![]() ![]() “As the mayor was really just trying to get crime under control for political purposes while she was in office.”īuckhead Village’s fall from glory began with lax enforcement, then a rise in crime linked to nightlife, then a crackdown on nightlife, then erasure of it, followed by developers transforming the space. “There was a lot of … for lack of a better word, repression in Atlanta’s club scene,” Chidi says. The Atlanta nightlife scene took a hit that it would never fully recover from. The club scene in Buckhead Village is gone now, replaced with mixed-use highrises and no traces of the partying that happened there.Ĭity leadership made an example out of Buckhead. Bad timing on their part, because the 2008 recession pushed back their plans to rebuild. Like, shut Buckhead down,” Chidi says.ĭevelopers swooped in and bought up the property. “Shirley Franklin was mayor at the time … she was looking to make a mark and clamp down and said, ‘Enough.’ And basically shut the whole f****ing street down. The BMF shooting in 2003 accelerated the fall of the club scene in Atlanta. The Super Bowl murders in 2000, when Ray Lewis allegedly stabbed two men to death, was the beginning of the end for Buckhead. Although nobody really thought of it as such,” says George Chidi, a journalist who reports on crime and law enforcement in Atlanta. And it was rowdy and if you look at the crime statistics it was also a lot more violent than it is today. It was like f***ing Ludacris music video on the weekends, particularly in the summer. People were in the street, everybody’s half naked. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. The emergence of Atlanta hip-hop in the ’90s ushered in a new era of nightlife in the city. ![]() This is Part 2 of the 3-part series: Nightlife in Atlanta. ![]()
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