Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium was a baseball, football and soccer stadium that formerly stood in Atlanta, Georgia. Completed in a then-record 50 weeks for $18 million, it opened in the spring of 1965 as Atlanta Stadium. It was intended as the home of the soon-to-be-relocating Braves, but court battles kept the team in Milwaukee as a lame duck for a year. So the new stadium had a lame duck of its own for that first season: the Atlanta Crackers of the International League, whose previous home had been Ponce de Leon Park at 650 Ponce de Leon Avenue. In 1966, both the NL's transplanted Atlanta Braves and the NFL's expansion Atlanta Falcons moved in. In 1967 the Atlanta Chiefs of the National Professional Soccer League (reformed as the North American Soccer League in 1968) began the first of eight seasons played at the stadium. The stadium's name was lengthened to Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium with Ted Turner's purchase of the Braves in 1976. The Falcons moved to the Georgia Dome in 1992, while the Braves had to wait until the Olympic Stadium from the 1996 Summer Olympics was renovated into Turner Field to move out at the beginning of the 1997 season. The stadium sat 60,606 for football and 52,007 for baseball. The baseball competition for the 1996 Summer Olympics was held at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.
Historic and notable events in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium
Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium was imploded on August 2, 1997. A parking lot for Turner Field now stands on the site, with an outline of the old stadium, and a plaque marking the spot where Hank Aaron's historic 715th career home run landed on April 8, 1974, in what was formerly the Braves bullpen.
The stadium was demolished in the same year as another Atlanta sports venue, the Omni Coliseum. That arena was the former home of the NBA's Atlanta Hawks and the NHL's Atlanta Flames.
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