Walk the south side of McLendon Avenue near Clifton Street this month and you'll pass a bookstore where a bakery used to be, a boutique with blush walls where a bridal shop closed, and two storefronts still wrapped in construction paper that will open as a Paris-inspired cafe by fall. None of this happened by accident, and none of it came from outside developers betting on a hot corridor. It came from people who already worked on this exact street, coming back to buy in.
If you've lived in Candler Park for more than a year, you've watched this stretch cycle through openings and closings before. What's different this time is who's doing the opening, and at what scale. One new business on the block is a single owner reopening the space she worked in as a young stylist. The other is a bakery that started as a single farmers market table and is now filling its fourth Atlanta storefront. Neither is a chain parachuting in from outside. Both are proof that the people rebuilding this block already had a stake in it.
The block that emptied out, then filled back in
For years, the south side of McLendon at Clifton was anchored by two names everyone in the neighborhood knew: Flying Biscuit Café at one end, in the original space that opened in 1993, and Dr. Bombay's Underwater Tea Party at the other. Kelly's Closet, a bridal shop, sat in between. All three have since closed, and Dr. Bombay's has relocated to Grant Park.
That left a stretch of prime, walkable retail sitting empty across the street from two of the block's steadiest tenants, Candler Park Market and Gigi's Italian Kitchen & Restaurant. According to reporting from Urbanize Atlanta, the leasing and build-out activity accelerating on that stretch this year amounts to a full retail resurgence, not a single replacement tenant.
Here's what's landed so far, and what's still coming:
- Lostintheletters, an Atlanta-based writing studio and nonprofit, opened a bookstore and creative space in part of the original Flying Biscuit footprint in 2025.
- Lucille's, a boutique selling home décor, candles, jewelry, and self-care products, opened in July 2026 in the space next door.
- Little Tart Bakeshop is renovating the former Dr. Bombay's space for its fourth Atlanta location, joining existing spots in Grant Park, Summerhill, and Krog Street Market.
- Midi, a sister concept from the same team, will open alongside it this fall, serving sandwiches, salads, wine, and soft serve in a format inspired by the Paris cafes its founder visited on a recent trip.
That's four new businesses filling roughly the same footprint that two closed longtime tenants used to occupy, which tells you something about how the block's landlords are thinking about tenant mix. Smaller, more numerous storefronts mean more foot traffic reasons to stop, not just one destination to drive to.
The person who used to work in this building is now renting it
The detail that makes this more than a real estate footnote is Lucille's origin story. Owner Kristen Eber isn't a first-time retailer parachuting into a hot corridor. She grew up in Virginia-Highland, spent much of her youth around Little Five Points, and has a child in a neighborhood school now. Her retail career started in this exact stretch of McLendon Avenue, working at Salon Red when it occupied a small building set back behind what's now Lucille's storefront.
When Salon Red moved to its current location at 1642 DeKalb Avenue in 2006, Eber stayed on until 2016, when she opened her own business, the Rosefinch Spa, a few doors down at 1604 DeKalb Avenue. As that business grew, she started imagining a shop with a broader self-care focus. She mentioned it to her spa landlords, who happened to also own the McLendon Avenue block, and they encouraged her to consider the space. According to the Candler Park Neighborhood Organization's own writeup, Eber described it simply: the location chose her.
The shop she built markets itself as a "luxury gift store for the romantically inclined," and a Haute Living feature on the opening noted that the space sits in the former bakery and takeaway wing of the original Flying Biscuit, where Eber worked when she was younger. That's not incidental marketing color. It's the whole mechanism behind why this stretch is filling back in with locally rooted businesses rather than sitting vacant or going to whoever bids highest: the same landlords who own multiple properties on this block are recruiting tenants from inside their own existing relationships.
The bakery chain filling the other end of the block tells a similar story, just at a bigger scale. Little Tart's founder, Sarah O'Brien, started the brand as a farmers market stall in 2010. By the time it committed to a fourth Atlanta location in Candler Park, it already had a track record in Grant Park, Summerhill, and Krog Street Market, meaning this expansion is a known operator extending into a neighborhood it already understands, not a speculative first bet.
One storefront, one growing brand, same block
Set the two stories next to each other and the contrast is the point. Eber's path to McLendon Avenue ran through a single spa, a single landlord relationship, and one storefront she'd physically worked inside decades earlier. There was no expansion plan behind Lucille's, just a specific building she already knew and a landlord willing to hand it to someone with roots there.
O'Brien's path ran through ten years of scaling. What started as a table at a farmers market in 2010 is now a bakery brand with a foothold in Grant Park, Summerhill, and Krog Street Market, and Candler Park is next because the operator already understood how these in-town corridors work. That's not a speculative first bet on an unproven neighborhood. It's a known brand extending into a market it has already tested successfully three times over.
Both paths point away from outside capital treating Candler Park as the next hot corridor to flip. One is a neighborhood insider with no ambition beyond this one storefront. The other is a homegrown brand that grew big enough to become a known quantity before it ever touched McLendon Avenue. Either way, the people filling this block already had Atlanta credentials before they signed a lease here.
What this actually changes about a weekend here
If you already live in Candler Park, none of this requires you to do anything differently yet, but it does change what's worth planning around over the next few months. Lucille's is open now, so that's a stop you can make today. Little Tart and Midi are targeting a fall opening, which puts them on track to be running by the time Fall Fest hits the park on October 3 and 4, 2026, an event that already draws about 20,000 people a day according to the festival's own site. A new bakery and cafe a few blocks from the festival entrance is going to see its first real test that weekend, whether the owners planned it that way or not.
The Candler Park Neighborhood Organization runs that festival as its major fundraiser, with proceeds going straight back into infrastructure and improvements for the 55-acre park at the center of the neighborhood. It's the same organization tracking zoning discussions and development proposals on McLendon Avenue at its monthly meetings, which means the retail changes on the block and the civic conversations about the neighborhood's future are running on parallel tracks, not separate ones.
The mix of a solo neighborhood entrepreneur and a proven bakery brand landing on the same block in the same year says something about where Candler Park sits right now. It's established enough to attract a bakery with three other Atlanta locations already under its belt, and still small enough that the person filling the storefront next door might have worked in that exact building years earlier. Both things are true on the same block, and that tension is probably the more accurate read on the neighborhood than picking one story and calling it the trend.
If you're watching this corridor because you're thinking about what a home near it might be worth, or because a friend has asked what it's actually like to live around here day to day, Bolst Homes keeps a running local view of Candler Park and the neighborhoods around it. Find a Home. Make an Impact.
