Atlanta’s St. Mark’s Ame

The historic St. Mark AME (b.1920; abandoned 1976) is located at the figurative and literal center of Atlanta’s English Avenue neighborhood. As a symbol of ongoing neighborhood transition, the building initially housed Western Heights Baptist church’s white congregation, then a Black one (1938). Once an affluent area, it later suffered the impacts of de jure segregation, redlining, urban renewal, and the opioid epidemic. Now, English Avenue is poised for a new wave of investments, gentrification, and displacement. Site owner and Beloved Community, Inc. founder Pastor Winston Taylor labored since the 1990s to rehabilitate and re-establish safety at the site. Since then, consistent grassroots engagement has grown in-kind work and volunteerism, recognizing preservation as a powerful tool for economic development and revitalization. Taylor partnered with the Atlanta Preservation Center and Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture to research, document, and craft a pioneering Landmark Site nomination and in 2023, the Stone Mountain granite shell of St. Mark became the city’s first designated ruin, leveraging policy change established in the Land Use Framework Plan (2017) to preserve and strengthen the neighborhood. This case study highlights proactive development for ongoing incremental change and the transformative power of collaboration.

Located in the heart of Atlanta’s English Avenue neighborhood, St. Mark AME is a little over a century old. Yet, the building has witnessed countless changes, including revisions to adjacent street names that have altered the address, shifts in ownership between two religious organizations to its current ownership by a non-profit organization, and dramatic demographic change to the racial and socio-economic composition of its surrounding residents. Nevertheless, the integrity of the building’s stone exterior walls and its role as an icon in the neighborhood remain unchanged (Figure 1). The nearly cubic building is made of Stone Mountain granite, a local blue-grey igneous rock quarried just east of the city. As a building closely associated with the Modern Civil Rights Movement, it may seem contradictory that it shares materiality with the Atlanta rock outcropping Stone Mountain, known as the largest Confederate memorial in the world due to the figures of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson carved into its face.[i] This, however, is just one of the many complexities of St. Mark AME that make it simultaneously a rich case study in postbellum architecture and a building that necessitates nuanced interpretation.

[i] Shannon Byrne, “This Used to Be a Mountain: Mapping Stone Mountain Granite in Metro Atlanta,” Atlanta Studies  (October 17, 2017); J. Vincent Lowery, “A Monument to Many Souths: Tourists Experience Distinctiveness at Stone Mountain,” in Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History, ed. Karen L. Cox (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012).

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