In front of you rises the Baptist Tabernacle, a 1911 church built to seat nearly five thousand worshippers and now reborn as one of Atlanta's most storied concert halls. The building seated nearly five thousand worshippers and was for decades one of the most important Protestant churches in the city, hosting revivals, community events, and services that drew enormous congregations. When the congregation moved to a new facility in the mid-twentieth century, the building sat through various uses before being converted into a concert hall in 1996, in time to serve as a venue during the Atlanta Olympics.
The Tabernacle now hosts a wide range of performers in a general admission standing-floor format, with upper balconies preserved from the original church configuration. The acoustics of the original sanctuary — designed to project a preacher's unamplified voice to the back rows — work remarkably well for music. Atlanta's music scene has been one of the most fertile in America since the 1990s, producing the OutKast sound that transformed hip-hop, the trap music aesthetic that Lil Jon and T.I. and later Young Jeezy and Gucci Mane developed, and the newer Atlanta rap wave of Future, Migos, 21 Savage, and Killer Mike.
The Tabernacle has hosted all of it.