If you live in Atlanta, you might not know Findley Plaza by name, but you’ve almost certainly walked through it.
It’s the triangle of concrete between The Porter and Little 5 Pub, sometimes occupied by throngs of music lovers vying for a new release outside Criminal Records. Maybe you even pass it on your way to work, stopped at a traffic light in front of the Pray for ATL mural at the intersection of Moreland and Euclid.
For the better part of the past six months, Findley Plaza was obscured from view by a high chain-link construction fence. The redesign promises open space for events, new trees planted along the edge of the plaza, new benches and bike racks and better access to electricity for programming. Fans of The Porter Beer Bar can soon rejoice: the neighborhood mainstay will expand its patio to seat 40 guests on the plaza.
The Little 5 Points Alliance broke ground on the renovation July 30. Hardscaping of the design was slated for completion before the Little Five Points Halloween Festival and Parade in October, but Executive Director Lauren Welsh said challenges with the streetlights required Georgia Power, Georgia Department of Transportation and the City of Atlanta to be involved, delaying construction.
The fenced-off construction zone was made smaller to accommodate the Halloween Festival crowds. This adjustment, along with a week of inclement weather, paused construction work and pushed the completion date further.
As of Feb. 6, the new plaza is nearly complete: bike racks and benches have been installed, and the pedestal for a sculpture by local artist R. Land is in place. The new Findley Plaza design features a star that represents the history of how the major roads once connected in Little 5 Points. Donors’ names are engraved on pavers surrounding the border of the star design.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony is coming soon, Welsh said. As the dust clears, community leaders, business owners and residents remember the decade-long road to the renovation.
A decade of planning
The redesign began in 2015, when Friends of Little Five Points Parks was formed and soon received a $100,000 grant from Park Pride. Despite major fundraising progress in the initial years, the project still moved slowly.
“There’s not typically a shortage of funds for some of these infrastructure projects. It’s just this inertia of getting them done that I think is hard,” Welsh said. “We’re now on our third city council member since this started.”
Little Five Alive started the initial fundraising for the renovation, which was soon formalized with sponsorship from the Little Five Points Community Improvement District. In 2018, Little 5 Points Alliance, which Welsh leads now, was created to facilitate collaboration between The Little Five Points Community Improvement District, the Little Five Points Business Association, the Candler Park Neighborhood Association and the Inman Park Neighborhood Association. The Alliance seeks to improve and support the existing neighborhood.
“This design truly came from the collective community,” Welsh said. “It was a group of residents from Inman Park and Candler Park, a group of business owners and a couple of commercial property owners who were really just frustrated with what they saw as kind of the sad state of Findley Plaza, which was the heartbeat of Little 5 Points.”
Rachel Parish, who served as the creative director of Little Five Alive from 2016 to 2018, said the renovation required “nuanced interconnected collaboration.”
“The plazas were part public works, part private property, and part Department of Parks and Rec, so there was no clear… body who was responsible for the maintenance or the permitting or the control of the areas,” she explained.
If the growing list of organization names and acronyms is already making your head spin, you’re not alone. So many people and entities are invested — financially, emotionally or both — in this triangle of space at the heart of Little Five Points.
Liz McCurtain served on the board of Friends of Little Five Points, which then became Little Five Alive, when the efforts to revitalize Findley Plaza began.
“We were truly a little upstart community effort trying to get some traction on what’s a pretty complex little tiny piece of space… It’s like a tiny little postage stamp of space that was under like five jurisdictions,” McCurtain said.
This past December, the construction fences finally came down to reveal the new plaza, which, still awaiting landscaping, was a stark contrast to the tree-filled plaza pre-renovation. Some Facebook users were startled by the plaza’s new concrete-forward look: “Can y’all put the trees back? lol,” one comment reads. “Why did you cut down the trees???” another user asks.
The new open space is intentional. When Findley Plaza was originally built in 1983, crepe myrtles and trident maples were planted throughout the triangle in raised beds that were eventually surrounded by high metal fences.
“They had these large, oval-shaped tree wells that were raised off the ground that then made it very difficult to put any kind of programming, music, any kind of artistic events, in the plaza because the space was cut up in these narrow little slots,” Welsh said.
Plus, the trees weren’t an ideal choice for the spot long-term, she explained. 40 years later, “they were really struggling in those tree wells and looking pretty straggly.”
Rather than obstructing the center of the triangular space, the new trees will line the outside of the triangle, leaving space for programming and events to flow in the center, Welsh said.
The newly-planted Nuttall Oaks lining the plaza are still dormant, but they will grow to provide ample shade and a buffer between the plaza, Euclid and Moreland, the busy roads on either side.
The trees weren’t the only challenge. Welsh and Parish can both attest that electricity was a problem when trying to plan programming in the space.
As creative director of Little Five Alive, Parish programmed Findley Plaza and the adjacent Davis Plaza for three to eight hours per day, two to three days per week, for six months per year for those three years. She brought musicians, puppets, educational experiments, improv performers, theater, artist markets and more to the space — but it wasn’t easy.
“It took a lot of effort to be able to do anything on the plaza from an infrastructure point of view,” Parish said.
