On Saturday, September 12, the Kirkwood Business Owners' Association threw its 20th annual Wine Stroll, filling Hosea L. Williams Drive with a few thousand people carrying souvenir glasses between more than 50 pouring stations. Three stages hosted live music that night. One sat at Finally Wine on Hosea Williams, reserved for VIP ticket holders. Another was set up at the Kirkwood Car Wash and Dog Wash on Oakview Road, sponsored by District 5 Councilmember Liliana Bakhtiari. The third, according to the event's own lineup, was "located in the parking lot of the former Georgia Boy BBQ," sponsored by Stryant Construction.
That detail is worth sitting with for a second. The parking lot doubling as a stage that night is the same half-acre parcel at 1976 Hosea L. Williams Drive that Stryant plans to demolish this fall to build two restaurants, an office and 50 micro-apartments. The band that played there on Saturday may have performed the last free show that patch of asphalt ever hosts.
A Lot With Two Names and One Future
Before it was a construction site in waiting, 1976 Hosea Williams was Anna's BBQ for nine years, a female-owned, family-operated shop known for pulled pork, brisket and a Brunswick stew loyal enough to earn a "best barbecue" nod from Atlanta Magazine's readers back in 2019. Owner Anna Phelps closed the doors in 2022 to retire and run a food truck instead. A second barbecue concept, Georgia Boy BBQ, took over the space after that, which is why the Wine Stroll's map still refers to it by that name rather than Stryant's.
Stryant closed on the property in May 2025 for $910,000, and by March 2026 the Atlanta-based developer had filed demolition and land-disturbance permits with the city's Department of City Planning. The plan that's emerged since: a four-story building with roughly 6,500 square feet of ground-floor commercial space split between two restaurant slots (about 953 and 719 square feet), an office headquarters that Stryant co-founder Stan Sugarman has said will double as customer meeting space open to other local businesses, and 50 apartments averaging around 340 square feet each, managed by the co-living platform PadSplit. Rents will be reserved for tenants earning no more than 80 percent of the area median income, without public subsidy attached, which is an unusual bet for a developer to make on its own.
There's no dedicated parking in the plans. In its place: EV charging and a ground-floor room for roughly 14 bikes, leaning on the site's position across from Kirkwood Station and its access to city bus routes. Sugarman has said the goal is to break ground in summer 2026, with construction running about 18 months once permits clear. The project's own marketing has since shifted its public timeline to a fall 2026 groundbreaking. Either way, the parking lot that hosted a live band, a DJ and a crowd of wine strollers two nights ago is not going to look like that again for a while.
It's an odd echo, actually, that a parking-free event just used a soon-to-be parking-free building's lot as a venue. The Wine Stroll's own instructions to attendees this year were the same as always: walk, bike, take MARTA or grab a rideshare, because there's no stroll parking to be had. Stryant is betting the same logic works for 50 apartments as it does for one night of live music.
The Rest of the Block Isn't Waiting Around
The BBQ lot isn't the only storefront on this stretch that's changed hands recently. A few blocks over, the seafood restaurant that had occupied a spot known as The Argonaut closed, and this spring the space reopened as Jolene Jolene, a women's sports bar. In its farewell post, The Argonaut credited incoming operating partner Chelsea Fishman with a vision that would take the space "somewhere this neighborhood deserves." Jolene Jolene arrived in time to give Kirkwood a place to watch the Atlanta Dream's season on a big screen, something the neighborhood didn't have a dedicated home for before.
And this past summer, a former Subway location next to the Kirkwood gas station reopened as Kirkwood Kravingz, a takeout counter with a full bar from chef and owner Alexis Sewell, who also runs Southern Queenz about a mile away. The pitch is straightforward: burgers, wings, tacos, nachos and a happy hour with $5 margaritas, built for the exact moment when you're waiting on a to-go order and would rather have a drink in hand than stand around. It's become enough of a fixture already that regulars have nicknames for their usual order.
Put those three storefronts together and you get a small, useful picture: within roughly twelve months, Kirkwood's compact downtown core turned over a sports bar, a fast-casual kitchen and, soon, an entire mixed-use building, all inside a three or four block radius anchored by the same commercial strip the Wine Stroll has walked for two decades.
What the Wine Stroll Actually Protects
None of this changes what the Wine Stroll itself is for. The event remains the Kirkwood Business Owners' Association's main fundraiser, and proceeds go toward scholarships, support for local schools, and upkeep of the downtown business district, with the KBOA also partnering throughout the year with the Kirkwood Neighborhood Organization, the Coan Splash Pad Project and LantaGras. Twenty years of Wine Strolls have outlasted plenty of storefronts already. Anna's BBQ came and went inside that run. Georgia Boy BBQ came and, soon, will go too. The event itself keeps happening, which is part of why a stage sitting on borrowed ground doesn't feel like an ending so much as a marker of exactly where the neighborhood is right now.
If you live near this stretch, the next few months are worth watching directly rather than through a rendering. Demolition permits are filed. A groundbreaking has been publicly targeted for this fall. Once that starts, the parking lot that hosted a stage two nights ago becomes a job site, and the corner that's been barbecue for most of the last two decades becomes something else, on a timeline the developer has already put in writing.
Kirkwood's downtown has absorbed turnover before without losing what makes it feel like a village center rather than a strip. Whether this particular changeover reads the same way in a year probably depends less on the building itself and more on what ends up in those two ground-floor restaurant slots, and whether the office space really does end up hosting the kind of small local businesses Sugarman has described. For now, the most honest thing to say is that the lot got one more good use out of its old life before its new one starts.
If you're watching how a corner like this reshapes the block around it, or wondering what it means for a home a few streets away, Golley Realty Group knows this stretch of Kirkwood block by block. Talk to a Decatur Neighborhood Expert before you make your next move here.
