Norfolk Southern plans to build $575M HQ on Midtown’s West Peachtree Street

Applaud it or hate it, the Atlanta City Council’s approval of the Gulch agreement this week appears to have secured railroad giant Norfolk Southern’s HQ move to Midtown.

The company threatened to take its business elsewhere if the deal didn’t clear a council vote on Monday. The CEO initially said Norfolk Southern would ditch its plans for an Atlanta home base because, without the Gulch deal’s passage, it wouldn’t be able to unload a key piece of Gulch property that it currently owns.

But now, according to an Invest Atlanta document, the company knows where it wants to build its new headquarters.

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On a site between 3rd Street and Ponce de Leon Avenue on Midtown’s bustling West Peachtree Street, a $575 million HQ building is slated to rise.

Norfolk Southern’s new HQ is slated to span some 750,000 square feet of office space and infuse 850 new jobs into Atlanta, in addition to the 2,000-plus employees already here. (The company’s current office is about a mile north of the proposed project site, near the Arts Center MARTA Station.)

According to the Invest Atlanta inducement resolution fact sheet, the new HQ could have an $811 million economic impact and could come in tandem with a $600 million lease purchase bond.

Norfolk Southern is expected to close on the property in the beginning of 2019.

Practically next door, CA Ventures is moving forward with a 27-story building for 699 Spring Street marketed toward students, near the Varsity and just south of the Coda project.

And just up West Peachtree Street, John Portman and Associates has three contiguous office projects in the works that would join its tech-hub Coda, which is nearing completion.