And no, it does not involve pouring concrete over Dan Uggla where he sits and turning him into a “living memorial.” I wouldn’t object to that, but GSU is just not on the same page as me. From the AJC:
The university wants to convert The Ted into a new 30,000-seat football, soccer and track-and-field stadium and build a new baseball park, academic buildings and green space. A private team led by real estate development powerhouse Carter and Columbia Residential would build private student housing, a mixed-use campus of shops, restaurants, retail and single-family and market-rate apartment homes on a majority of the surrounding area of about 80 acres.
There’s a map in the story showing the plan. As is the case with all situations like this, it’s a huge, huge leap from proposal stage to actually turning dirt, but it does show that there is interest in the site. There are reportedly three or four other entities who have development ideas too.
Thing about plans like this one? They represent way better use of the property than the current use to which the Braves are putting it. For a lot of reasons — some innocuous and reasonable and logistics-related, some drenched with history and problematic social arrangements and attitudes — baseball fans don’t care to come to Turner Field en masse and even when they do, they don’t want to hang around. If they did there would have been more development around the place in the past 17 years.
Who knows what will ultimately happen there — redevelopments can be great or awful and it’s way to early to know how this goes –but seeing this property better serve the citizens of Atlanta than it’s serving them now would go a long, long way toward alleviating the concerns the Braves’ unexpected move out of downtown has raised.
