Walk through the front doors at 1 CNN Center and the building does not feel like the food-court-and-tour-line memory many of us are carrying around. The atrium has been opened up, the signage is new, and on Wednesday the lobby was full of city officials, developers, and local artists watching the place get its second life. The Atlanta Voice was inside for the ribbon cutting and captured Mayor Andre Dickens standing in front of the redone atrium, calling out the building's long arc from 1976 to the Olympics to today.
The redevelopment is being led by CP Group, which closed on the property a couple of years ago and has been working the building over ever since. Chris Eachus, a CP Group founding partner, framed the project around continuity. The building watched the Olympics roll in across its front lawn in 1996, served sandwiches to generations of field trips, and now gets to host the world again as Atlanta hosts FIFA 2026. SaportaReport noted that the city is using the moment to launch the Atlanta Cultural Exchange, a new platform from the Mayor's Office of Cultural Affairs aimed at giving visitors a single place to see local arts and culture during the tournament. Centennial Yards and the broader SoDo redevelopment a few blocks south are part of the same push.
The AJC and Axios both flagged the timing. With about 25 days to go before kickoff and roughly 300,000 visitors expected for the World Cup, the city has been racing to open new public space and venues. Founders Green, a half-acre park carved out of an old parking lot between Broad and Peachtree, cut its ribbon this week too. Together those projects start to fill in the gaps in a part of downtown that has spent years as connective tissue between MARTA, the dome, and Centennial Park without much to actually stop and look at. The test is whether the energy outlasts the tournament once the visiting fans head home.
