Creating A True College Town Downtown

There’s a quote floating around the internet attributed to the famous conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein: “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”

That’s the situation Georgia State President M. Brian Blake found himself in this spring when a donor approached him with an enticing challenge: How can we help facilitate your highest strategic ambitions and Georgia State’s next big thing? After exploring a dozen ideas, there was mutual interest to, on a short time horizon, remake GSU’s downtown campus and serve as a beacon for further revitalization of Atlanta. The challenge was, what could be done before the World Cup shines its spotlight on the city in the summer of 2026?

“We were confronted with an opportunity to dream a dream,” Blake says. “We were asked, ‘What could you do in two years?’”

The opportunity set Blake and his team off on a whirlwind quest to bring many of GSU’s most wished-for improvements to life on a very ambitious schedule. Now, thanks to an unprecedented gift from the Woodruff Foundation announced in early November, a series of transformational changes to the Atlanta Campus will be made possible. At $80 million, the grant is the largest in university history and the largest that the foundation has given to any institution in the University System of Georgia.

The university will embark on nine projects aimed at refashioning downtown Atlanta and contributing to Blake’s goal in the university’s strategic plan of Identity, Placemaking and Belonging. Plans include creating an enlarged “Panther Quad,” which closes off a section of Gilmer Street to vehicle traffic to create a zone of greenspace, food trucks, cafés and study and relaxation areas. By connecting Hurt Park and the Greenway, the Quad will become the social heart of campus, helping to realize Blake’s vision of creating a true “college town downtown.”

In the late 1940s, Georgia State’s first president, George Sparks, had a lofty vision for the corner of Gilmer and Courtland streets, at the heart of what would become the university’s unconventional downtown campus. When he imagined Georgia State’s future, he looked skyward, to the tops of tall buildings yet to be constructed. Up there, hundreds of feet above the streets of downtown, a “campus in the sky” would take shape: a towering research library, elevated classrooms, even a rooftop beach and badminton court.

George Sparks, Georgia State's first president, points toward the building that bears his name.

Plans change however, and the building that went up at the corner of Gilmer and Courtland in 1955 rose just four stories high. Clad in white Georgia marble, it was named in Sparks’ honor.

Sparks Hall was a watershed achievement for the young institution, symbolizing its evolution from a small Evening School of Commerce to a rapidly growing college. It was the first building planned and constructed by Georgia State, and the first in the whole university system to be cooled by air conditioning throughout. Over the years, it has also been the heart of much of GSU’s civic activism: When students demonstrated against the Vietnam War in 1970, they gathered in front of Sparks Hall. In 1992, after a fraternity member defaced a trash can with a racial slur, students staged a sit-in at Sparks Hall to protest intolerance on campus.

Sparks Hall has been a familiar sight for students navigating between GSU’s downtown facilities, which now number more than 100. Yet as the campus and student population have expanded, the need for more integrated, open spaces has become clear.

During his tenure as president, Sparks went to great lengths to ensure the university was a place where students — especially nontraditional ones — could succeed. During the Great Depression, he even cashed in his life insurance policy to keep the lights on. His dedication to creating nurturing spaces for students has remained a core part of GSU’s mission, making this latest campus transformation plan a natural extension of his legacy.

When Sparks imagined GSU’s future, he looked up. Today, President M. Brian Blake sees that future not in the clouds but right at street level, no longer distancing the campus from the city that surrounds it but integrating the two as never before.

“When previously it was ‘how do we get isolated from the city?’ now our idea is really just being the city,” Abramson says. “A true integration between the campus and the city is the only way to make it happen.”

Quads are a new thing for GSU, but creating spaces for outdoor contemplation is a concept that goes back to antiquity. Aristotle famously delivered his lectures to students while walking around the Lyceum, and the Stoics held debates in outdoor courtyards.

The notion of the quadrangle, or quad, as a central greenspace around which buildings are arranged, has its origins in the monasteries of medieval Europe. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge used enclosed quads to facilitate debate and social interaction.

Thinkers from Cicero to Thoreau have embraced the idea that intellectual development and personal growth thrive in outdoor spaces. Learning doesn’t happen only in the classroom, after all, as GSU students well know.

“I think the open spaces are really nice. They give people a place to relax, be around other people and just exist,” says Matthew Scheiber, a first-year student walking on the Greenway on his way to class one recent afternoon. “Open spaces like this give the campus a more community feeling that can be hard to find when everything’s, like, inside the city.”

