Biography|Ted Turner — The Omni Complex He Bought and Renamed CNN Center

In 1985 Turner paid forty-two million dollars for the Omni International Complex, a half-empty downtown mall with an ice rink in the atrium and an arena next door.

The building had opened in 1976 as a Cousins Properties speculation. The indoor amusement park failed. The offices sat vacant. Turner needed floor plates that a converted clubhouse on Techwood could not give him.

By 1987 the renovation was far enough along for CNN to move the newsroom here from 1050 Techwood Drive. The complex took the name CNN Center. Headline News, CNN Radio, and Turner corporate offices followed.

The red letters on the west face became a tourist mark for Atlanta the way a network peacock had marked New York.

This was the public headquarters, not a house. Visitors rode an escalator through the atrium and looked down on an open newsroom that the company treated as a civic exhibit.

Turner kept an office in the tower. The building sat beside the Omni Coliseum, later Philips Arena, so the same man who owned the Hawks and the Braves could walk from a basketball bowl into a news channel.

The Time Warner merger of 1996 folded Turner Broadcasting into a larger New York company. Turner stayed vice-chairman for a time, then left the executive suite after the AOL combination wrecked the stock.

CNN stayed in the atrium until the 2020s. WarnerMedia sold the office tower. Production moved back to the Techwood campus in 2023 and 2024. The property is now marketed as The Center.

The pin is still the downtown box at One CNN Center, next to Centennial Olympic Park and the GWCC/CNN Center MARTA station.

What a visitor sees in 2026 is a mall in renovation. What the address records is the decade when Atlanta's news export had a front door on Marietta Street.

Photo: CNN Center, Atlanta, 26 January 2013, Daniel Schwen, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Bernard Gotfryd, April 1985, public domain, Library of Congress.