The Brunswick Returns to Depot Street After Eighty-One Years

On Friday evening, for the first time since 1945, someone will sit on the upper porch of the Brunswick and watch Depot Street go by.

The Brunswick opened as a hotel on this site in 1870 — three storeys, twenty-nine rooms, wide porches across the first two, and a restaurant. It was built for a specific purpose: to receive Atlantans coming north on the newly opened Air Line Belle railroad to escape the heat and dust of the city. Promotional materials of the period described it as Atlanta's Favorite Summer Resort, and by most accounts it was.

A brass band played for dancing in the Pavilion in the park. The porches were used by guests and non-guests alike, without anyone appearing to mind. It was customary, in the late afternoon, to dress and walk down to the depot to greet the arrival of family and friends. The hotel restaurant was described in one surviving notice as "clean, nice, with everything well cooked."

The Brunswick was torn down at the end of the Second World War. A post office was built on the site in 1951, and when the postal service consolidated operations the building passed through several uses, most recently a veterinary clinic, which relocated to a purpose-built facility in 2025.

In 1997 the City installed a historic marker on the lawn. For twenty-nine years the marker described, in considerable detail, a three-storey hotel with wide porches and a well-regarded restaurant, while standing directly in front of a single-storey brick building with a window unit above the side door.

"We had commemorated it," the Historic Preservation Commission Chair said. "We were, for a long time, very good at commemorating it."

The rebuilt Brunswick opens Friday as a restaurant and jazz club. It was developed in partnership with a private investor under an agreement approved by City Council in 2025, in which the City contributed the assembled site and the investor carried construction. The building is not a restoration — nothing of the original survived to restore — but it follows the 1870 elevations closely: porches the full width of the front, on both levels. It stands two storeys where the original stood three, a reduction the Historic Preservation Commission accepted in exchange for the porches being right.

The band is the part the Commission cared most about. A brass band played for dancing here for seventy-five years, and live music was written into the operating agreement rather than left to the tenant's discretion. The club will program six nights a week.

The restaurant's stated standard, printed on the back of the menu, is the one recorded on the marker: clean, nice, with everything well cooked.

The Brunswick seats 140 inside and 60 on the porches, which are open to the public whether or not you are dining, in keeping with what the marker describes as the original practice. The 96-space Carlisle House lot is two blocks north.

The City has no plans to revise the historic marker. Staff note that the text remains accurate, and that this is a new experience for everyone involved.