The spiel began like this: “Situated at the intersection of Luckie Street and Ivan Allen Jr. Boulevard...Aquarius Tower offers unique, unobstructed, breathtaking views of Centennial Olympic Park.” Yeah, not so much. Eye-catching design, wind-powered capabilities, with a car-parking robot. But ultimately a no-go, circa 2007.

This concept was once described as the “Crown Jewel of the Midtown Mile”—and lambasted as a giant glassy spatula. Proposed in 2008 as an anchor of the still-developing Midtown Mile, the Mandarin Oriental condominium-hotel hybrid would have cost around $300 million and towered over Peachtree Street with 53 stories. (Another version later surfaced.)

The property was in foreclosure by early 2010 and remains a parking lot, although plans have emerged recently for a possible 530-foot YOO tower on site, with some of the same developers involved.

For several long years, Atlanta development wonks waited with baited breath for this EVIVA incarnation to materialize at a marquee location: the southeast corner of Peachtree and 6th streets. Alas, developers Integral Group removed street signage and officially pulled the plug in May. (They did, however, leave the door open, saying a “world-class development” could be in the parcel’s future.)

As eventually conceived, the 32-story tower would have stood 360 feet tall, substantially shorter than its neighbor to the north, but with design that Integral head Egbert Perry once called “iconic.”

Plotted for a 2009 opening, this concept by architect David Chipperfield would have brought about 80 apartments, retail, and a 15,000-square-foot contemporary art museum near 15th and Peachtree streets. Instead, pricey condos of much smaller scale have materialized there.

Back in the pre-recession boom times, the future POTUS set sites on Atlanta as an excellent place to leave his mark in the form of a glassy two-tower development, complete with a three-story “TRUMP” sign over Midtown.

A partnership involving Donald Trump formed in 2006; plans for Phase I included a $260-million, 48-story tower at 15th and West Peachtree streets. It would feature restaurants and retail (and interior designs by Kenny Rogers), but the concept went belly up in 2010.

Shorter in physical stature but high in design ambitions, the Emerson condo tower in Buckhead by JPX Works was initially marketed as “architecture of tomorrow’s Atlanta” and an “ethereal and sculptural” nod to Frank Lloyd Wright’s famed Fallingwater house. Pre-sales never allowed the 41-unit project to take off, and by July, the cleared site was on the market.

Thirty stories, 20,000 square feet of retail, and a restaurant were planned to go up in classical style across the street from the Fox Theatre, but developer Cousins put this “on hold” in 2009. The site festered for years. And now Midtown has a low-rise, modernistic Proton facility there.

The largest condo project ever planned for Buckhead, CityPlace was to have six condo towers with nearly 4,000 units. It was slated to consume 16 acres at Roxboro and East Paces Ferry roads, but it never secured a construction loan. Approved in 2006; plug pulled in 2008. The multifaceted AMLI 3464 project has since taken shape across much of the property.

At 40 stories, 1989’s Promenade tower in Midtown still stands as Atlanta’s seventh tallest building. But as is, it would have been small potatoes next to substantially larger sibling towers (48 and 58 stories) that were crippled by a commercial real estate recession in the early ’90s.

Due to that instability, the existing tower was actually scaled back from the 857 feet envisioned above. Nonetheless, its tapering spire is still distinctive amid the subdistrict’s growing high-rise forest.