Plans to create the first arts organization headquarters along the Atlanta Beltline’s 22-mile loop are set to move forward in coming days. 

A groundbreaking ceremony for an Atlanta Opera expansion project—now officially christened the “Molly Blank Center for Opera & the Arts”—is scheduled for Monday afternoon, as led by Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and other dignitaries. 

The Atlanta Opera, an internationally recognized opera house founded in 1979, unveiled plans a year and ½ ago for the $45-million, adaptive-reuse project that will bring a multidisciplinary arts center to the doorstep of the Beltline’s Northwest Trail, on a looping segment completed a few years ago in Buckhead.

Situated between Northside Drive and Peachtree Road, the project will span 4.7 acres of new construction, greenspaces, and parking.

Specifically, plans call for expanding and modernizing the former Bobby Jones Clubhouse, a Grecian revival structure that dates to the early 1900s at 384 Woodward Way, with the multi-use Beltline pathway and revised Bobby Jones Golf Course in its backyard.

Condition of the former Bobby Jones Clubhouse and its proximity to the park and golf course today. Google Maps

Courtesy of Atlanta Opera; designs, Post Loyal

The planned $45-million facility is considered a key piece of the opera’s new $110-million comprehensive campaign. Theater Projects and A’kustiks LLC are leading development.

A $27.5-million gift from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, as announced in late 2024, is making the opera project financially viable. The center will be named in honor of Blank’s mother, Molly, a dancer and sculptor who cherished opera and theater performances and music concerts she attended in Atlanta and Blank’s native New York. 

Blank, Home Depot cofounder and Atlanta Falcons and United owner, has contributed through his foundation significant gifts in recent years for high-profile projects across the metro. Those include the National Center for Civil and Human Rights’ second phase, a massive Children's Healthcare of Atlanta expansion, a Shepherd Center residential tower for patients’ families, a Chattahoochee RiverLands access project, and U.S. Soccer Federation’s new U.S. headquarters near Trilith, among other initiatives. 

In Buckhead, Atlanta Opera’s arts center facility will expand the current 17,000-square-foot golf clubhouse into a 56,000-square-foot complex, with its exterior on Woodward Way designed to blend with the surrounding, tony neighborhood. Meanwhile, a more contemporary facility will face the Beltline around back, according to Post Loyal architects, an Atlanta-based firm leading designs.

Features around the new building will include a “nature-inspired” 200-seat recital hall (with greenspace views), an immersive theater venue, a film studio, a rehearsal hall, costume shop, administrative offices, and gardens, project leaders have said. 

Courtesy of Atlanta Opera; designs, Post Loyal

Scope of the 4.7-acre site in question, with the adjacent Beltline trail and links shown just to the south. Google Maps

Plans for the recital and theatrical spaces call for hosting a “variety of performances and community engagement focusing on the arts, including recitals, jazz, cabarets, immersive chamber operas, and more,” opera officials have said. 

When the opera project was announced in September 2024, Rhys Wilson, Atlanta Opera board chair, said the building’s design is intended to evoke an open and welcoming sense that “emphasizes the same values we held during the pandemic and that we will always espouse—of being a skillfully managed organization dedicated to making beautiful music available to everyone, everywhere.” At the time, the center’s naming rights were still up for grabs. 

The opera’s current rehearsal space doubles as a storage warehouse next to an active railroad line along Northside Drive in Loring Heights, which officials say the company has outgrown. Main-stage productions of the Atlanta Opera will continue to be housed at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center.  

Construction timelines call for the new Atlanta Opera facility to be finished and open in summer 2027.

Find more project context and visuals in the gallery above. 

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