Photograph by Chuckyfoto
The darlings of Atlanta’s underground pop-up party scene have gone brick-and-mortar, and they’re taking on one of the city’s most popular nightlife districts: Edgewood Avenue.
In recent years, the street’s once-thriving bar and club scene has taken a hit. A handful of iconic spots, like Noni’s and Ammazza, shuttered, and a survey from the Atlanta Nightlife Impact Report found that almost half of the city’s nightlife patrons go out less than they used to. Nightlife still hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic traffic levels, but customers also reported concerns about lack of parking, transit, safety, and healthy food options, as well as high costs for food and drink.
With their newly opened clubs, a handful of Atlanta’s well-known party producers aim to shift the fortunes of the struggling entertainment district. Pisces, which opened in late 2024, is a venture from DJ Ree de la Vega, known for her hugely popular outdoor summer dance party, Chaka Khan Hacienda. Down the street Jon Dean—the de facto godfather of drag events across Atlanta—teamed up with Kimberly Turner and Scott Lockhart, founders of the dance party NonsenseATL, to open Lore in March.
“We’re really looking to build something that has some staying power and has the potential to become a real institution in Atlanta,” Lockhart says.
Lore, a two-story bar adjacent to Sister Louisa’s Church of the Living Room & Ping-Pong Emporium, is eclectic, with a giant disco ball named “Lola” and a drink named after characters from Twin Peaks. Turner, who’s been deejaying at NonsenseATL parties for years and is known around town as “Kimber,” says the bar’s owners were all craving “that freedom to be a little weird.”
Photograph by Darcy Darmody
For Dean, throwing drag shows and dance parties at other venues around town came with limitations on programming and space. Instead, Lore offers the trio a playground to curate their own LGBTQ+ nightlife scene, with a roster of drag shows.
The team is toying with producing other events, like a M3GAN drag-show-meets-dance-party to celebrate the movie sequel’s release in July. Such niche events are harder to sell to guest venues, says Turner: “I want to be able to play off of some of those, like, pop culture things, weird Halloweeny things, and just weird little short dance parties.”
Up the street, a low-key entrance guides partygoers into Pisces’ pulsing club space. Colored tube lights slope up mirrored walls, and fog encases the tightly packed crowds. The bar serves specialty drinks, while a huge DJ booth takes center stage.
The crowd skews younger than de la Vega’s previous dance parties, with music spanning from Charli XCX nights to Latin techno extravaganzas. She says Pisces is exactly what she’s wanted in the city she’s been partying in since 1998. “We deserve to have this—I deserve to have this,” she says.
The shift to brick-and-mortar locations is a significant one for these party hosts, who are coming from the pop-up model of throwing one-off events at spots around town. De la Vega acknowledges that producing parties in other people’s spaces offers a different type of freedom: “The club, it’s more of a marathon than a race.”
It helps that the new club owners all have established, dedicated followings. NonsenseATL partygoers followed Kimber from Ammazza to the now-shuttered Basement for dance parties. And Chaka Khan Hacienda, perhaps Atlanta’s most popular party of late, has routinely drawn more than 2,000 regular attendees since it moved to Pullman Yards in 2023. (De la Vega plans to continue Chaka Khan Hacienda at Pullman Yards.)
On Edgewood, they’ve found a different type of community in such longtime residents as Joystick Gamebar and Sister Louisa’s.
According to de la Vega, the scene has more camaraderie than competition, where all the venues, as she puts it, “can really differentiate ourselves.”
Dean says it also helps to set up shop in one of the city’s few nightlife districts. “There’s not a lot of places in Atlanta with nightlife where you can go to multiple places in one night,” he notes. He and his co-owners hope patrons will come to Edgewood to bar-hop, hitting Lore, Pisces, and other venues along the strip.
The new residents of Edgewood’s party scene all have one sentiment in common: This move has them feeling positive about the future of the city’s nightlife. “We’re all helping each other—we’re not in this neighborhood with strangers,” says Turner. “I feel like there’s a really nice district building here.”
This article appears in our August 2025 issue.
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