If Georgia State University has anything to do with it, Downtown Atlanta is going to become a place where tens of thousands of people live, work, play and study.
That is the thrust of a new 10-year, 1 billion expansion plan that President Carl Patton believes will transform GSU from a commuter college into “a real university” while invigorating Downtown with new retail and residential developments.
GSU’s plan, which will rely primarily on private funding, includes:
• Building more than a dozen new structures, including student housing and fraternity and sorority buildings.
• Creating a 200 million research park at the intersection of Piedmont Avenue and Decatur Street.
• Combining the law and business schools in a 120 million complex.
• Building a new convocation hall, athletic center, humanities center and upgraded library.
The plan also involves undoing some of the work from a previous master plan, which separated university buildings from the rest of the city. In the new plan, plazas, platforms and catwalks will be lowered to street level, which, with other improvements, will open up the campus.
And, by replacing smaller buildings and empty lots with towers as tall as 14 stories, it will also alter the city’s skyline.
“The idea is to have students walking around the city, to create more vitality,” said Patton. “We’re going to have a real university, where students live on campus and are engaged in a variety of activities. We want them to be living here on campus where they can be engaged in the life of the university rather than going back and forth in a car.”
A.J. Robinson, president of Central Atlanta Progress, welcomed the new plan and applauded Georgia State for “adding a tremendous amount of vitality to the Downtown community. The growth of the university and their master plan to turn it into a non-commuter school is having a big effect not only on our desire to have a walkable community, but also to bring more retail outlets to the street level.”
With 27,000 undergraduate and graduate students, GSU is second in size of student population only to the University of Georgia in the state. But projections call for the number of students to nearly double to 50,000 by 2015 36,000 of them full-time and the school’s infrastructure must be upgraded to meet the growth.
GSU occupies all or parts of 45 buildings, from a handsome new recreation center to an 80-year-old building that once was a parking garage. It also leases more than a million square feet of space.
But some of the buildings and leased space are old or no longer meet the school’s needs and will be torn down or phased out as part of the new plan. There are also two other projects from the previous master plan that are either pending or under construction.
One is a 2,000-bed, 168 million student housing project at the intersection of Piedmont Avenue and Ellis Street. Patton says that Piedmont/Ellis, as it is known, is the largest project of its type in the country. Another project involves narrowing Decatur Street and adding plantings and other elements to make it more pedestrian-friendly.
Robinson points to GSU’s new Aderhold Building at Broad and Luckie streets as an example of a structure that meets the university’s needs while enhancing its surroundings.
“That’s had a huge effect on the community,” he says. “There’s a lot going on there. Students are going in and out of there at all hours.”
Robinson says that as GSU expands and the boom in residential building continues Downtown, “it’s just a matter of time before there’s significant retail development in new construction.”
That development, he says, will target office workers, residents, visitors to the Georgia Aquarium and tourists, as well as students. Among those retailers will be a grocery store that also serves prepared meals, a major bookstore and a drugstore.
Robinson cites the new commercial development on Fifth Street near Georgia Tech as an example of what will happen Downtown.
“There are other kinds of retailers than those who appeal to students,” he says, “and it’s become a big part of the Midtown community. There’s a hotel and a couple of really nice restaurants. It’s really changed that area.”
GSU has its eye on a piece of land at Peachtree and Ellis streets next to and owned by the Georgia-Pacific Corp. as the site for the business and law school complex. It had hoped Georgia-Pacific would donate the two-acre plot, which is now occupied by a parking lot and the Peachtree Center MARTA station.
But Georgia-Pacific has been sold, and GSU has yet to talk with its new owners, Koch Industries Inc.
“We are going to talk to them and invite them to know about our master plan,” Patton says. “And we hope they’ll think it’s a good idea to develop that site.”
Putting the law and business schools in the same complex is unusual. Each school would have it’s own office building, but they would share a building housing classrooms and an auditorium.
Patton says the idea came from cross-fertilization in other disciplines.
“In our research park, one of the new buildings will be for advanced collaboration,” he says. “We’ve made great strides where we’ve matched, say, biology and chemistry.
“We want to foster that kind of collaboration between business and law, with the idea that it will advance better business and legal practices. We think it will be better for all of us if they learn to work together more.”
Work is scheduled to begin on the 142 million first phase of the research park this fall, and Patton an urban planner by training thinks the new buildings will have great “flair.”
“A science park,” he said, “can be pretty bold.”
For more information on Georgia State University, visit ww.gsu.edu.
