5th Avenue, Rome GA

Seven hills, drawn from a hat

Rome was platted at the confluence of the Etowah and Oostanaula rivers in 1834. Five founders, looking at the seven hills rising around them and the rivers between, are said to have written candidate names on slips of paper and drawn one out — Rome won, for the obvious reason. The seven hills are still there: Myrtle, Lumpkin, Neely (where the Clock Tower stands), Mount Aventine, Old Shorter, Blossom, and Jackson.

The civic spine

Where Rome put its courthouse defined where its civic life would cluster. In 1892 the county chose 5th Avenue, between Tribune Street and Government Plaza — a few blocks east of Broad Street, on a slope facing the river bends. Banks, law firms, the police department, and the tag office grew up around it. Today the street still works the same way: a quieter, dignified counterpart to the storefront commerce of Broad.

On the police lawn at 5th Avenue stands the Call to Duty statue — an officer kneeling in prayer, holding a folded American flag. On the corner of Broad Street and 5th Avenue, a plaque honors Karl Dance, the metal fabricator who made much of the wrought-iron public art that gives downtown Rome its character.

The 1892 courthouse

The historic Floyd County Courthouse at 101 W 5th Avenue was the county's fourth courthouse. Designed by the Atlanta firm Bruce and Morgan and built in 1892 for $49,935, it was a Romanesque Revival building of red brick — heavy round arches, terra-cotta grotesques staring down from the cornices, a clock-bell tower at the corner. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

On March 23, 2026 — a fire began in the courthouse attic during a renovation. By that night the second and third floors were gone. Nobody was hurt; the building was declared a total loss. Floyd County commissioners approved $520,000 for emergency stabilization in early April, and the city began the slow work of figuring out what comes next for the brick walls that survived.

Walking 5th Avenue in the months since the fire, the absence is the loudest thing on the street. We opened a few weeks later, a block north of the same address.

The Clock Tower, just up the hill

One block from the courthouse, at the top of Neely Hill, stands Rome's other defining building: the Clock Tower. James Noble Jr. and his family built it in 1871 — originally a 250,000-gallon water tower, all stone and round-arched openings. In 1872 the city added a bell and four clock faces; by the 1890s the tower had been retired from waterworks duty and become decorative.

At 104 feet it's still visible from almost any part of downtown. The Rome Jaycees raised funds to landscape Neely Hill in 1986; the tower opened as a museum in 1995. It is the closest thing Rome has to an emblem, and the visual logic that gave the city its name.

What the street is, today

5th Avenue is a working street. Police, county offices, law firms with mid-day clients, the tag office, the firehouse. It's quieter than Broad Street — fewer storefronts, fewer tourists — and because of that it's also the part of downtown that still looks most like itself from twenty years ago. Brick. Trees. The slope of the hills.

We chose 252 N 5th Ave because it's where the people who actually live and work in Rome already are. Closings, business meetings, podcast guests, baby showers, weddings, retirement parties — the kind of room you walk into when you want your event grounded in the city itself, not displaced into a suburban hotel ballroom.