Things to Do in Tallapoosa This Fall: Head Avenue & Events
September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
Walk into Dirty South Sips these days and you're standing where an idea about downtown Tallapoosa is being tested in real time. The shop opened its first permanent storefront at 119 Head Avenue on August 29, after a year of running a mobile cart through pop-up events across West Georgia. A few doors down, Beach Teas & Creams took over a longtime ice cream shop space at 124 Head Avenue this spring, giving the block a second new name on the same short stretch of sidewalk within a matter of months.
Two new storefronts on one street in one year would be worth noting anywhere. What makes it worth understanding here is the timing. Both openings landed in the same stretch when the City of Tallapoosa is physically tearing up and rebuilding the street they sit on, following a plan the mayor described in blunt terms: get people downtown first, and let the businesses come find them.
As The Times-Georgian reported, Mayor Brett Jones and Kevin Bacon of Toole Design presented the city's first-ever downtown master plan in February 2025, built with the Downtown Development Authority over roughly a year of work. The plan's four goals were straightforward: connect both sides of downtown across the railroad, create space for everyday activity and events, get businesses back into empty downtown buildings, and keep Tallapoosa a small town with a big heart.
In that report, Jones was direct about the sequencing. He'd seen the strategy work in other towns and wanted to try it here rather than the alternative.
"So, we're going to try to take that approach, let's get people here first and then businesses later, because the other way hasn't worked so far."
That's not a marketing line. It's a reversal of how most small towns try to fill empty storefronts, which usually means chasing tenants first and hoping foot traffic follows. Tallapoosa's plan bets the opposite: build the reasons for people to be on the street, and the businesses will read the crowd and move in on their own.
The physical changes back up the bet. On the Head Avenue side, the plan calls for removing the angled parking that currently eats up curb space, making the street surface flush with the sidewalks, and narrowing each lane from twelve feet down to eleven. The goal, as presented, is a street that handles ordinary shopping and dining on a Tuesday afternoon and still opens up for a festival crowd on a Saturday. Alabama Street gets a similar treatment, trading angled parking for parallel spots and aiming for what the plan calls a park-like plaza that encourages people to linger instead of just pass through.
None of that construction is a promise about who moves in next. It's infrastructure, and infrastructure doesn't hand out leases. But it's the kind of investment that only makes sense if the city expects the street to be busier than it is now, and Beach Teas & Creams and Dirty South Sips are the first two businesses to bet on that expectation before the concrete work is even finished.
Beach Teas & Creams isn't a brand-new concept from scratch. It's a familiar ice cream shop space under new ownership, run day to day by Kayti McAlister with her husband Michael working the partnership from behind the scenes. The menu keeps the hand-dipped ice cream and shakes that made the original spot a fixture, then adds a rotating lineup of loaded teas, the kind of colorful drink menu that's become a small-town main street staple over the past few years.
Dirty South Sips took a different path to the same block. Rather than opening cold, the shop spent a year building a following through a mobile cart at pop-up events around West Georgia before committing to a fixed address. That's a meaningful detail for anyone reading the local business scene here: a mobile vendor choosing Head Avenue specifically, after a year of testing demand elsewhere, is a vote of confidence in the street rather than a first guess.
Put those two openings next to each other and you get a block that now has two places to grab a drink within a few doors of each other, on a stretch of Head Avenue that's simultaneously getting its parking reconfigured and its sidewalks widened. The businesses and the construction crews are, in a real sense, working the same shift.
None of this happened on a blank slate. Head Avenue has been Tallapoosa's gathering spot for longer than the master plan has existed, which is part of why the city chose to invest there instead of somewhere else.
The clearest evidence is a piece of local food history that outlasted the man behind it. In the early 1950s, Howell Vester "Hat" Roberts ran a café on Head Avenue after reportedly working in the kitchen at Atlanta's Dinkler Plaza Hotel. Local legend holds that if you ordered his chili, he might ask you to pay up front so he could run down the street to Smith's Market and buy the wieners to top it. Whether that detail is exactly true or has grown in the retelling over seventy years, the chili itself became enough of a fixture that the city still names its fall festival after him.
The Hat Roberts Chili Cook-off runs on the fourth Saturday of October every year, which puts this year's event on October 24. Past cook-offs have set up both directly on Head Avenue and at the Tallapoosa Civic and Cultural Arts Center on Robertson Avenue, and the day typically folds in a Halloween costume contest, kids' games, and food vendors alongside the chili judging itself. It's the kind of event that turns a quiet downtown into a packed one for an afternoon, which is exactly the foot traffic the master plan is trying to make into more of a weekly habit instead of a once-a-year spike.
The rest of the fall and winter calendar follows a rhythm long-time residents already know by heart:
None of these events are new. What's new is that for the first time in a while, they're happening on a street that's also picking up new retail tenants between festival weekends, not just around them.
If you've been driving past the construction cones on Head Avenue wondering what all the parking changes are actually for, the two new storefronts are your answer in miniature. The city didn't wait for a tenant to commit before deciding to fix the street. It fixed the sequencing instead, betting that a more walkable, more event-friendly Head Avenue would pull people downtown on an ordinary Tuesday, not just a festival Saturday, and that businesses would notice and follow.
Two openings in one year isn't proof the strategy has fully worked. It's the first data point in a bet the city is still in the middle of placing. But if you're grabbing a drink at Dirty South Sips or ice cream at Beach Teas & Creams sometime before the Chili Cook-off rolls around on October 24, you're standing in the middle of that experiment, on a street that decided to build the crowd before it built the case for anyone to sell to it.
If you're curious about what's happening in other pockets of Metro Atlanta, West Georgia, or East Alabama, or you want a straight answer about buying or selling a home in this part of the state, Shawn Self is a text or call away. Let's Connect.
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