Croker Concourse

Croker Concourse is the mixed-use development Charlie Croker built in Cherokee County, Georgia, and the clearest physical expression of his ambition and miscalculation. Conceived as the center of a future edge city, it combined a forty-story tower with a mall, cineplex, hotel and apartments, and an elaborate domed club. Instead of arriving ahead of a wave of growth, the complex stood lonely amid trees and conspicuously empty parking. Its financial failure helped bring Croker’s business empire down; its eventual sale turned the building into both an asset for creditors and evidence of the excess that had made it infamous.

Location and original vision

Croker imagined the development as a new edge city west of Forsyth County and north of the Galleria, part of the northward expansion of Atlanta into its surrounding counties. Other commercial centers had formed around major intersections and malls, and development was pushing into what had been an immense expanse of trees. Croker wanted to establish a comparable center in Cherokee County, with the added distinction of bearing his own name. The scale of the plan was not simply commercial: the project would make a new suburban center and mark its developer as the person who had seen the future first.

That future was not yet in place. Looking down from his Gulfstream V, Croker saw the tower, mall, cineplex, hotel-and-apartment complex, and a vast sweep of asphalt, isolated in the wooded landscape. He understood the mismatch between the development and its surroundings: the complex was too far north and too far from the old city for its current market, although a future outer-perimeter highway might eventually make the investment valuable. The building’s position therefore held both promise and reproach. It might be well placed for growth that had not arrived, but its present emptiness could not be financed by a forecast.

The project’s scale gave Croker’s personal name architectural force. He had chosen a forty-story tower and topped it with a dome, so that the Croker name rose conspicuously over the landscape. From above, that prominence made the development look less like a settled center than a solitary island. Croker’s private recognition of the mismatch—his folly, as he thought of it—was sharpened by the very visibility he had sought: the tower could not be missed, and neither could the vacant land and parking around it.

Design, amenities, and the promise of tenants

The dome housed a planetarium and the Cosmos Club, a private dining club unlike Atlanta’s other clubs in high-rise buildings. Croker spent $8.5 million on an astronomical light-show system developed by the Henry Beuhl, Jr., observatory at Carnegie-Mellon University. The spectacle was meant to distinguish the tower and lend it a rarefied appeal. Yet the location undercut the extravagance: the hoped-for diners would have to travel out to Cherokee County to eat beneath simulated stars. In Croker’s later view, the club had become an exceptionally expensive failure, a cosmic showpiece with too few people willing to make the journey.

The building’s office space likewise depended on persuading businesses that a suburban address did not mean exclusion from the city. Croker placed the executive suites on the tower’s south side, where occupants could see Midtown and Downtown Atlanta. He meant the view to sell a combination of sylvan spaciousness and proximity to the city proper. The southern exposure also brought practical discomfort: by mid-afternoon the sun could overwhelm the air-conditioning. The suites’ orientation thus embodied the project’s sales argument and its limits at once. Tenants could see the city, but the glass-and-sunlit office could not erase the distance between the building and the established center.

Croker repeatedly treated potential tenants as the people who might reverse the project’s fortunes. During a weekend at Turpmtine Plantation, he hoped to persuade Inman Armholster, chairman of Armaxco Chemical and an influential Atlanta businessman, to lease space. The prospect mattered because Croker Concourse had so far been the worst mistake of Croker’s real-estate career, while Croker had to sell himself as well as his company in order to secure confidence and financing. He recognized the trap in that personal salesmanship: he had started believing his own image of himself as an all-powerful developer.

The search for large tenants continued through separate prospects. Jerry Lovejoy and his colleagues visited Croker’s office as representatives of VectorCom, an aircraft-navigation company looking for a headquarters; a lease might have filled four to eight floors. Croker arranged a conference alcove facing Atlanta, New Orleans coffee with chicory, and ham biscuits, then tried to make the property’s fire stairs part of the presentation. After standing with difficulty because of his painful knee, he proposed taking the stairs so the visitors could inspect the fire-stair enclosure. He was proud of its construction and hoped the demonstration would support the building’s case. He also wanted to avoid Colonel Popover, whose interruption might revive a matter that could cost Croker the prospect of millions in annual rent.

A still larger possibility was associated with Herb Richman: a search for 360,000 square feet of prime office space that might mean seven floors and more than $10 million in annual rent for Croker Concourse. Croker’s lavish hosting at Turpmtine was part of his business method, intended to turn hospitality and the estate’s allure into leases. When he made a remark that he understood to have ruined the prospect, he immediately feared that he had lost those seven floors and the income they represented. The building’s fate depended not only on the development cycle but on fragile negotiations conducted through personal performance.

