Ahead spreads a broad plaza of fountains and plazas, built for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games and left behind as Atlanta's lasting downtown legacy. Atlanta won the bid to host the Centennial Olympics — the hundredth anniversary of the modern Games — in 1990, beating out Athens in a victory that surprised the world and electrified Atlanta. The park was carved out of a blighted district of warehouses and parking lots west of downtown and served as the public gathering space for the Games, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors nightly for concerts and celebrations.
On the night of July 27, 1996, a pipe bomb exploded here during a concert, killing two people and injuring more than a hundred. Security guard Richard Jewell was wrongly suspected and hounded by the press for months before the actual bomber, anti-government extremist Eric Rudolph, was identified. The park was redesigned and expanded after the Games, and the five interlocking rings of the fountain remain one of Atlanta's most visited public spaces.
Nearby, the Georgia Aquarium, World of Coca-Cola, and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights have clustered around the park, forming an unlikely civic campus that draws millions of visitors a year.