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At this point, it’s not just rundown. Not merely blighted, or even postapocalyptic. It’s like a 15-story set for one of the Saw movies—all bleak corridors, scary shadows, busted concrete, and bad graffiti. And unfortunately, the former Presidential Hotel serves as a sort of cylindrical front door for not just DeKalb County but all of ITP Atlanta, at least for anyone headed down from, say, Lilburn, Buford, or Charlotte. It’s been called one of the metro’s most visible buildings and one of its worst eyesores.
So what’s happening with this abandoned, windowless, hulking, skeletal mass of a concrete corncob now, a half-century after its construction? It’s complicated.
Still known colloquially for its 4001 Presidential Parkway address and original purpose, the Presidential Hotel was built in 1973 where I-85 and I-285 meet. The completion, the following decade, of the Tom Moreland Interchange—aka Spaghetti Junction—only boosted the building’s status as a local icon, putting it on full display for hundreds of thousands of commuters daily. According to the AJC, its long slide into infamy began in the 1980s, when it became an unauthorized, mini police precinct—and a hot spot used by cops for “free drinks, food, and rooms for sexual trysts.” Following years of declining patronage—the predicted development boom around Spaghetti Junction never came, and the original Presidential Hotel closed in 1987—the property rebounded as a Ramada-branded hotel in time for the 1996 Olympics.
In the late ’90s, a legendary nightclub called Club Europe roared to life at the building’s base. Various attempts to rejuvenate the tower followed, but it went to auction, and by around 2010 it was operating as condos—the Presidential Boutique Condotel. As infighting began between…
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