New Black Wall Street Market opened to fanfare. It’s soon closing.

The New Black Wall Street Market, a 125,000-square-foot indoor market of Black-owned shops, artists and restaurants in Stonecrest, is closing at the end of the month.

Onethia Flowers, the general manager of the market, confirmed its last day in operation will be April 30.

She said business was slow and “the overall business, operation, facility and financial factors … contributed to the closing.”

The closure comes nearly five years after the market opened to big fanfare and high hopes. The NBWSM was the brainchild of Lecester “Bill” Allen, an entrepreneur and philanthropist turned developer who died in 2024.

Years ago, he proposed turning a vacant Target store into a thriving marketplace where more than 100 Black entrepreneurs could sell their wares and branded it as a modern take on a historic Black business district. Allen said the market would be the first phase of an ambitious $700 million development in the heart of south DeKalb County.

He modeled his idea after the historic Greenwood community of Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as Black Wall Street, that was burned down in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre by a white mob that murdered dozens of Black residents and displaced a thriving community.

The NBWSM was initially a hit, with most of its 118 vendor spaces landing tenants and more than 10,000 attendees on its opening weekend in October 2021.

For Jaquatte Williams, one of the market’s original vendors and CEO of J’s Gift Shoppe, the NBWSM gave her a chance to achieve her long-held dream of having her own storefront.

“I’d always thought about having it, and the vision of Mr. Allen and the New Black Wall Street Market was the perfect opportunity,” Williams told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

She said she got entrepreneurial training there, and people with NBWSM sat down with vendors and taught them “everything from pricing, setting up the store, to being able to get financing.”

Williams will now be shifting her business online and will sell at pop-up markets.

The NBWSM had its challenges over the years. Reports of a leaky roof, combative management and scorned former tenants tarnished its first year. There were differences with Stonecrest officials over delaying approval of the next phase of the larger project, a planned international village and 16-story hotel.