The Georgia World Congress Center or GWCC is the major convention center in Atlanta. It is the fourth-largest convention center in the United States at 3.9 million ft2 (360,000 m2) and hosts more than a million visitors each year. At the time opened in 1976 the Georgia World Congress Center was the first state owned Convention Center in the United States. The A, B, and C buildings of the GWCC (the actual Convention Center), Centennial Olympic Park and the Georgia Dome are all run by the Georgia World Congress Center Authority under the auspices of the State of Georgia and funding for new expansions and other major project come from the Georgia General Assembly.
The GWCC is located in downtown Atlanta at 285 Andrew Young International Blvd. NW, adjacent to Centennial Olympic Park, the Georgia Dome, CNN Center and the Philips Arena. Public transportation is serviced by the Dome/GWCC/Philips Arena/CNN Center MARTA station.
The GWCC was designed by Atlanta-based architects Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback & Associates (TVS) and is made up of three adjacent buildings, Buildings A, B, and C. In total these buildings have twelve exhibit halls, 105 meeting rooms, and two ballrooms. Building A has three exhibit halls and the Sidney Marcus auditorium seating 1,740. Building B, the largest, contains five exhibit halls and the 33,000 square-foot (3,065 m 2) Thomas B. Murphy Ballroom. The newest building, Building C, has four exhibit halls and the 25,700 square-foot (2,387 m 2) Georgia Ballroom. Other amenities include a FedEx Kinko's office, Starbucks coffee shops, a gift shop, internet access, telephone service, and full IT management provided by CCLD (Convention Center Long Distance), a concierge desk, and a food court plus another restaurant. Freight rail tracks run through the middle of the complex and under the parking decks. The complex incorporates pedestrian bridges to connect exhibit halls on opposite sides of the tracks.
The GWCC opened in 1976 with 350,000 square feet (33,000 m2) of exhibit space. Additional phases opened in 1985, 1992, and 2002. During the 1996 Summer Olympics, the GWCC hosted handball, fencing, judo, table tennis, weightlifting, wrestling, and the fencing and shooting portions of the modern pentathlon. The International Broadcast Center for the worldwide media was also set up inside the GWCC. On November 8, 2001, President George W. Bush made a speech at the GWCC in which he exhorted the crowd of police, firefighters, and politicians, "My fellow Americans, Let's roll!", a phrase he would later use at the 2002 State of the Union address. The center also hosted the 2009 Soul Train Music Awards, the first held outside of the Los Angeles area.
Every year, the GWCC holds the SEC Football Fanfare in one of its convention halls, usually Halls C1 and C2, joined together to create one large exhibition hall. Fanfare is a huge event in early December that occurs simultaneously along with the SEC Championship Game, held in the Georgia Dome. For the 2 day event, thousands of Southeastern Conference football fans attend to see the festivities. The GWCC will play host to WrestleMania Axxess for WrestleMania XXVII at the nearby Georgia Dome.
Though similarly named, the Georgia International Convention Center is a smaller unrelated facility located near Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Delta Air Lines previously had a ticket office in the lobby of the complex.
Read more about Georgia World Congress Center: 2008 Atlanta Tornado
Famous quotes containing the words georgia, world, congress and/or center:
“Georgia, Georgia, no peace I find, just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind.”
—Stuart Gorrell (d. 1963)
“Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“I have been up to see the Congress and they do not seem to be able to do anything except to eat peanuts and chew tobacco, while my army is starving.”
—Robert E. Lee (1807–1870)
“Actually being married seemed so crowded with unspoken rules and odd secrets and unfathomable responsibilities that it had no more occurred to her to imagine being married herself than it had to imagine driving a motorcycle or having a job. She had, however, thought about being a bride, which had more to do with being the center of attention and looking inexplicably, temporarily beautiful than it did with sharing a double bed with someone with hairy legs and a drawer full of boxer shorts.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)