Lost neighborhood
Segregation
to the early 1990s
City of Atlanta
General area only

Lightning (lost to the Georgia Dome)

A Black working-class neighborhood just west of downtown and among the last in the city to get paved streets and electric power. The state took four blocks for the Georgia World Congress Center in the 1970s and cleared the rest in the late 1980s and early 1990s for the center's expansion and the Georgia Dome.

See it on the map All Segregation records

The record

The Bitter Southerner describes Lightning as one of Atlanta's earliest communities, where most streets were long unpaved. After the legislature decided in 1973 to build the Georgia World Congress Center, four blocks of Lightning were acquired for it. In the late 1980s the state bought up the rest of the area for the Georgia Dome and the center's fourth phase, about 90 acres in all; ground was broken in November 1989, nearly a dozen churches accepted relocation, and by the Dome's opening in September 1992 the neighborhood had been virtually obliterated. The Atlanta History Center says the Dome's construction 'erased' Lightning.

Today: The Dome itself was demolished after Mercedes-Benz Stadium opened; its site is now the stadium's Home Depot Backyard green space.

Where on the map: Former Georgia Dome footprint and adjacent GWCC blocks west of downtown; the pre-1990 street grid is not mapped here.