AT&T Midtown Center

AT&T Midtown Center is a 677-ft. (206-meter), 47-story skyscraper in Midtown Atlanta, Georgia. Completed in 1982, it serves as the regional headquarters of BellSouth Telecommunications, which does business as AT&T Southeast, and was acquired as part of AT&T's acquisition of BellSouth. Its employees refer to it simply as "675" (its address is 675 West Peachtree Street) or "The Tower". BellSouth Corporate headquarters was located in the Campanile building, also in Midtown.

The company, then called Southern Bell, originally planned to build the tower one block further east at the corner of Ponce de Leon Avenue and Peachtree Street. This would have required the razing of the historic Fox Theatre which would have been an especially great loss to the city after the downtown Loew's Grand Theatre was destroyed by fire in 1978. Tremendous opposition, protests, fundraising, and petition drives within the community prevented the Fox's demolition. Even Liberace spoke out on behalf of the "Fabulous Fox". In the end, a complicated deal was struck to build on an alternate site on West Peachtree Street.

The building has a direct entrance to the North Avenue MARTA Station, which is located at the southern end of the complex and was built concurrently with the building (the station's structure is actually integrated with the skyscraper's foundation). In 2002, BellSouth completed construction of two additional mid-rise buildings adjacent to the tower to form its Bellsouth Midtown Center campus as part of its effort to consolidate office space around mass transit stations.

The architects who designed the tower were Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and Rosser International, Inc. The general contractor for its construction was Beers Skanska, Inc.

ee also

*Architecture of Atlanta
*List of tallest buildings in Atlanta