This past summer, smoothie and juice bar Arden’s Garden opened its newest location near Godby Road on Old National Highway. Old National—the 10-mile corridor that runs through both College Park and what is now South Fulton—is where Arden’s Garden founder Arden Zinn opened her first exercise studio in 1971.  

A few weeks after its grand opening, Leslie Zinn, Arden’s daughter and current CEO of Arden’s Garden, is back at the new location. “This is kind of a full circle moment for us to be back here again.” 

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, the corridor and surrounding communities were viewed as an enclave for the professional class with their shopping centers, movie theater, skating rink, and proximity to the world’s busiest airport.

Today, the offices for the City of South Fulton Development Authority are in a plaza off Old National Highway. They’re where Artie Jones, South Fulton’s economic development director, considers the corridor’s economic past as he looks toward its future. 

“Longhorn Steakhouse was here on Old National, Red Lobster was here,” Jones says. “Nurses, doctors, airport workers, teachers all lived here on Old National and Godby Road in College Park. It was a great place to be.”

Culturally, Old National has since become a hip-hop landmark. Notable artists who were raised on or near Old National—or have shouted out the thoroughfare in songs—include Jermaine Dupri, Dallas Austin, 2 Chainz, and Ludacris. During the funeral service for Rich Homie Quan, who died September 5 at age 34, his friend Charles Bolten remembered how he and Quan “grew up right across the street, five years old, at Old National Park, playing baseball.” The service took place a week later at World Changers Church International in College Park.  

In August, after months of talks with South Fulton Mayor Kobi, rap artist and College Park native Gunna teamed up with the Black Music Action Coalition to gift 30 families in South Fulton’s zip code, 30349, a monthly stipend of $1,000 for one year. “[The money] can really help people on the margins when it’s given without strings,” Kobi says. (Kobi, formerly known as khalid kamau, is a member of the organization Mayors for a Guaranteed Income.)

But there are other reasons why the late Arden Zinn might not recognize Old National today. The newest Arden’s Garden has opened after the thoroughfare’s heyday, with its high crime rate and lack of development.

Leslie Zinn chose to open a store on Old National following the overall success of her East Point location, which is about five miles away.

“Out of 16 stores at the time, East Point is number one, and it has been number one since 2010. So what that told us is that underserved areas need to have access to fresh food, and that’s our mission,” she says. “We believe in good health for all, not good health for some. And so it just fit everything that we wanted to do, which was to make fresh food available on Old National.”

Fulfilling that mission, though, hasn’t been easy: “We were broken into the first two weeks that we opened, and I would say my retail team was afraid of the area,” Zinn says.

One August day, about a hundred people dressed in red and black withstood the Georgia heat to gather at the parking lot of Harold’s Chicken and Ice Bar. They held dozens of balloons in honor of 38-year-old Devon Anderson, who was fatally shot by an off-duty Atlanta police officer there days earlier.

Pastor George Worrell of the Kingdom Life Changing Center led Anderson’s family and friends in prayer. He tells Canopy Atlanta that he remembers Anderson for being a “really good guy” who was well-known and beloved by his community. 

But Anderson’s death also is part of an “unfortunate reality that we have to deal with,” and “added to the cesspool of other lives that have been lost on Old National Highway,” Worrell says. 

Days prior to Anderson’s death, Aniyah Harris, an 18-year-old Banneker High School graduate, was shot and killed at a Shell gas station on Old National. A week before Labor Day, a hit-and-run driver struck and killed a 53-year-old man. 

Jones believes that the $500 million expansion of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, completed in 1977, led to the downward spiral of Old National Highway.

In 1976, the Federal Aviation Administration introduced the Aviation Noise Abatement Policy, which allowed municipalities to acquire land most affected by air and noise pollution. 

“The airplanes, at the time, had phase one engines which did not burn all of the jet fuel,” Jones says. “People were becoming deaf, and they did not want to be in the middle of lawsuits.”

In 1981, the city of College Park acquired nearly 600 homes and relocated 200 families. (As of the airport’s most recent noise exposure report in 2007, the total number of homes acquired was approaching 3,000.)

“Urban sprawl happened where people in the city were beginning to move away from the airport,” Jones says. “When people leave, the retail leaves with it. And you can see some of those buildings still remain here. That’s what you now see along Old National Highway.”

In the ‘80s, Camelot Condominiums in South Fulton used to be viewed as coveted living quarters for pilots, flight attendants, and other professionals. When Camelot homeowner Condia Perry first moved to the complex in 2012, an older homeowner—who claimed to be the half-brother of blues singer Johnnie Taylor—told her stories about other upper class and celebrity residents, including Atlanta Hawks players.

Someone else told Perry about a party they’d been invited to at Camelot: “Once they got into the unit, they looked up and saw Rick James. And they said, At that moment, I knew that Camelot was the shit. That was their exact words. And that’s what I heard Camelot was like in the early 1980s.”

Since 2019, 15 homicides have occurred in Camelot Condominiums. For most of 2022, Mayor Kobi lived in Camelot to better understand the problems at the complex. In that time frame, one woman was murdered and at least one other person was found dead. Kobi moved out because of a black mold infestation in the basement of his building, which shared the same HVAC system as his unit.

In summer 2022 Perry hosted her six-year-old niece, who would hear gunshots in the complex and cry. 

