Georgia Tech’s leap over the Connector paying off

Wayne Clough steered his car past buildings with for-sale signs and across the dreary Fifth Street bridge onto Georgia Tech’s campus.

It was the summer of 1996, and tight security for the Summer Olympic Games had cut off his usual route to work. His new daily drive past the lonely buildings and empty parking lots made the Tech president wonder if there was a way to reconnect a campus separated from Midtown by the Downtown Connector built many years earlier.

“I thought to myself, ‘We should buy this property,’” said Clough, now president emeritus.

Though it would be several years before Clough, the university and its foundation had a plan to create Technology Square, that decision to round up…