The battle for Galloway’s historic Gresham building is over. What now?

The year-long fight over the Galloway School’s historic Gresham Building officially came to an end after the Atlanta City Council approved a special public interest district rezoning request at a Sept. 3, 2024 meeting. The vote clears the way for Galloway to build a new Upper Learning Building in place of the Gresham.

The council approved the zoning with a 10-2 vote — Councilmembers Howard Shook and Julian Bond voted against the measure. It will formally create the “Chastain park Galloway School” special public interest district, a designation typically for areas with “special and substantial public interest.” 

With the rezoning, the Galloway School will be able to renovate existing buildings and create a new building to replace the razed Gresham. Earlier this month, the school demolished the historic building in a surprise move after a lengthy battle among residents, alumni and preservationists to keep the property intact. 

The Gresham at 215 Chastain Park Ave. was the 113-year old former Fulton County Almshouse and the original home to the Galloway School, a small private institution founded by Elliot Galloway in 1969. 

Since its founding, the school has been home to prominent students like Martin Luther King III. Galloway teaches about 750 kids from preschool through grade 12. The small campus is tucked into Chastain Park among fields and walking paths. 

For years, the Gresham served as both the high school building and the school’s administrative offices. Students would pack into small classrooms with wall-unit air conditioners, a handful of outlets and cushions adorning the non-functional fireplaces. Office desks squeezed into hallway alcoves near a library lined with fiction, feminist literature and local history. 

To many, the Gresham is the iconic symbol of Galloway. It’s even the school logo. But in October 2023 school officials confirmed plans to demolish the historic building and create a new campus hub in its place. The school cited safety concerns and issues with space and accessibility among its reasons for demolition instead of renovation.

For Galloway Head of School Dr. James Calleroz White, the charming Gresham interiors posed a host of issues, from bowed floors to insufficient power systems. In a walkthrough of the building before demolition, Calleroz White pointed out windows that were painted shut, walls coated with layers of paint to hide the original lead paint job, and a lack of sprinklers throughout the building. School officials also said the building wasn’t properly accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

The campus also comes with space constraints: Because The Galloway School is in the middle of Chastain Park, it has nowhere to expand to. Calleroz White said the school couldn’t just add a building like a more expansive campus would. It would have to come from the existing footprint. 

Originally, Calleroz White said the school planned to demolish the Early Learning Building and move younger students into the Gresham, while the new development would house upper learning students. 

But the head of school said the costs to bring the Gresham to code and do essential renovations would still be high, particularly with the addition of a new building elsewhere on campus. He also said renovations wouldn’t add space that the school desired. 

“This was actually our last and our last resort because what we realized is that to save the building was actually not going to give our kids what we actually needed them to have,” Calleroz White said in a March interview. 

Instead, the school opted for a new plan in October 2023: a bigger building in place of the Gresham updated for a “modern learning environment.” Early plans showed the new building would be about double the size of the Gresham while keeping the same footprint on the 8.2-acre campus. 

Galloway’s decision ignited alumni and preservationist groups. In early November 2023,  community members and former students created an online petition and formed GASP, Galloway Alumni and Supporters for Preservation to rally around a stop to demolition. 

The Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation President and CEO W. Wright Mitchell also opposed the demolition, saying the Gresham “was an integral part of the historic fabric of the City of Atlanta and the State of Georgia.” 

The Galloway School itself placed the Gresham on the Trust’s National Register of Historic Places in 2014, a statewide designation that doesn’t come with any protections or preservation requirements. 

Local organizations like the Atlanta Preservation Center also opposed the construction plan, but Galloway kept moving forward. The school received two demolition permits — one in the spring, but pushback slowed the process, and another on July 30. 

Before construction, Galloway needed its rezoning request approved. On Aug. 6, 2024, the matter went before the local Neighborhood Planning Unit in a tense meeting. Its members voted against the plan 43 to 28, though some cited hopes to negotiate a middle ground between demolition and preservation.

