Dunwoody’s aging, long-vacant Gold Kist HQ to get new lease on life

In the shadow of State Farm’s massive—and expanding—Dunwoody campus sits an unassuming three-story office building that’s been vacant for nearly a decade, an anomaly amongst so much nearby investment.

Bordering the point where MARTA rail lines cross over the Interstate 285 Perimeter, the building formerly housed the Gold Kist poultry company.

Now, it seems, the former headquarters, which has been empty since 2011, is expected to play a role in the Perimeter city’s development boom.

According to Reporter Newspapers, Buckhead-based RocaPoint Partners and New York-based The Georgetown Company recently purchased the roughly 13-acre Gold Kist site.

The joint venture, known for Forsyth County’s rising Halcyon mixed-use district, aims to transform the plain 1970s office complex into a creative corporate campus.

The structure sprawls across more than 264,000 square feet, offering massive floor plates for would-be tenants.

It also boasts close proximity to the Dunwoody MARTA stop, Perimeter Mall, and a long roster of new and established businesses, as marketers point out.

Plans now call for sprucing up the interior and exterior in a way that blends the two, Phil Mays, principal with RocaPoint Partners, told the publication. The goal is to continue a national office trend for tenants “to not be locked in a box, for a mix of outdoors with indoors,” he said.

Zoning code allows the property to host a million square feet of office space, although it’s unlikely the vision will expand that much.

There are, however, plans to bring another office building—perhaps a wood-framed one, like T3 West Midtown, according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle—and possibly a hotel.

If it looks familiar, the former Gold Kist building was used as a set for FBI headquarters scenes in director Clint Eastwood’s controversial Centennial Olympic Park bombing movie Richard Jewell.

Long before that, though, in 2016, the site was expected to host the Crown Towers, a dense, high-rise-heavy development opposed by city officials.