingly, visitors are exploring the highlights of this American city: leafy neighbourhoods such as Inman Park; a food scene shaped by Atlanta’s diverse population; and architectural treasures into which new life has been breathed.
Ponce City Market, a hulking warehouse and one of America’s largest brick buildings, towers over Ponce De Leon Avenue, along which Atlantans once flocked to nearby springs named after 16th-century Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, who spent most of his life searching for the fountain of youth (although he never visited what is now Atlanta).
The building covers 2.1 million sq ft (19.5 hectares), which is why I’ve enlisted David, a guide for Food Tours Atlanta, to help me navigate the market.
He says that from the 1920s, the building was a distribution centre for Sears, and points to the department store’s name engraved in the ornate stone archway. He produces a catalogue from the 1900s and explains that almost everything in it – from tombstones to prefabricated houses – was stored here.
