College Park

Understand

The east-west avenues in College Park are named for Ivy League colleges, and the north-south streets are named for influential College Park residents.

History

The community that would become College Park was founded as Atlantic City in 1890 as a depot on the Atlanta and West Point Railroad. The town was renamed Manchester when it was incorporated as a city in 1891. It was renamed again as the city of College Park in 1896. The city's name came from being the home of Cox College (where the city hall and other buildings now stand) and Georgia Military Academy (now the Woodward Academy).

The history of College Park has been closely linked with what is now known as Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport — airport development having spurred several radical changes to the landscape of the municipality over the course of the 20th century.

In the 1970s and 1980s, large swaths of property in College Park were purchased in order to address concerns about aircraft noise. The 1985 Chuck Norris film Invasion U.S.A. was filmed in these abandoned portions of College Park; houses owned by the City of Atlanta and the FAA were allowed to be blown up to simulate bazooka attacks, which was criticized because nearby properties were still in the process of being purchased. This site, in 2003, became the Georgia International Convention Center. Next door is the Gateway Center Arena, which opened in November 2019, home to the NBA's G-League College Park Skyhawks and the WBNA's Atlanta Dream.

Although the Atlanta hip hop music scene in the 1980s and 1990s was largely credited to artists from nearby suburban Decatur, College Park and the adjacent city of East Point have been strongly associated with artists and record producers from "SWATS" ("Southwest Atlanta, Too Strong"), whom have substantially contributed to the evolution of the southern hip hop genre over the course of the 2000s.

In the later 2010s redevelopment spread to College Park. From the 1990s and into the 2010s, the City of College Park succeeded in repurchasing the entirety of the 320 acres adjacent to downtown; commercial and residential development in this abandoned area, now referred to as "Airport City," is part of a larger transit-oriented revitalization plan referred to as "Aerotropolis."

Get in

By plane

• Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL)is the world's busiest airport, and is the largest hub for Delta Airlines, which has over 1,000 daily departures to points around the country and the world. The airport property is located partly in Hapeville, and partly within the city limits of College Park and Atlanta, as well as unincorporated areas of Fulton and Clayton County.

By car

By bus