Back then, she had to ask businesses for permission to run power cords from inside their storefronts out to the plaza.
Parish added, “Even though it just looked like a blank plaza, there was a lot of stuff that did make it difficult for people with different mobility issues to physically navigate.”
“Right now, as the plaza stands, you don’t see any of that infrastructure that is going to make things like that more feasible, but it is there and will be there in a way that kind of solves some of the problems that we had before,” Parish said.
Before Findley
Little Five Points looked very different 50 years ago. Just ask Richard Shapiro, an active community leader and neighborhood dentist until his retirement in 2025.
Shapiro moved to the neighborhood in the 1970s, served as president of the Little Five Points Business Association and was involved in the Little Five Points CID, among other neighborhood organizations. He practiced dentistry on Moreland Avenue until his retirement in 2025. To Shapiro, a native New Yorker, Little 5 Points’ quirkiness and diversity felt like home — and home it would be for the next four decades.
Those next forty years would be transformative for the intersection outside Shapiro’s practice. When Shapiro graduated from Emory Dental School in 1978, Findley Plaza didn’t exist. At the time, Seminole Avenue extended through the area where Davis Plaza is today, joining up with Moreland, and Euclid Avenue ran continuously along the storefronts that abut Findley Plaza today. Little 5 Points was named for the distinctive five-point intersection formed by the convergence of those three major arteries.
In the early 1980s, the intersection’s eponymous “five points” were reduced to three to make room for the construction of two plazas.
At the time, Candler Park residents Kelly Jordan and Don Bender had been working to revitalize Little Five Points into a thriving commercial district and vibrant neighborhood. Jordan explained that the original plan to create the plazas received both support and opposition from residents and business owners.
“One of the main considerations was trying to simplify traffic for the benefit of pedestrian safety,” Jordan said. But there were always reservations about the change, which would drastically alter the flow of traffic in the beloved neighborhood.
“I do remember people thinking that … well, we’re closing some streets, and … that’s gonna hurt business, you know. We’re reducing the accessibility of buildings to cars and everything. And the transportation consultants with that plan said, ‘No, I don’t think so. I think traffic will actually move better once we do this and the area will be more appealing.’ That’s certainly, I think, proved to be the case,” Jordan said.
Mixed reception
While some online comments about the renovation were positive, some residents voiced concerns about the pace of construction or why the project needed to happen at all.
“There’s a real source of frustration, I think, for people in the city really wanting to see projects get off the ground and get finished sooner,” Welsh said. “If you weren’t involved with the community meetings 10 years ago, you’re looking, and you’re saying, ‘Wait, what? Why are they doing what they’re doing?’”
Indeed, the first glimpse of the new Findley was anticlimactic for some. Others expressed concern at a lack of visible greenery.
“The renderings look devoid of any historic character or charm,” one user commented on Saporta Report’s coverage of the renovation.
“Disappointed. Why did you even do this?” another commented on a Facebook post by Little 5 Alliance of photos of the plaza after the fence was removed.
A few other comments on that post were positive. One said, “You can see the shops from the street now!”
Change in such a beloved neighborhood is never easy, Welsh acknowledged.
“You’re doing a project in the middle of a community that people have a real connection to, a sense of nostalgia for, passion for,” Welsh said. “Little 5 Points holds a special place in a lot of people’s hearts, so any kind of change is a little bit hard to see sometimes.”
Parish views the new space as a blank canvas to be filled by the community.
“I know that there’s a feeling or some chatter about… ‘Like, what is this?’ Because it’s sort of a blank space right now. And I get that,” Parish said. “But I think that the intention there is for it to become a space that can be activated, can be enlivened.”
Serving an entire community
McCurtain said Little Five Alive wanted to consider the diverse community’s needs when planning the renovation.
“There was a lot of concern from all sides around the unhoused population,” McCurtain said. “There were a lot of spaces where people were camping out, and it made the plaza a bit unwelcoming for some, or difficult for people to feel like they could go be in. And on the other hand, there was a lot of concern from neighbors about, ‘We don’t want to push folks out of the space.’”
The community felt it was important for the plaza to have comfortable and welcoming seating for all. The benches installed in the plaza provide that seating.
A local touch
“I think there’s a very special spirit about Little Five Points and a lot of people concerned about gentrification or trying to sanitize the patina of Little Five Points that we all love about it,” McCurtain said. “So really a lot of like, ‘How do we keep and preserve what Little Five Points is while also making it better?’”
One attempt to preserve the area’s charm? Commissioning local artist R. Land to design a sculpture for the center of the plaza.
Atlanta street artist R. Land, or Ronnie Land, is responsible for some of the most recognizable art pieces in Atlanta, including the “Pray for ATL” hands mural on the building bordering Findley Plaza. You probably recognize his piece “Loss Cat” and other bold, colorful vignettes.
“He’s got murals all over Little Five Points and the surrounding area, and so bringing in that local touch to sort of anchor the space felt really important to be a real statement about: we are still Little Five Points,” McCurtain said. “We are still funky, We are still cool. We are still gritty.”