As the crowd left, a resident said, “It’s not like anything we do makes a difference, anyways.” 

From there, it moved to the Zoning Review Board’s Aug. 8 meeting. The board also denied the rezoning request. But both entities are purely advisory. The City Council takes the votes into consideration, but the final decision comes down to the council members. 

During the Aug. 8 Zoning Review Board meeting, the school unexpectedly tore down the Gresham and ended any preservation conversations. Head of School Calleroz White said it boiled down to safety reasons. Students and staff have already been moved to a temporary building, where they will remain until the Upper Learning Center is complete. 

It was an upset for the community members who had been fighting to preserve some or all of the structure. 

“This part of our history has now been erased forever as a result of Galloway’s disregard for the historic integrity of their own campus,” W. Wright Mitchell said in a press release. “Several historic preservation organizations, including Buckhead Heritage, the Atlanta Preservation Center and the Georgia Trust, offered to assist Galloway in exploring alternatives to demolition.” 

Atlanta Preservation Center Executive Director David Yoakley Mitchell said the demolition is “Atlanta 101.” But he doesn’t want the loss of historic buildings like the Gresham to become business as usual. 

“What the Gresham building truly represents is a referendum,” Yoakley Mitchell said. “What is it? Are we more conformed with the Atlanta we want or the Atlanta we deserve?” 

Rather than focus on the animosity and battle lines drawn over the Gresham, Yoakley Mitchell sees the conflict as an example of two major issues facing historic preservation and the city.

“One of the glaring issues in this entire conversation is going to come back to the fact that this building was not protected,” Yoakley Mitchell said. 

The “gold standard” designation of the National Register does nothing to protect the property, and the city lacks any ordinance that states the building must be adaptively reused or incorporated into new construction. 

Organizations like the Georgia Trust can acquire buildings or create easement and preservation agreements with private buyers, but the standards don’t apply to most property owners, including the Galloway School. 

It leaves historic preservation organizations largely powerless when an owner wants to raze a historic building. There are also few avenues for residents to make an impact. They can advise and join in neighborhood meetings, but the decision will ultimately come down to the city. 

Yoakley Mitchell called it a “breakdown in the civic process.” But he hopes the Gresham can be a starting point for people to get involved,  especially as the city sees major development and tourism boosts.

“This is not going to be the first thing like this for the rest of the decade,” Yoakley Mitchell said.

The preservation director worries that with upcoming events like the Atlanta-hosted Fifa World Cup matches in 2026, the “pageantry” around tourists will neglect people who live in the city and the buildings around them.

“This is our city, our home, where we pay a bunch of money to live and do stuff, and we would like to have a little bit more of our community and our neighborhoods exist outside of someone’s dominance,” Yoakley Mitchell said. 

He said tourists won’t return home from Atlanta visits talking about the “two-story Starbucks” development, but they will talk about visits to Martin Luther King Jr.’s church. Yoakley Mitchell sees those spots as the building blocks of a connected Atlanta. 

To Yoakley Mitchell, historic preservation is a way of building an identifiable “Atlanta” community — and the Gresham’s destruction is like the “bubble bursting” for people who felt removed from the issue. But he wants people to engage with properties across the city, especially in historic areas like Sweet Auburn or downtown Atlanta.

“A community has to exist because it’s connected to its past, present future, and a community with nothing recognizable, historic or identifiable to its experience is all new build and I just don’t think it’s going to be a sustainable thing,” Yoakley Mitchell said. 

According to Yoakley Mitchell, losing the iconic Chastain Park building might have made the city a little less Atlanta, but he hopes the “spirit is stirred.” 

“Every one of these buildings is one less barrier that keeps us from tearing each other apart,” Yoakley Mitchell said. 

As for Galloway, the school will now move into the next steps of planning and construction for its new build. In the meantime, students and staff will work from modular classrooms set up in the campus’ small courtyard.