digATL | The Digital Atlanta Portal

Originally Atlanta’s first modern parking garage, Kell Hall began as a 1920s “automobile hotel” and later became Georgia State’s first permanent building, illustrating urban ambition, cost effective development, and adaptive reuse. A testament to the resourceful and inventive spirit of GSU’s early leaders, Kell Hall endured through more than seven decades of growth and innovation as Georgia State evolved from the University System of Georgia’s “Atlanta Extension Center” to a world-class urban research university.

A Community Interactive Digital Archive. Krog Street Tunnel is one of Atlanta’s premier destinations for street art, political communication, and a community bulletin board. Since the late 1960s, artists have added and subtracted new paintings, messages, and designs to its walls, effectively creating a rapidly changing archive of local cultural concerns. The tunnel and the walls connected to it on DeKalb Avenue and Wylie Street comprise a single living dynamic work of art that is a cultural center of Cabbagetown. As such, to understand the cultural composition of the town, it is important to not only examine the art but also the creatives who give the tunnel life. Given the ephemeral nature of the tunnel art and its historical significance to the city, Georgia State University’s EPIC program, an academic research initiative dedicated to providing students with the opportunities to work on public-facing projects, has assembled a team of professors, graduate students, and undergraduates to document and catalog Krog Street tunnel’s art. In addition to regularly scanning and archiving the community’s tunnel art and murals, we also plan to conduct interviews with artists, patrons, and members of the community. This collection will become the basis of a frequently updated online publicly accessible 3d digital archive. Launched in 2022.

Aims to both preserve this unintentional archive as it was before Manuel’s Tavern underwent renovations in 2015 and provide a platform through which one might learn more about the individual items in this archive and even contribute to the knowledge about them. This project is the result of a collaboration via the Atlanta Studies Network, Emory University’s Center for Digital Scholarship, Georgia State University’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and University Library, with additional contributions from the Savannah College of Art & Design in Atlanta and the Center for Public History at the University of West Georgia. While some archives are carefully curated by experts with clear intentions and institutional resources supporting their creation, other archives are unintentional and organic collections of materials that have gathered in a corner of a city like driftwood on the beach.  One such example of the later type of archive are the walls of Manuel’s Tavern, which over the past half century have slowly evolved into a record of the local established political left that inhabited that space; where a generation of cops, soldiers, and politicians—who believed in a more representative democracy—gathered to eat pork chops in a neighborhood occupied by immigrants, hippies, and punks. And to this day neighbors still treat it like an extra living room, where they come to watch elections or play chess. The project has received both local coverage (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, WABE, Creative Loafing, ArtsATL) as well as national coverage (New York Times). Note: All photographs, videos, and other materials hosted on this site are licensed CC BY NC.

Archived by the Wayback Machine.

Exhibit revised in 2026 as “GSU Ramps Up: Kell Hall and the Rise of an Urban Campus.” Originally one of the first parking garages in the city, the Ivy Street Garage was renovated and opened to students in 1946. In 1964, it was renamed Kell Hall to honor Wayne S. Kell, the original director of the school. Kell Hall was demolished and replaced with a campus greenway in 2021. On this archived website, you can browse the collections of digital items gathered, read about Kell Hall’s history, and take a virtual tour of the building.