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Atlanta City Detention Center

1995 establishments in Georgia (U.S. state)Buildings and structures in AtlantaCriminal justice reform in the United StatesGovernment buildings completed in 1995Prisons in Georgia (U.S. state)

Atlanta City Detention Center (ACDC), also known as the Atlanta City Jail, is a municipal pretrial detention and arrest-processing facility located at 254 Peachtree Street SW in Atlanta, Georgia. Opened in 1995 as a design–build project by Turner Associates Architects and the Turner Construction Company, the 471,000-square-foot, 1,300-bed facility was built in anticipation of increased arrest activity surrounding the 1996 Summer Olympics. Although designed to hold over a thousand people, ACDC's daily population declined sharply in the late 2010s following a series of criminal justice reforms enacted under Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, including the end of cash bail for most municipal offenses and the termination of the city's contract to hold detainees for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In May 2019, following years of organizing by coalitions including Women on the Rise and the Close the Jail ATL: Communities Over Cages campaign, Bottoms signed legislation authorizing the closure of ACDC and establishing a task force to repurpose the building into a "Center for Equity." A 2021 analysis commissioned by the city from the Vera Institute of Justice found that, as of October 2020, ACDC held fewer than 25 people on an average day at an estimated cost of $807,723 per incarcerated person annually—more than seventeen times the national average—and that Black residents made up 90 percent of the facility's average daily population despite constituting roughly half of Atlanta's population. Despite the 2019 closure commitment, ACDC was never fully decommissioned. In August 2022, amid a fatal overcrowding crisis at the Fulton County Jail, the Atlanta City Council approved Ordinance 22-O-1632, authorizing a four-year lease of up to 700 ACDC beds to Fulton County at a rate of $50 per detainee per day. The agreement, opposed by many of the activists who had campaigned for the jail's closure, has remained a point of contention between the city and county. In late 2024, the Fulton County Commission unsuccessfully sought state legislative intervention to compel Atlanta to sell the facility outright, and by early 2025 the Atlanta City Council was considering measures signaling it would not renew the lease when it expires in late 2026.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Atlanta City Detention Center (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

Atlanta City Detention Center
Peachtree Street Southwest, Atlanta

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Wikipedia: Atlanta City Detention CenterContinue reading on Wikipedia

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N 33.7473 ° E -84.3954 °
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Atlanta City Detention Center

Peachtree Street Southwest 254
30303 Atlanta
Georgia, United States
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call+14048658001

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atlantaga.gov

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Hotel Row
Hotel Row

Hotel Row is a both National Register and locally listed historic district consisting of one block of early 20th-century commercial buildings, three to four stories high, located on Mitchell Street west of Forsyth Street in the South Downtown district of Atlanta. The buildings were originally hotels with ground level retail shops built to serve the needs of passengers from Terminal Station, opened in 1905. The buildings are the most intact row of early 20th-century commercial structures in Atlanta's original business district. The decline of Hotel Row began in the 1920s due to the increased availability of automobile transportation and the construction of the Spring Street viaduct, which made getting to hotels in the northern part of the city easier. In the 1950s and 1960s, the increase in air travel led ultimately to the demolition of Terminal Station in 1971.The district is architecturally significant because the structures that make up the block retain most of their original historic architectural character. Several structures were developed by Samuel Inman and Walker Inman, two of Atlanta's most prominent businessmen, and the majority of the structures were designed by the leading architects of the period. They typify the early 20th-century commercial structures once common in Atlanta but now rare because of extensive redevelopment. With Atlanta's massive gentrification, plans were underway to convert some of the buildings into lofts, however these plans ultimately stalled as a result of the Late-2000s recession.