Vacancy, debt, and the creditor’s view

The development’s commercial weakness became increasingly difficult to disguise. At one point it was 60 percent empty and losing money. Its anchor tenant, Consolidated Surety, sought a 30 percent rent reduction, from $32 to $21.80 per square foot. The tenant’s leverage came from Croker’s inability to absorb a departure: it could afford to leave its five-year lease, while Croker could not afford to have the tower look even emptier. The threat translated vacancy into a daily negotiation in which the building’s owner had little power over the space he had built.

The scale of the original investment made occupancy alone an inadequate remedy. Harry Zale described Croker Concourse as having cost about $1,000 per square foot, arguing that even full occupancy for thirty years would not recover the cost and service the debt. He contrasted it with Croker’s earlier projects, which he considered burdened by debt but not fundamentally flawed in their cost basis. The new development was, in his account, the extreme case: a building whose economics could not be repaired simply by leasing it up. Elsewhere the creditor’s estimate put PlannersBanc’s financing for the project at $175 million and concluded that the loan would not perform even if the property reached full occupancy at top current-market rents.

That judgment sat against Croker’s own more hopeful account of the market. His representative argued that commercial vacancies in metropolitan Atlanta had fallen below 20 percent after the 1989–90 saturation and that Croker Concourse, as a prime outer-perimeter property, was positioned for an eventual rise in demand. The contrast is central to the property’s story: Croker’s case rested on sound underlying assets and a future recovery, while his lenders faced immediate cash-flow losses and a building whose actual leasing potential could not support its cost. The tower’s future-facing design could not settle the dispute between forecast and payment due.

PlannersBanc considered avoiding a public foreclosure by taking deeds in lieu of foreclosure. Under the proposed arrangement, Croker would surrender four developments, including Croker Concourse, while keeping his Blackland Road house, Turpmtine, and the N. C. Wyeth painting Jim Bowie on His Deathbed. Croker was described as particularly attached to the tower as well as to the estate and painting. The proposed transfer offered a way to avoid the publicity of an auction, but it also made clear that the building was no longer simply a project Croker might rescue: it had become one of the properties his creditors expected him to give up.

Public image and exposure

Croker Concourse’s own promotional materials turned its ambition into a spectacle. A package delivered to Croker contained a video titled Croker Concourse: A Vision of the Future. Its opening presented an endless green forest before the domed tower emerged, accompanied by grand music and a solemn narration. The film called the development one man’s vision for metropolitan Atlanta and identified its maker as Charles Earl Croker, though Croker did not use his middle name and had instructed that it not appear in publicity. The error irritated him, but the more damaging image was the camera’s lingering view across the practically empty parking lot and through tenantless floors. The video’s claim of visionary scale collided with the vacancy visible on screen.

The promotional film also recounts how Croker obtained the land for the project. When he sought acreage in southern Cherokee County, speculators had already bought much of the land and the required property would have cost about $4 million. Croker’s scheme involved a racial protest led by Andre Fleet, a white-supremacist counter-demonstration associated with Darwell Scruggs, television coverage, and the county’s resulting public disgrace. The deeds shown in the film reveal that Croker then assembled the land for about $200,000, one-twentieth of the anticipated price. The development was therefore linked not only to a costly bet on suburban growth but also to a manipulative land deal whose details became part of the public story of Croker Concourse.

The complex also served as a measure of Croker’s political and personal predicament. Roger White argued that Croker’s financial collapse would make him a less persuasive public supporter of Fareek Fanon: he would appear as another megalomaniacal developer who had failed to stop in time. Later, while explaining his decision to surrender his holdings, Croker connected the pursuit of property, recognition, and eminence with an inability to escape concern about other people’s judgments. Croker Concourse stands at the center of that account because its visible scale had embodied the worldly success he had tried to secure, even as its debt made him more dependent on creditors and reputation.

Surrender and sale

Croker ultimately announced that he was handing over Croker Global Corporation and his property to creditors, including Croker Concourse, the development that had ruined him. His declaration reframed the surrender as a refusal to keep treating possessions as the source of freedom; materially, however, the tower passed out of his control. The transfer did not proceed as quietly as the proposed deed-in-lieu arrangement was meant to allow. Publicity following Croker’s press conference attracted bidders and other investors hoping to buy the property cheaply, and competition among them produced an auction after all.

PlannersBanc sold Croker Concourse for $130 million to a group from Dallas, less than the amount lent to Croker for it. During the process, the bank discovered that its loan officer Raymond Peepgass had secretly formed a syndicate intending to buy the property for $50 million and persuade his superiors to accept that price. The bank dismissed him. The episode repeats the building’s governing pattern in altered form: Croker Concourse had been created as a vehicle for one man’s outsized ambition, then became an object around which creditors, prospective tenants, and insiders pursued their own advantage. Its sale closed Croker’s ownership, but did not undo the project’s importance as the material center of his financial collapse and the most legible monument to his overreach.