In September 2024, Georgia-Pacific announced that its 52-story headquarters at 133 Peachtree Street — a pink granite tower that has anchored downtown Atlanta's skyline since 1982 — would undergo a conversion from corporate office building to mixed-use development. The plan: 400 residential apartments on the upper floors, reduced office space on the lower floors, and new retail, restaurant, and entertainment tenants at street level. A new central plaza would open the block to pedestrians.
The announcement marked the most significant office-to-residential conversion in downtown Atlanta's history. At 697 feet, the Georgia-Pacific Tower is the city's sixth-tallest building, and its transformation signaled a fundamental shift in how downtown's largest property owners were responding to the post-pandemic collapse in office demand.
A Building With History
The Georgia-Pacific Tower stands on ground that carries more Atlanta history than almost any other address downtown. The site at 133 Peachtree Street was previously home to Loew's Grand Theatre, the movie palace where Gone With the Wind premiered on December 15, 1939. The theater was destroyed by fire in 1978, and the Georgia-Pacific Center — designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill — rose in its place four years later.
The building's distinctive pink granite cladding, quarried in Georgia, made it instantly recognizable in the skyline. For four decades, it housed Georgia-Pacific's corporate operations and served as one of Peachtree Street's most prominent commercial addresses. The company — a pulp, paper, and building products manufacturer owned by Koch Industries — maintained its headquarters there even as other major corporations relocated to Midtown or the suburbs.
The Office Landscape Has Changed
Georgia-Pacific CEO Christian Fischer framed the conversion as pragmatic, not sentimental. "The office landscape has changed," Fischer stated, noting that adaptive reuse could "create greater long-term value" than maintaining a building designed for a workforce pattern that no longer existed. The company would retain less than half of the tower's 1.3 million square feet for office use, freeing the remainder for residential and commercial tenants.
Mayor Andre Dickens endorsed the project as "a significant step in moving Atlanta forward," describing the vision as transforming the block into "a vibrant and welcoming destination." For the Dickens administration, which had been pushing for downtown residential density as a strategy for revitalization, the Georgia-Pacific conversion represented exactly the kind of private-sector investment the city needed — a major property owner choosing to bring residents downtown rather than waiting for the office market to recover.
What It Means for Downtown
The 400 apartments at Georgia-Pacific Tower will add to a growing inventory of downtown residential conversions. The trend — driven by remote work, excess office supply, and city incentives — has reshaped blocks of Peachtree Street that were once exclusively commercial. Residents in the building will live within walking distance of Woodruff Park, Five Points MARTA station, the Peachtree Center district, and the Centennial Olympic Park area.
For a stretch of Peachtree Street that empties after 6 p.m. on weekdays, 400 new households represent something more valuable than rent revenue: foot traffic, demand for restaurants and services, and the kind of around-the-clock activity that makes a downtown feel like a neighborhood rather than a commuter destination.
Original reporting by Georgia Public Broadcasting, September 20, 2024.