Building to become offices, restaurant

The building at 143 Alabama St. and adjoining property has been sold for $2 million to a joint-venture between Pope & Land and Place Properties to renovate the building for office and retail space and to construct housing on the property.

Known as the Art Moderne building, it was built in the 1940s to house the city’s newspaper — the precursor to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The newspaper occupied the space for only a few years. After 1953, Georgia Power moved into the facility, sticking around until the 1970s.

Pope and Land, an Atlanta-based office developer and Place Properties, an Atlanta-based multifamily developer with expertise in student and workforce housing plan to rehabilitate the existing building into a mixed-use project that will include:

■ 67,000 square feet of loft office space (half of which is slated to be occupied by the city of Atlanta Planning Office)

■ 2,500 square feet of groundfloor retail

■ 3,500-square-foot rooftop restaurant

■ 142 parking spaces Pope and Land/Place Properties will also construct 112 new residential units based on modular residential construction, a new building technique that has been successfully used in San Jose, Calif., and Brooklyn, N.Y. With 30 percent of the units to be income-restricted to households earning 80 percent of the area median income.

A timeline of the project estimates construction to begin in June. Office construction is set to conclude in May 2019.