Toco Hills Turned Away Borders Once. Barnes & Noble Isn't Getting the Same Fight.

Barnes & Noble has signed a lease for more than 14,000 square feet at Toco Hills Shopping Center, in the storefront Westside Market vacated at the end of last year. The company is targeting a September opening, which means the store is either already welcoming customers or close to it as you read this. It will sit a short walk from Tall Tales Book Shop, the independent bookstore that has held a corner of that same shopping center since 1979.

If you've lived in North Druid Hills long enough, this should feel familiar. Around 2002, Borders Books & Music was in talks to open in the space that ULTA occupies today. Public pushback was strong enough that the landlord went with Office Depot instead. A chain bookstore wanted in, and the neighborhood said no.

This time, nobody's organizing against it. The difference isn't the neighborhood. It's the shopping center.

A Struggling Mall Fights Differently Than a Thriving One

In 2000, an Atlanta Constitution piece described Toco Hills as a property with vacant storefronts, sagging facades, and shop owners complaining they couldn't get customers through the door. A movie theater needed a remodel. Drug Emporium was closing. When residents pushed back against Borders two years later, they were defending a center that already felt like it was slipping, and a chain moving in read as one more sign of a neighborhood losing its footing to anonymous retail.

The math is different now. EDENS bought Toco Hills in 2015 and has spent the past decade repositioning it, adding restaurants and specialty tenants rather than watching them leave. The company holds a 35-year ground lease, signed in 2016, on the portion of the center where the new Barnes & Noble is landing. Kroger and Tall Tales sit on a separately owned parcel next door, though most shoppers experience the whole lot as one place. When a landlord is actively courting recognizable tenants for a property that's working, adding a big-name anchor isn't a distress signal. It's confirmation the center has leverage. That's a very different story to tell your neighbors than "our mall is dying and here comes the chain to finish it off."

The Bookstore Landing Here Isn't the Bookstore You Remember

Here's where the comparison actually gets interesting. Barnes & Noble's Toco Hills store won't be the size of a typical suburban Barnes & Noble.

That's roughly half the size of the Dunwoody store and nearly half of Buckhead's. Under CEO James Daunt, the company has been opening smaller-format stores as part of a broader turnaround. Barnes & Noble is now above 700 locations nationally after dropping below 600 as recently as 2023, and the chain has told reporters it's planning around 60 new stores in 2026 alone, built on this leaner model rather than the big-box format that defined the brand in the 1990s and 2000s.

A downsized Barnes & Noble is a meaningfully different neighbor than the one that scared off Borders' opponents two decades ago. It's closer in scale to a well-funded specialty shop than to the anchor tenant model that used to swallow whole blocks of retail. Tall Tales has survived by doing what a store this size can't: used and rare titles, a selection built over close to five decades, and the kind of staff memory that comes from being in one spot since Jimmy Carter was in the White House. Those two things can plausibly share a parking lot without either one losing its reason to exist.

The Rest of the Center Is Moving in the Same Direction

The bookstore isn't the only signal. Look at what else has turned over at Toco Hills over the past couple of years, and a pattern shows up.

• Switchyards, the 24-hour neighborhood work club, opened its Toco Hills location on October 13, 2025, its 13th club in Atlanta and 32nd overall across a dozen-plus cities.
• Silla Del Toro, a Spanish tapas restaurant from the Fork U Concepts group behind Taqueria Tsunami and Stockyard Burgers and Bones, opened a second location here in early 2024 after starting in Marietta.
• Bobo Izakaya soft-opened in a storefront near Kroger, replacing the longtime Maysuya Japanese Restaurant.
• Go Greek Yogurt is planning its first Georgia location at Toco Hills, a 900-square-foot shop targeted for early 2027.
• Blue Donkey Coffee is reportedly moving into the space that housed Atlanta Coffee Roasters.

Almost none of this is a purely local operator opening a first shop. It's multi-city brands, first-in-Georgia franchises, and restaurant groups with several other Atlanta-area addresses already on their resume. Toco Hills isn't losing its restaurant variety or its reasons to stop in on a Tuesday night. It's just increasingly filling those slots with names that already exist somewhere else first.

What This Actually Looks Like If You Shop Here Every Week

None of this means Toco Hills is turning into a generic strip mall. The center's own marketing describes its role as "enriching community," and to be fair, most of what's landed here over the past couple of years genuinely does add something: a 24/7 workspace for people who need somewhere besides a coffee shop or a home office, a Spanish tapas menu that didn't exist in this zip code before, a Japanese spot in a location that already had foot traffic built in.

What's worth watching is whether that pattern holds once the Barnes & Noble opens and the neighborhood gets a real look at how two very different bookstores coexist twenty feet apart. If Tall Tales' regulars keep showing up for the used shelves and staff recommendations while the new store draws a different crowd in for storytime and new releases, that's a version of this transition that adds retail without subtracting identity. If foot traffic just shifts from one to the other, that tells a different story about what a neighborhood's loyalty to a local business actually withstands when a well-capitalized alternative moves in next door.

Either way, this is the kind of change worth watching in real time rather than after the fact. If you haven't been into Tall Tales in a while, this is a good season to stop by before the parking lot gets busier. And if you're curious what a fully repositioned Toco Hills looks like a year or two from now, the Go Greek Yogurt opening in early 2027 is as good a marker as any to check back in.

For more on what's happening in the neighborhoods around North Druid Hills, from Toco Hills to Emory to the surrounding streets locals actually walk, Heather Cummings keeps a running eye on the details that make this part of Atlanta worth paying attention to. If there's a corner of the neighborhood you think deserves a closer look, or you're weighing what a shift like this means for a home you already own here, Let's Connect.