Biography|Ted Turner — CNN Went on the Air From This Old Clubhouse on Techwood

At 6 p.m. Eastern on 1 June 1980, Cable News Network left a red-brick clubhouse at 1050 Techwood Drive and did not sign off.

David Walker and Lois Hart opened the first hour from a converted ballroom. About 1.7 million cable homes could receive it.

The building had been the third home of Atlanta's Progressive Club, a Jewish social club finished decades earlier and left empty after the members moved on.

Turner paid 4.2 million dollars for the twenty-one-acre tract in 1979. An abandoned country club next to Georgia Tech was cheaper, and closer to his Peachtree studios, than a hotel site in Buckhead.

Engineers were still wiring the plant on opening day. Porta-potties stood in for finished restrooms. A garden grew in an old swimming pool so a reporter could file a farm segment from the grounds.

Turner told guests the network would keep going when the broadcast evening news had packed up. He had spent three years planning a channel that treated news as a continuous service instead of a half-hour appointment.

Skeptics called it the chicken-noodle network. The name stuck because the budget looked like a local station's and the ambition did not.

The first years were loss-making. By the mid-1980s the service was in the black, and the Techwood rooms had become too small.

In 1987 CNN moved downtown to the former Omni complex. The Techwood campus stayed Turner ground. It later took his name and took CNN back again in the 2020s after the downtown atrium was sold.

The pin is the public production campus, not a residence. The original Progressive Club facade is gone under later studio buildings, but the address is the same one on the 1979 deed and the 1980 air date.

A visitor standing on Techwood is standing where twenty-four-hour television news started, in a building that had been built for dances.

Photo: Bernard Gotfryd, April 1985, public domain, Library of Congress.