A proposal to move the 1996 Olympic Torch Cauldron has sparked pushback from Summerhill residents, the community where the torch currently resides.
The cauldron, which was lit by the torch carried by Muhammad Ali, currently sits on land owned by Georgia State University (GSU) and, in effect, the University System of Georgia.
GSU has had a large physical expansion and an ever-increasing presence into the Summerhill area in the last decade, converting the old Turner Field into the school’s football stadium, along with a new Convocation Center nearby and off-campus apartments for students sprouting up left and right.
Now, the University System of Georgia, with the support of civic leaders, is looking to move the historic artifact from the games to Centennial Olympic Park, the park created for the 1996 games that has become a cornerstone of Downtown, today maintained by the Georgia World Congress Center Authority. Specifically, officials are looking to move the cauldron — the uppermost part of the torch-tower structure, infamously likened to a box of fries — but say the Olympic Flame Tower will stay in place in Summerhill.
The pushback has prompted an online petition; already, it’s gathered hundreds of signatures.
Georgia State University recently published a two-part series chronicling the path to winning the Olympic bid and how it forever changed the city.
Saporta Report reached out to Georgia State University; at this time, they were only able to share the public press release.
Repeated, repeated promises
Not everyone is against the move. One of the lead architects behind Atlanta winning the Olympic bid Billy Payne supports the move to Centennial Olympic Park, as does former mayor Andrew Young, the other driving force behind the 1996 games. The duo’s journey to bringing the games to Atlanta is chronicled in the 2025 documentary “The Games in Black & White.”
Honor Summerhill, a coalition made up of two community groups Organized Neighbors of Summerhill & Summerhill Neighborhood Development Corporation is behind the petitions to keep the torch cauldron in Summerhill. They allege the decision to move the cauldron without any community input is the latest in a long history of the neighborhood being neglected.
“During that timeframe when the Olympics came into the Summerhill areas, there were a lot of promises that came along with that,” said Cheron Pitchford, executive director for the Summerhill Neighborhood Development Corporation for the last four years, adding that the neighborhood lost a significant portion of the community leading up to the Olympic Games. “Understand, Summerhill as a community… a lot of those people were relatives and close friends… so paving over a good portion of the community and those people being forced out was very disruptive.
Estimates of residents displaced because of the Olympics are in the thousands. Still, many residents were excited to have such a big event right in their backyard, believing it would spur investment into the community. Investment that, following the games, was slow to arrive, if at all.
“There was not a lot of community investment,” Pitchford said, adding that the Olympic stadium that later turned into Turner Field, where the Braves played for about two decades, wreaked “havoc” on the community. “People just felt that, ‘oh, we have the stadium here, we have all these people parking and drinking in our neighborhood, we gave up half our neighborhood, and it didn’t really do anything beneficial for us.’”
For decades, residents of Summerhill called for investments; at one point in the early 2000s, it was believed the area around then-Turner Field would be developed into a retail district; eventually, those plans were redeveloped into what became The Battery Atlanta around the new stadium for the Braves in Cobb County.
“When [the retail complex] finally did happen, it happened in Cobb County,” Pitchford said. “Instead, they pulled [the team] out and left vacant buildings in Summerhill. For people who have been there for a long time, it just feels like repeated, repeated promises.”
Even calls for grocery stores — a call that went unanswered until recently, when a Publix opened in the neighborhood in 2023 amidst large investments from Georgia State University. And this new wave of investment is largely spurred by Georgia State University, not anything from the Olympics itself.
Within this context, they argue that the community itself saw tens of thousands of residents displaced for the games alone, and that removing the cauldron from its longstanding place in Summerhill, where it was officially lit is disrespectful to the legacy of the community of the games.
Despite, or perhaps because of, promises of investments in numerous forms and concessions made by the community for the Olympics that did not yield benefits, Pitchford said, the cauldron is significant to the neighborhood.
“The one thing that we have is that the Olympics happened here, and that’s very special; it was very big in Atlanta, and that’s something to hang your hat on. There were people in Summerhill who carried the torch through the neighborhood,” Pitchford said.
Pitchford added that you can see homes with symbols of the torch on them, showing just how important the torch has become to the community.
