Tuesday transitions
Dec. 16 — With 2025 wrapping up and 2026 on the horizon, this week we have more on holiday events, celebrations, and dining.
Scroll down for our Best New Restaurants of 2025 – an endeavor over a year in the making from our dining team, Beth McKibben and Sarra Sedghi – as well as a link to dine-in and takeout options for the holidays. We also have specifics on a long-delayed redevelopment in Old Fourth Ward that is set to become a new senior affordable housing apartment complex in 2027, and details on the changes afoot for New Year’s Eve in Atlanta, including a pause on the annual Peach Drop in favor of a fireworks and drones show.
➳ Plus, read more about December milestones in a Publisher’s Note from Keith Pepper here. And, if you want to help shape the future of Rough Draft, there is still time to take our year-end survey (it will take you less than two minutes).
And now for a few headlines:
🗳️ Polls are open until 7 p.m. today in the state Senate District 35 runoff, as former Cobb County School Board member Jaha Howard and retired state Rep. Roger Bruce vie to replace state Sen. Jason Esteves.
🚇 MARTA continues to upgrade its Breeze payment system this week at the H.E. Holmes, Civic Center, and Midtown stations.
🧥 First Senior Center of Georgia (FSCofGA) will host its “Heartwarming Christmas” celebration for Vietnamese seniors and the community on Thurs., Dec. 18 at 11 a.m. Along with music, lunch, and remarks from government officials, 50 winter coats will be distributed to new members.
🎄 John Waters is performing his spoken word Christmas tour at Variety Playhouse in Little Five Points tomorrow at 7 p.m. Read Rough Draft contributor Gregg Shapiro’s interview with him here.
🕓 Here’s what’s in today’s newsletter.
• Senior affordable housing
• Best New Restaurants 2025
• New Year’s Eve changes
AND
• Stories of Atlanta | Lance Russell
Enjoy!
Civic Center, Waterworks Village next steps in city’s affordable housing initiative
🏗️ A groundbreaking ceremony was held Dec. 8 for a new senior affordable housing apartment complex on the site of the long-delayed redevelopment of the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center site.
The revamp of the Civic Center site in Old Fourth Ward has been nearly a decade in the making, but city officials said Tuesday’s groundbreaking is just the beginning of a $1 billion mixed-use development.
The $60 million, six-story apartment building will include 148 affordable one-bedroom apartments for low-income senior residents. The development – a partnership between Atlanta Housing, The Michaels Organization, Sophy Capital, and Republic Properties – is expected to open in 2027.
🛋️ Read more about the project here.
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Rough Draft Atlanta’s Best New Restaurants of 2025
🌟 Rough Draft’s dining team, Beth McKibben and Sarra Sedghi, spent the last year eating at dozens of new restaurants across Atlanta. Many meals and debates later, they narrowed a lengthy list of contenders down to just 11 stellar restaurants (and one collaboration) that kept capturing their attention in 2025.
This year’s award winners brought something extra special to the Atlanta dining scene. Your next favorite dish might come from a sandwich shop doubling as a community hub, a fine dining establishment leaning into Alpine ingredients, a strip mall spot dedicated to an Italian grandmother’s legacy, or a tiny counter-service restaurant whipping up made-to-order meals perfect for a dinner party.
RELATED DINING NEWS
🧣 Planning to dine out on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day? Find out which restaurants around Atlanta will serve special holiday menus and offer takeout service.
🥂 Looking for how to ring in 2026? Here is a roundup of New Year’s Eve dinners at restaurants around Atlanta to check out.
Fireworks, drone show over Atlanta will ring in New Year
🍑 There’s no Peach Drop at Underground Atlanta this year, but Mayor Andre Dickens announced that the city will be hosting a creative new approach to celebrating New Year’s Eve.
This year, the city will host citywide fireworks with a special drone countdown display, which will be visible in Downtown and Midtown. This unique celebration will include a 12-minute New Year’s Eve activation that is “a modern, inclusive, and citywide celebration,” Dickens said in a statement.
“By decentralizing Downtown crowds, increasing visibility across the city and strengthening public safety operations, this citywide display delivers a unified New Year’s experience for all Atlantans,” the statement continued.
🎆 Read more about the celebration here.
‘An Eye for Detail’: Stories of Atlanta by Lance Russell
VIA SAPORTAREPORT
🖋️ One of the challenges of our 21st-century lifestyle is trying to process the unprecedented amount of information available at any given moment. We are subjected to so much input on so many different topics that it is hard for us to imagine how people got along before the invention of instantaneous communications.
It helps, when thinking about how previous generations consumed information, to remember that instant gratification was not on anyone’s list of expectations. People were used to having to wait for information, and, subsequently, any improvement in the speed of communications immediately attracted attention.
Such was the case for a magazine called Harper’s Weekly which saw its readership dramatically increase during the Civil War because of the illustrations it printed depicting battles and troop maneuvers. Harper’s hired artists to travel with armies and document what they saw. Illustrators were to the 19th century what photographers became once the technology of photography had been perfected.
And while the camera ultimately replaced the illustrator as the preferred means of capturing images, that did not mean that life was over for illustrators. In fact, one illustrator who experienced a very successful wartime career discovered that three decades after the end of the Civil War his talents were still very much in demand.
🎖️ Find out just how much so on this week’s Stories of Atlanta.
Explore more of our newsletters
💡 Did you know Silver Streak has other newsletters that go deeper into what’s happening across metro Atlanta?
➡ Stacks: Our newest newsletter covering Atlanta’s literary scene, author profiles, book reviews, and more comes out the second Sunday of each month.
➡ Sketchbook: All about Atlanta’s art scene. Artist profiles, art openings, museum events. Wednesdays.
➡ Side Dish: News about the food scene. Beyond just openings and closings, Side Dish includes recipes and a regular feature on pop-ups. Thursdays.
➡ Scene: The only newsletter focused on the movie world. Reviews, interviews, podcasts. Fridays.
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🖋️ Today’s Silver Streak was edited by Julie E. Bloemeke.