The redevelopment wave that rebuilt Summerhill's Georgia Avenue is angling east. Atlanta Track Club and Atlanta Public Schools have put together a joint pitch for the Cheney Olympic Legacy Complex, which would give Georgia its first indoor facility built specifically for track and field.
The site carries real history. The 16.5 acres in question, all APS-owned and sitting next to Phoenix II Park, are what survives of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games warmup grounds for track and field. The renovated outdoor 400-meter track that Atlanta Track Club has programmed there since 2017 would stay put, with the new building working around it rather than replacing it.
The program is dense. Plans call for a 200-meter indoor track, a STEM center, unspecified healthcare offerings, an 8,757-square-foot shared community space fronting Georgia Avenue, 3,400 square feet of run-specialty retail, and an overlook of the existing outdoor oval to the south. The Track Club would move its headquarters offices into the complex. Bass and Ami streets, which currently cut around the park, would be converted into pedestrian ways.
The reference point organizers keep citing is The Armory Track in New York's Washington Heights, a year-round indoor facility wedged into a dense residential neighborhood. Atlanta Track Club wants to import that model to the South and use a state-of-the-art hydraulic 200-meter oval to chase NCAA championships, collegiate conference meets, high school invitationals and youth competition, while promising continued neighborhood access.
Not everyone is sold. Plans show a surface parking lot just west of the current track serving staff and the general public, with no stated space count, and a source says that piece is not sitting well with nearby neighborhood leadership. The project's FAQ argues the lot would sit behind building frontage and tree buffers, held back from the street and from residents, with overflow for large events pushed to Georgia State University's Purple Lot. A scheduled presentation to the Grant Park Neighborhood Association this week came off the agenda.
The clock is the story now. Community engagement began last month and was scheduled to run through July, the APS Board of Education is expected to take up the proposal in August, and if it clears that gate the Track Club says it wants a definitive agreement signed by the end of September. That is a fast timeline for a project that would permanently reassign a piece of Atlanta's Olympic inheritance.
Original reporting: Urbanize Atlanta (July 20, 2026)