A Pool and a Running Track Sit Empty Above Downtown. Somebody Has to Want All 74,000 Feet.

High above Courtland Street, behind floor-to-ceiling windows most people walk under without looking up, there is an indoor running track, a full-size basketball court and a swimming pool with no water in it. All of it belonged to the Peachtree Center Athletic Club, which closed in 2009. Much of what made the place unusual is still up there.

The roughly 74,000-square-foot space is being actively marketed for lease. It comes with those windows, and with covered connections to MARTA and to the surrounding Peachtree Center properties, which is the kind of access downtown space does not always have.

Images have circulated showing what could go in: cafes, gallery-style spaces, lounges. I want to be careful here, because that is the part that travels fastest and means the least. Those are possibilities. There is no confirmed redevelopment.

What strikes me about this one is the shape of the problem rather than the square footage. A pool, a track and a court are not a blank floor plate. They are somebody else's very specific idea, left in place for more than fifteen years, and whoever takes the space either builds around that idea or pays to remove it. That narrows the list of people who can say yes.

So the honest read is that a strange piece of Atlanta real estate has re-entered the conversation after sitting dark since the Great Recession. Being on the market is not the same as having a future. Its next chapter is still completely unwritten.