Golden Touch

T. Lake: During the war, as the Yankees came with their guns and torches, Henry Irby laid his gold in a dishpan and buried it in the clay. So goes the legend. Irby lived at the center of Buckhead—indeed, his famous tavern, with the head of a deer mounted on the front porch, gave Buckhead its name—and he barely survived the fall of the Confederacy. The legend is hazy on the fate of his gold, but circumstances suggest it never resurfaced. Irby fed his family by selling land for five cents an acre and sometimes bartering land for wheat.

One hundred and forty-two years later, a man named Ben Carter sank $200 million into the same soft earth. This is a lot of money: larger than the gross domestic product of some countries, enough to buy five tons of pure gold. Carter bought about nine acres across Peachtree Road from the place where Irby's Tavern once stood. He wanted to turn the old Buckhead Village into Atlanta's version of Rodeo Drive, and if this sounds like a wild idea now, in the New Age of Austerity, here are two reasons it made sense then: First, it was 2007, when banks were still lending enough to get ambitious projects built; and second, he was Ben Carter, a developer with something close to the golden touch.