With the 2026 World Cup on the horizon, ambitious plans heating up at Centennial Yards, and CNN Center promising an upscale revival, the Georgia World Congress Center Authority set its own wheels in motion in April 2024 -- issuing a request for qualifications to possibly redevelop the Home Depot Backyard, less than six years after the greenspace opened.
The 11-acre hybrid park, wedged between Mercedes-Benz Stadium and the Signia by Hilton Atlanta tower, hosts tailgating during Falcons and Atlanta United games alongside community programming like summer movie nights and free yoga. It rose in the footprint of the old Georgia Dome -- a crushed layer of the demolished stadium sits several feet beneath the Backyard's grass, helping with irrigation -- and was originally billed as a park meant to uplift surrounding Westside communities.
The GWCCA's RFQ, issued April 1, sought architecture, engineering, and landscape firms that could help create what officials called an "entertainment development project," with the stated goal of a "seamless integration" of entertainment venues, convention center buildings, and greenspace on downtown's westernmost fringe. No budget, timeline, or specific use type -- residential, commercial, or otherwise -- was specified. The call came one week after Centennial Yards unveiled its own splashy entertainment-hub plans, timed to the same World Cup deadline.
The Backyard, which opened in September 2018 with restrooms, a playground, and sculptures, can host more than 500 vehicles for game-day tailgating. Its potential redevelopment fits a broader pattern of GWCCA activity: the authority had separately issued an RFQ the prior year for a master-plan update of its convention campus -- the nation's fourth-largest -- not revised since 2008, and had already delivered a pedestrian mall and $18 million transportation hub near State Farm Arena in 2022, plus downtown's tallest new hotel in nearly four decades, the 976-room Signia by Hilton, that January.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published April 2024.
