The Crum & Forster Building is a 1928 three-story building with a Renaissance façade with columns and arches located at 771 Spring Street at Tech Square in Midtown Atlanta.
History
The building was designed in 1926 by a team of New York and Atlanta architects, Ed Ivey and Lewis Crook, who were both Georgia Tech graduates and helped establish the Architecture program at Georgia Tech in 1908,[1] and opened in 1928 as a regional office for a national insurance firm.[2]
In 2007, the Georgia Tech Foundation purchased the building, and sought permits to demolish the building as part of a plan to expand Technology Square.[1] Preservationists fought the demolition and in August 2009, the Atlanta City Council and Mayor Shirley Franklin granted the building protective status as a historic landmark.[3] The Georgia Tech Foundation appealed this decision. They instead purchased an adjoining property where a SunTrust Banks branch was previously located. In September 2013, the Georgia Tech Foundation demolished two-thirds of the Crum & Forster Building, leaving only part of its facade, to clear space for a High Performance Computing Center mid-rise.[4]
As of late 2017, there are plans to build an 8,000-square-foot (740 m2) restaurant in the remaining portion of the building, adjacent to a new 20,000-square-foot (1,900 m2) food hall at the adjacent new CODAmixed-use development.[5]