“She looked at me, her eyes big, scared and she ran to me,” Perry says. “She had never heard gunfire. I’m supposed to have her down here to keep her safe, and at that moment, I’m sure she didn’t [feel safe].”

Perry’s niece went from being disturbed by the gunfire to being numb to it.

“After about two weeks, she’d be able to eat her food and still watch TV and not even blink an eye,” Perry says, “because it was just happening that often.”

In 2023, two HOA board members were charged with theft after $1.5 million of insurance money was not properly paid out to residents affected by a building fire. Perry says the board has also mismanaged safety priorities for the complex: “We’ve had board members that have refused to turn over our books so that we can get grant money. They refuse to do what South Fulton police have asked them to do so that they can help protect us and add more security.”

Keith Meadows, a 30-year Atlanta Police Department veteran, became South Fulton’s first chief of police one year after South Fulton became a city in 2017. Immediately, tackling crime on Old National became a top issue for him and his department. When Meadows was appointed, 47 percent of crime on Old National Highway was what South Fulton police calls “Part 1” crimes, which includes murder, rape, and assault, according to police spokesperson Tori Cooper. 

“If people don’t feel safe along the Old National corridor, then nobody’s going to invest in it,” Meadows says.

Located inside of LA Fitness, Karma Nutra offers juices, smoothies, vegan wraps, and salads.

“What made me bring it here to the Old National area was primarily providing healthy options for those that kinda are landlocked in their neighborhood,” says owner Whitney Boyd. “Most of the time, people want healthier options, but the thought of going a half an hour or more to go get it, it’s very easy to get discouraged.”

Initially, though, people discouraged Boyd from opening a healthy foods shop on the corridor. “They just honestly thought that anything healthy or health-related was not going to do well here, because it was just nothing out here like that,” she says.

That may soon change. In 2023, Jones led developers through a tour of Old National, which he advertised as one of the busiest corridors in the metro Atlanta area. He also ordered a study to see where money is flowing, or “leaking,” out of Old National to determine what retail businesses the community needs and can support.

“I found out that there was a leakage of grocery stores of about $53 million,” he says. “So it tells you that this community could support another grocery store.” The leaders of that study will then “put a strategy together for us to go after those retailers who have relationships with brokers who represent the Whole Foods and the Walmarts and the Hilton Hotels, and the other types of businesses of that nature.”

Shaneen Davis, who operates a childcare facility near Old National, often visits the new Arden’s Garden location. She hopes one day to see a Whole Foods or Sprouts on the corridor. 

“They could at least give us a Sprouts,” she says. “If you compare to Highway 74 [in Peachtree City], there’s a Sprouts and a farmers market. We don’t have anything like that on Old National. And this area generates just as much income.”

Along with Arden’s Garden, Chipotle and Five Below also opened on the corridor earlier this year. Tamiko Leverette, a former legislative aide for the City of South Fulton and a resident, has witnessed this transition. 

“For years, Goodwill was never on the Old National corridor. And then suddenly they came,” Leverette says. “A few years back, Habitat for Humanity [Restore] chose to come out here. You have the new businesses coming, the chain [restaurants] are coming. So I think that the outlook is changing on Old National. And I think people see this is a viable place to go.”

Boyd said she believes that an influx of new businesses will help to eradicate the negative stigma often associated with Old National. 

“It’s going to take businesses coming in to change the perception,” Boyd says. “Once people start to see that retail and stores are coming in, I feel like it’s going to bring more people that are a little bit further out . . . because this strip is so close to the freeway and the airport.”

“The better that Old National does, the better that the entire Southside does,” Mayor Kobi says. “My vision is that in seven years, Obama National Highway, which is what we’d like to rename it, will be world-famous in an entirely different way.”

When asked about what could be done to help elevate the corridor, Leslie Zinn says, “Help with crime.”

“It’s petty crime for the most part. We had an incident this morning where we had a homeless person come in and walk behind the counter,” she says. “But again, the police presence, they were here in minutes and they took care of it. I feel that everybody’s in the boat rowing in the right direction, but we just need to pick up some momentum.”

In 2022, South Fulton paid $1.4 million to purchase nine acres at Old National Highway and Jonesboro Road to build its new police headquarters. 

Police chief Meadows wants the facility, which the department ambitiously hopes will open in 2026, to appear approachable to residents. He proposed “one big campus field” with trails nearby and “an area where people might want to walk their dogs.”

Pastor Worrell proposes a similar solution, though to provide more opportunities for the youth. “On a more simple level, what we can do is just continue to show them new things in the community,” Worrell says. “There’s no skate park anywhere in South Fulton. Give them different alternatives, try to catch them early. It’s harder to train a man than it is to raise a boy. Once they reach a certain threshold, it’s kind of hard, but we’re not giving up.

Meadows says that an average of eight murders per year used to occur along Old National. Last year, with a focus on “narcotics and gang investigations,” that number fell to three.

In the meantime, support from other community members helped to reinforce Zinn’s decision to invest in the area.

“To have the option to be able to go right up the street and get a healthy smoothie, I think it’s a positive thing for the south side,” says Davis, the Arden’s Garden customer. “Chipotle is not the best, but it’s better than McDonald’s.” 

“The day that we were broken into, people flooded into the store to say, Please don’t leave,” Zinn says. “We’re here. We’re committed to the area. We feel that Old National is an extremely vibrant community, and it’s on the cusp of transition. We want to be part of that change.”