History
During his 1961 campaign for mayor of Atlanta, Ivan Allen, Jr. promised to build a sports facility to attract a Major League Baseball team. After winning office, Allen chose a 47-acre plot in the Washington-Rawson neighborhood for the building site, citing its proximity to the Georgia State Capitol, downtown businesses and major highways. Allen, along with Atlanta Journal sports editor Furman Bisher, attempted to persuade Charlie Finley, owner of the Kansas City Athletics, to move his team to Atlanta. Finley was receptive and began discussing stadium design plans with Allen. The deal, however, ended in July 1963 when the American League did not approve the move.
In 1964, Mayor Allen announced that an unidentified team had given him a verbal commitment to move to Atlanta, provided a stadium was in place by 1966. Soon afterward, the prospective team was revealed to be the Milwaukee Braves, who announced in October that they intended to move to Atlanta for the 1965 season. However, court battles kept the Braves in Milwaukee for one last season.
The new stadium was built on the site of the cleared Washington-Rawson neighborhood, which 50 years previously was a wealthy neighborhood home to Georgia's governor, among others, but which by the 1960s had fallen on hard times. 47 dignitaries took part in a groundbreaking ceremony on April 15, 1964. Almost a year later, construction was completed on April 9, 1965 for $18 million, and on the same night the Milwaukee Braves and Detroit Tigers played an exhibition game in the stadium. During that year the International League's Atlanta Crackers, whose previous home had been Ponce de Leon Park, played their final season in Atlanta Stadium. In 1966, both the NL's transplanted Braves and the NFL's Atlanta Falcons, an expansion team, began to use the facilities. In 1967, the Atlanta Chiefs of the National Professional Soccer League (re-formed as the North American Soccer League in 1968) began the first of five seasons played at the stadium. After Ted Turner purchased the Braves in 1976, the stadium's name was changed to the hyphenated Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. The Falcons moved to the Georgia Dome in 1992, while the Braves had to wait until the Olympic Stadium from the 1996 Summer Olympics was transformed into Turner Field to move out at the beginning of the 1997 season. The stadium sat 60,606 for football and 52,007 for baseball. The baseball competition for the 1996 Summer Olympics was held at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.
Read more about this topic: Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium
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