NFL History | Georgia Dome Site, Atlanta — A Convention Authority Was the Landlord

On 22 January 2017 the Atlanta Falcons beat the Green Bay Packers in the NFC Championship Game at the Georgia Dome. Pro-Football-Reference's quarter-by-quarter table gives Green Bay 0, 0, 15 and 6, and Atlanta 10, 14, 13 and 7, for a final of 44-21, and prints the attendance as 71,127. It was the last National Football League game played in the building. The building was demolished before that year was out.

The Falcons did not own it, and never had. The Georgia Dome was owned and operated by the Georgia World Congress Center Authority, the state body whose principal business is the convention complex immediately to the east. The New Georgia Encyclopedia's entry on the Dome, by Chris Starrs of Athens, dates the deal to an agreement reached in January 1989 between the club's owner, Rankin Smith, and the Governor of Georgia, Joe Frank Harris. Not the mayor of Atlanta, and not Fulton County. Ground was broken on 22 November 1989.

Starrs gives the construction cost as roughly 210 million dollars, raised through tax-exempt bonds and serviced by a 2.75 percent hotel and motel tax levied in Atlanta: a charge on lodging, not on tickets. No source consulted for this entry states what the Falcons contributed to the 1992 construction, and this entry does not assume the answer.

Both published transcriptions of the site's historical marker say that in 2012, twenty years after the Dome opened, the Authority and the Falcons agreed to build Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and the Georgia Historical Society's transcription says it opened in August 2017. The Dome held the conference championship in January of that year and was demolished in November. Starrs records one episode of physical trouble across its life: heavy rain damaged a section of the roof in August 1995, after which repairs and structural adjustments were made.

Another entry in this series describes the Chicago Bears renting Wrigley Field on a handshake with a baseball club, the Boston Patriots playing in a university's surplus grandstand, and the Houston Oilers leasing a school district's field. Atlanta adds a fourth kind of landlord: a state authority in the convention business, for which a football club is one booking among many. The marker credits the building with more than 1,400 events.

The numbers do not agree, and this entry does not reconcile them. The Historical Marker Database's transcription of the marker gives 71,996 seats and an opening in August 1992. The Georgia Historical Society's transcription of the same inscription gives 71,228 seats and an opening on 6 September 1992. Starrs gives 71,250. Both transcriptions put the cost at 214 million dollars against Starrs's figure of roughly 210 million. The two also differ on the demolition, the Historical Marker Database carrying 20 November 2017 and the Society carrying only November 2017. Because the two transcriptions of the exact wording disagree, nothing here is quoted from the marker.

The marker was erected in 2018 by the Georgia Historical Society together with the Georgia World Congress Center Authority, under the Society's Business History Initiative. It is in part the landlord's account of its own building, and it reads that way. The figures of more than 37 million guests and an economic impact of 7 billion dollars are the marker's claims, not this entry's, and the description of the Dome as the world's largest domed stadium is the marker's too. One transcription qualifies that as the largest cable-supported domed stadium; the other does not.

Coordinate. 33.758383, -84.402117, taken from the Historical Marker Database's field GPS for marker 187172, which places the marker at the northwest corner of the Home Depot Backyard, reached from Northside Drive NW north of Magnolia Street NW. This is one method and the entry says so. The United States Census Bureau's TIGER geocoder returned no match at all for 1 Georgia Dome Drive NW, and when asked for 100 Northside Drive NW it answered with 100 Northside Drive SW, a different quadrant about 920 metres to the south. Neither result was used. A control query on 285 Andrew Young International Boulevard NW, the convention centre's address, returned 33.758079, -84.396842, the same latitude and about 490 metres east of the marker, which is consistent with the Dome having stood west of the convention halls but is a plausibility check and not a second record. The Georgia Historical Society's page for the marker publishes no coordinates. Precision radius plus or minus 250 metres: the marker stands at a corner of the site, not at the centre of a building whose oval covered several acres.

Status note, September 2026. This entry describes the ground as its sources describe it, the most recent of them revised in 2019, and nothing in it establishes what stands there today beyond the Home Depot Backyard named in the marker's own location description and Mercedes-Benz Stadium to the south. Re-check after September 2028.

Cover image: Staff Sgt. Ray Santiago of Fort Benning's Ranger Training Brigade watching Carolina Panthers players in the tunnel of the Georgia Dome before the Falcons game of 30 September 2012. Photograph by Jessica Blanton, DVIDS image 674724, VIRIN 120930-A-9999F-326, public domain. It is not a photograph of the January 2017 game and does not show the building from outside. It shows the Dome's service level, more than four years before the last National Football League game played there.

Second image: spectators in the Georgia Dome's seating bowl at the same 2012 game. Photograph by Jessica Blanton, DVIDS image 674721, VIRIN 120930-A-9999F-324, public domain. The DVIDS Location field for both files reads Atlanta, Georgia; it is the captions, not that field, that place them inside the Georgia Dome.