Quads also foster the kinds of social connection that can be so influential during the college years. Abramson himself had a life-altering interaction on the quad of his alma mater, SUNY Albany, in the late 1990s.

“I met my wife in the quad. She was rollerblading by me,” he recalls, smiling. “I guess I had a good opening line, because we’ve made it work for the last 30 years.”

First-year student Samaria Keller took a break from filming a TikTok dance routine to reflect on the value of community space at GSU.

“I do think we need more open spaces in urban life,” she says. “It’s essential to the mentality of students.”

That’s what it’s all about for Blake who, while a professor at Georgetown, would often move his classes outside into the quad when the weather was nice.

“When students come to GSU they learn, but they don’t have that other piece — the community space,” he says. “Having that is going to help us give that mental-health burst that helps students graduate. That’s the bottom line for me.”

Another major component of the updated Master Plan is to improve the look and feel of Woodruff Park, a key node connecting campus with the Fairlie-Poplar District.

“The current design of the park really lends itself to clusters, rather than leveraging the fullness of the park,” says Abramson, who plans to add more lighting and GSU-branded signage to the area, as well as street art and plants. The plans also call for moving the streetcar stop a few meters south, to make the entrance to the park more open and inviting.

“The idea is to create this very comfortable walk between our 25 Park Place Plaza and the Aderhold Building, to make Woodruff Park a true community space that’s even more open and welcoming to students,” Abramson says.

But in certain ways, the park being part of the university means encountering the growing issue of inadequate housing that affects all American cities. GSU students often see the face of this crisis when they walk through Woodruff Park.

The homelessness epidemic isn’t an issue that Georgia State can solve on its own, but Blake wants the university to play its part by working with the new Center on Health and Homelessness in the School of Public Health.

The new center will leverage the expertise of faculty within the School of Public Health and across the university to develop and evaluate evidence-based solutions that address homelessness and its related health issues.

“We’re the premier public institution for health sciences research in the state,” Blake says. “We can bring a lot of that to bear in solving the homelessness crisis.”

By partnering with institutions like Grady Hospital and by taking a more active role in operating the park, GSU hopes to make the park a shared community space and help the unhoused residents get the services they need.

“While we work on some of the larger issues, our plan is to redesign the physical space so that we can peacefully and productively coexist,” Abramson says. “We're working with our partners and the city so we can get to a place where that population is well-served and doesn't have to use the park as a place to live.”

The projects are a formidable slate, but one that the administration believes is attainable, thanks to the Woodruff gift.

“Our ability to achieve what would traditionally be 10 years’ worth of progress and improvement in two short years is just an extraordinary transformational opportunity,” Blake says. “Creating the campus that we need so students can feel comfortable is foundational. We can’t do anything else without it.”

The Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce’s Katie Kirkpatrick, who encouraged Blake to seize Woodruff’s opportunity, welcomes the campus transformation.

“GSU’s plans will be an important part of downtown Atlanta’s next chapter, revitalizing the neighborhood and thoughtfully crafting a more campus-like feeling,” she says. “More well-maintained greenspace and a more secure environment means a more vibrant environment for students and faculty to enjoy, as well as others who live and work downtown.”

GSU’s plans are just one piece of a larger vision for reimagining downtown, alongside projects like the renovation of CNN Center, and the Stitch, a plan to “cap the Connector” with greenspace.

"The revitalization of this group project that we call Atlanta is the revitalization of downtown,” says Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens. “We all want to make sure that downtown is brighter and more inviting. And as an alumnus of Georgia State, I want to see this campus flourish. This is a great way to connect these parks and to make sure that people have an enjoyable experience downtown.”

“We love Atlanta, and being such a significant part of transforming the city is very exciting,” Blake says. “We can be a beacon to all the other development efforts, to create something that’s going to be long-lasting.”

While events like the World Cup have trained the world’s eyes on Atlanta, creating momentum for large-scale change, for Blake and Abramson, it’s important to take the long view.

“The steady driving force for improvement in this city has always been Georgia State,” Abramson says. “After 2026, you know who’s still going to be here? It’s going to be Georgia State. We are the player who can truly make things work. And we’re going to start to have the campus that our students have always deserved and wanted.”