John Helton, president of the Organized Neighbors of Summerhill and Summerhill resident for the last 25 years, echoed similar sentiments to Pitchford. He also said they only became aware of this planned move because Summerhill’s state representative Phil Olaleye, formerly the president of the Organized Neighbors of Summerhill, spotted money appropriated for it in the state budget.
“At that point in time, they already had the renderings done. In their mind it was a done deal, I think,” Helton said. “I later learned that this has been going on for many years, this intent to do this.”
At one point in some of the earliest proposals, Helton said it was his understanding that the intent was to take the tower that holds the cauldron as well, and possibly demolish the bridge. Only later did it morph into the proposal today of just taking the cauldron — akin to “taking the Statue of Liberty’s head off of her,” as he put it.
Olaleye told Saporta Report that the proposal in the budget to move the cauldron first appeared without notice in the budget in the spring of 2024, and again during the 2025 session for the amount of $833,000; he said he worked with the appropriations chairman to remove it and convene stakeholders to discuss a better outcome — one that, ideally, keeps the torch cauldron in the neighborhood.
Funds to move the cauldron never made it into the budget this past 2026 session, likely because they moved away from using public dollars and went solely private, said Olaleye.
Both Pitchford and Helton agree that the process circumventing Summerhill and its residents felt intentional.
“They already understood that there was opposition in the community, so I imagine that the reason they went about [the announcement of the move] that way was to bypass the community on purpose,” Pitchford said.
“I think it was absolutely intentional that they did it covertly so we wouldn’t know. That’s evidenced by, in my mind, the fact that I got a call from Dr. Blake [the president of Georgia State University],” Helton said, saying that the president informed him of the impending move. “We very quickly scheduled a meeting for last Monday [June 8], went to his office… and we learned that it was a done deal, and that they had made the decision to take the cauldron. The intent of that meeting was ‘how can we move on?’”
Despite their support of the cauldron moving, Helton spoke praises for both Billy Payne and Andrew Young.
“I think Mr. Payne deserves every accolade that could possibly be given to him,” Helton said, adding he and those involved with delivering the Olympics were some of the most influential people in the city’s history. “He changed the course of Atlanta, bringing the Olympics here. What I think they’ve missed is that we can establish a legacy for him, for the Olympics, right here in Summerhill. And that would be the fair thing to do.”
He added he’d like to think Andrew Young was unaware of how little the community has been engaged prior to putting his name on the project for support.
Helton said that he would prefer to see alternatives discussed and realized — ones that don’t involve uprooting the cauldron.
“An investment into refurbishing the cauldron in place could include the blue line walkway and turn the corner onto Fulton Street with an architectural or landscape solution to pedestrian control,” Helton said.
What’s next?
For Pitchord, before any final decisions are made, leaders from Summerhill should be present. It’s how they navigated the testy waters of the actual Olympic games, she said, and how it should have happened this go-around, too.
“It should have been a group conversation,” Pitchford said. “So all we’re saying right now is, before you do something like this, we should be a part of the conversation.”
That may very well come to fruition.
Helton said that following the backlash of moving the cauldron, there are ongoing attempts to hold a meeting involving all stakeholders, including ones from the University System of Georgia pushing for the move and residents Summerhill, to talk towards a resolution. There’s no set date for the meeting yet, however.
Cheron and Helton both said that until the cauldron is officially moved, they remain hopeful that a resolution can be reached. One solution that Helton said he would love to work with stakeholders on would be investing into the area around the torch so that it becomes a true, well-kept entrance into the neighborhood. Today, most activity in the area revolves around the adjacent GSU Convocation Center. Nearby, ongoing construction of GSU baseball and softball fields is underway.
“It’d be great if we have that torch fully intact on the corner, have it renovated… there’s some plaques and some artifacts at the base [of the torch] that a lot of people don’t even know are there,” Helton said, explaining that with continued planned investment from GSU, along with incoming bus-rapid-transit and a planned hospital from Kaiser, now more than ever the neighborhood could leverage the torch already in-place as a multifunctional piece of history, local attraction and grand welcome to the historic neighborhood and part of GSU campus.
There is no planned date for the moving of the cauldron; currently, a request-for-proposal from the Georgia World Congress Center, the group that manages Centennial Olympic Park, is set underway that will see contractors bid to win the project of moving the cauldron and installing it in its possible new home.
