Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium

Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium
The Launching Pad

Location	Atlanta, Georgia
Opened	April 12, 1966
Closed	October 24, 1996
Capacity	52,013 (baseball) 62,000 (football)
Owned By	City of Atlanta and Fulton County
Architect:	Heery & Heery and Finch, Alexander Barnes Rothschild & Paschal
Dimensions: Left Left-Center Center Right-Center Right	330 ft. 385 ft. 402 ft. 385 ft. 330 ft.

Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium was a baseball and American football stadium that formerly stood in Atlanta, Georgia. Completed in 1966 for $18 million, both the NFL's Atlanta Falcons and the NL's Atlanta Braves moved in in 1966. The Falcons moved to the Georgia Dome in 1992, while the Braves had to wait until the Olympic Stadium from the 1996 Summer Olympics was renovated into Turner Field to move out at the beginning of the 1997 season. The stadium sat 60,700 for football and 52,013 for baseball.

The stadium was relatively non-descript, one of the many saucer-shaped multipurpose facilities built during the 1960s. The stadium was long known for the poor quality of the field of play - no one bothered to hire full-time groundskeepers until the early 1990s, instead relying on a city work crew. The relatively high elevation meant that the stadium was relatively favorable to long-ball hitters, giving rise to the nickname The Launching Pad. The stadium was refurbished for the 1996 season because it hosted the Olympic baseball competition. It probably looked better in many ways in its last season than it had in its first.

Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium was imploded on August 2, 1997. A parking lot for Turner Field now stands on the site, with a plaque in that lot marking the spot where Hank Aaron's historic 715th career home run, the most historic event ever to occur in the old park, landed in what was formerly the Braves bullpen.