"This main corner lot has been serving the Virginia-Highland community in a variety of ways for 100 years," said Lynn Dewitt, the building owner at 1017 N. Highland Ave, when she announced who was taking over the space. Before it was a restaurant, it was Herrington Service Station. Before that, it pumped Standard Oil gas. For most of last year it sat behind butcher paper, a vacant Farm Burger that had closed at the end of 2025 after years on that corner.
On July 2, it became So. Fox, a 50-seat wine bar from Myles Moody and Rachael Pack, the couple who already run Kinship Butcher & Sundry next door. The AJC's Henri Hollis reviewed it earlier this month and said walking in felt less like boarding a rocket ship and more like "a hot-air balloon ride." That's a compliment. The menu leans on a whole roasted chicken meant for the table and a wine list built around low-intervention producers like California's Arnot-Roberts and Virginia's Lightwell Survey.
One new restaurant on one corner isn't a story. What makes it worth writing about is that So. Fox didn't open into a vacuum. It opened into a block that had spent years struggling to fill its storefronts, right as three other things finally clicked into place. None of the four caused the others. But look at them together and you can see why this particular stretch of North Highland suddenly feels like the busiest real estate in the neighborhood.
The Meters Were the Easy Fix
Atkins Park's businesses had been saying the same thing for years: the parking meters were killing quick visits. Braxton Alexander, floor manager at The Dirty Tea on St. Charles Avenue, put it plainly to a local TV reporter last September: "It is a big deterrent." Customers ready to grab a coffee or duck into a boutique were getting priced out of a five-minute stop.
The Atlanta City Council agreed. In September 2025, council members voted to remove every meter in the Atkins Park Neighborhood Commercial District, following years of pressure from the Virginia-Highland Civic Association and the Virginia-Highland District Association. The resolution that passed didn't mince words, calling the old metered system a "one-size-fits-all" approach that ignored how much off-street parking already existed nearby. Councilmember Alex Wan, who sponsored the measure, framed it as the city finally paying attention to what parking policy actually does to small businesses on the ground.
It's a small fix. It's also the kind of friction that keeps a block half-empty for years without anyone quite being able to point to why.
The Trail Finally Reaches the Neighborhood
The bigger fix took over a decade. A direct pedestrian connection between the BeltLine's Eastside Trail and Ponce de Leon Avenue had been part of the plan since before the Eastside Trail even opened in 2012, back when Ponce City Market hadn't started construction yet. Construction on the actual link didn't begin until summer 2023, and the finish date got pushed back more than once after that.
The fences finally came down in January 2026. What opened was modest on paper: a steel ramp, a set of stairs, and railings at the northwestern corner of the Ponce-BeltLine bridge, similar to the metal-ramp connection Old Fourth Ward and Inman Park share on Edgewood Avenue. What it does in practice is remove the last real obstacle between the trail and the neighborhood's edge. Before this, getting from the Eastside Trail down to street level near Virginia-Highland meant a longer detour. Now it's a direct, ADA-accessible drop that JHC Construction built as the final piece of a broader Ponce streetscape overhaul, one that's already made the corridor safer for cyclists and pedestrians along the way.
A trail connection and a parking fix solve two different kinds of friction. One gets people to the neighborhood's doorstep. The other lets them actually stop once they're there.
Somebody Finally Bought the Whole Block
Removing friction only matters if someone is willing to spend money on what's left behind. That's where Third & Urban comes in. The Atlanta-based developer started buying up pieces of the Atkins Park commercial strip in December 2024, then picked up a second phase, including the building that houses Neighbor's Pub and City Church, in September 2025. Between the two purchases, the firm now controls roughly 61,000 square feet of retail along North Highland and St. Charles avenues, more than $3 million worth of building and streetscape work already planned.
Co-founder Hank Farmer, who lives in the neighborhood, described the opportunity to SaportaReport in blunt terms: the block had "kind of lost its daytime and early evening services appeal," full of bars that did fine at night but storefronts that sat dark all afternoon. His read was that longtime owners weren't looking to sell, so Third & Urban assembled the portfolio piece by piece, eventually buying out everything from the old Runway Curls studio space to the block near The Splatter Studio.
Some of the work is already visible. The 842 North Highland building got new signage, railings, upgraded lighting, and a new front stair, along with a mural by local artist Janice Rago on the side facing Intown Hardware. The bigger project, an indoor-outdoor courtyard wrapped in retail suites at 780 North Highland, broke ground this spring and is meant to draw the kind of food-and-beverage tenants that keep a block busy before 8 p.m., not just after.
The Restaurants Are Betting the Same Way
Which brings the story back to food, because the tenants filling these spaces aren't chasing foot traffic that doesn't exist yet. They're people who already live and work in the neighborhood, betting on a version of the block that's just now becoming possible.
So. Fox is the clearest example, sharing a sidewalk and a supply chain with Kinship Butcher & Sundry next door. A few blocks over, Some Luck, a Thai bar from Talat Market's Parnass Savang and Rod Lassiter, was on track to open in the former Highland Ballroom Lounge near Madeira Park by early summer after a string of delays pushed the project back. And Moody and Pack aren't done expanding either. A second Kinship location is in permitting for the Beacon in Grant Park, aiming for an October opening with a full seafood butchery and cafe.
None of these are national chains testing the market. They're chef-owners who already had a stake in Virginia-Highland deciding the neighborhood was worth doubling down on, right as the parking got easier, the trail got closer, and a developer started paying for the block to look like it again.
What This Actually Changes for a Walk Down the Street
If you've lived here a while, you've probably already noticed the small stuff: the mural on Intown Hardware's side wall, the disappearance of the meters, the scaffolding going up at 780. What's easy to miss is that these aren't separate improvements happening to overlap by coincidence. They're the same underlying problem getting solved from four different directions at once: a block that had the bones for daytime and evening business but kept losing customers to friction they never had to think about elsewhere in the neighborhood.
That means the next few months are worth watching closely. The courtyard at 780 North Highland is still under construction, so more retail announcements are likely before the year is out. Kinship's second location gives you a reason to check in on the Beacon in Grant Park even if you rarely leave VaHi. And if you haven't walked the new BeltLine ramp down to Ponce yet, it's a five-minute stretch that used to not exist at all.
None of this required a single new resident or a rezoning fight to happen. It just took the meters coming out, the trail finally connecting, and the people who already loved this block deciding to bet on it.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property here, whether you're already living in the neighborhood or thinking about it, Roots Real Estate knows this stretch of North Highland block by block. Get your custom market plan and we'll walk you through what's actually changing, not just what's opening.
