Georgia State Is Building a Research Tower Downtown and a Ballpark Where Aaron's 715 Landed

Georgia State is reshaping two Atlanta neighborhoods on the same calendar, and the short version is this: a $100 million Research Tower downtown, and a 1,000-seat baseball park in Summerhill on the footprint of the old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

Start with the tower. It runs 155,000 square feet near Decatur Street and adds laboratories, teaching space and research facilities to the central campus. It is not a standalone building, though, and that is the part I think residents should hold onto. It sits inside Georgia State's $107 million College Town Downtown program, which covers nine projects. Some of that work is already visible on the ground:

• Sparks Hall is gone.
• Gilmer Street is closed to cars.
• The campus greenway will connect with Hurt Park to create the new Panther Quad.

Closing a street and knitting a greenway into an existing park is a different kind of decision than putting up a building. It changes how people walk through downtown, not just what they look at.

In Summerhill, the university is building a 1,000-seat baseball park on the former Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium site. That ground is where Hank Aaron hit his record-breaking 715th home run. His statue will move to the entrance of the new park, and a left-field marker will identify where the ball landed.

So the history is not being erased, and it is not staying exactly where it was either. It is being carried into something new, with a statue at a new entrance and a marker set in a new left field. New spaces are coming, and pieces of Atlanta's history are moving forward with them.