The Old Bobby Jones Clubhouse Almost Became a Driving Range. Haynes Manor Is Getting an Opera House Instead.

Anyone who has walked or biked the Northwest Connector Trail behind Woodward Way this year has seen the fencing and the equipment staged around the old Bobby Jones Golf Course clubhouse and assumed the obvious: another golf course upgrade, another quiet renovation to match the one the course itself got a few years back. The clubhouse has nothing to do with golf anymore. It is becoming the first permanent headquarters the Atlanta Opera has had in its forty-seven-year history, and the project now carries a price tag of $64 million.

That number is worth sitting with, because it did not start there. When the plan was first made public in September 2024, the estimate was $45 million. The building at the center of it is a 1941 Grecian Revival clubhouse, built by the WPA, that closed in 2016 after the golf course itself moved into a newer facility following a $24 million renovation. For years afterward the old clubhouse sat empty on land near Peachtree Creek, and the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation eventually listed it as a building in peril, with demolition for a driving range on the table.

A neighborhood group tried first

The building's rescue did not begin with an opera company. It began with the Haynes Manor Recital Hall Foundation, a group formed specifically because the clubhouse was sitting vacant and at risk. Their ask was modest by comparison to what eventually got built: convert the space into a community-centric recital hall and music education center, something scaled to neighborhood use. Atlanta City Council approved the concept, and the city worked out a land swap with the State of Georgia to make it possible.

The Atlanta Opera came into the picture separately. The company had spent years looking for a larger home, having outgrown its administrative offices near Georgia Tech, and when its search converged with the Foundation's plans for the clubhouse, the two efforts combined into something bigger than either had proposed alone. That convergence is the reason a neighborhood preservation project turned into a $64 million institutional relocation.

Why the number kept climbing

A December 2024 gift of $27.5 million from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation gave the project both its name, the Molly Blank Center for Opera and the Arts, and its financial center of gravity, with $25 million earmarked for construction and $2.5 million set aside for ongoing programming. That gift sits inside a broader $110 million comprehensive campaign the Opera is running for the building and its future seasons.

By the time Mayor Andre Dickens, general and artistic director Tomer Zvulun, board chair John Haupert, and members of the Blank family turned ceremonial shovels on February 16, 2026, the project scope had grown from a neighborhood recital hall into a full headquarters campus spanning roughly 4.7 acres, with administrative offices, rehearsal space, a costume shop, a film studio, and education rooms alongside the performance venue. The Opera pitched the same red and blue circus tent it used for outdoor performances at Oglethorpe University during the pandemic, a detail Zvulun has pointed to as evidence this groundbreaking marks a second turning point for the company.

What stays, and what doesn't

The finished complex will run to roughly 56,000 square feet, and the historic clubhouse will make up less than a third of it. The rest is new construction: a modern, glass-fronted addition facing the Beltline and the golf course, built by Atlanta architecture firm Post Loyal. The original Woodward Way facade is being preserved as the entry sequence, functioning as the lobby for a 200-seat recital space called Rosemary Hall, with the recital hall itself designed by Theater Projects and A'kustiks to face the trail and greenspace behind it.

Parking was the sticking point that mattered most to people who actually live on Woodward Way. When the clubhouse hosted golf events, weddings, and private parties, cars lined the residential street and neighbors sometimes had trouble getting out of their own driveways. Peachtree Battle Alliance leadership pressed the Opera early on to keep all parking off the street, and by the time of an August 2026 construction update, that commitment was holding: the plan reconfigures the existing surface lot behind the building to serve as the primary parking area, including ADA spaces, with the main entrance shifting to face the Beltline on the south side rather than Woodward Way.

The site's older history

The ground this is being built on carries a history that predates any of this. In July 1951, Dr. Hamilton Holmes, his sons Oliver and Alfred "Tup" Holmes, and family friend Charles Bell were turned away from the Bobby Jones course because it was whites-only at the time. The resulting case, Holmes v. City of Atlanta, reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously in November 1955 that the city had to open its public golf courses to Black golfers. Atlanta's courses were desegregated that December, and the ruling was later cited in other cases challenging segregation at public facilities. At the groundbreaking, Mayor Dickens tied that history directly to the project, framing the site's next chapter as another instance of the same ground being reopened to the public, this time through music instead of golf.

What residents can actually expect to see between now and 2027

For anyone tracking the fencing on their regular walk or ride, the practical timeline looks like this:

• February 23, 2026: initial site work began, one week after the groundbreaking ceremony
• June 2026: vertical construction started
• Through late 2026 and 2027: the surface parking lot behind the building stays closed for most of the construction period
• October 2027: substantial completion is the current target
• No confirmed opening date yet, as of the most recent public construction update in late August 2026

The Opera will keep staging its full-scale, main-stage productions at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre. The Molly Blank Center is being built for the smaller, closer-in work: recitals, jazz, education programming, and a series the Opera calls the Molly Blank Discoveries Series. When it opens, it becomes the first headquarters of an arts organization anywhere along the Beltline's 22-mile loop, and the closest one to a residential neighborhood, since the entry sits at the corner of Woodward Way and Havenridge Drive.

It is a different kind of civic project than the one unfolding a few miles east, where a decades-locked stretch of land next to Chastain Park is finally opening to public access. Both are examples of long-closed Buckhead ground reopening on a similar timeline, but this one started as a neighborhood ask before it became an institution's new address, and the scale of what got built reflects that shift more than any single line item in the budget.

Once Rosemary Hall is finished, a resident of Haynes Manor will be able to walk to a recital in the building their own neighborhood foundation first tried to save, rather than driving to Cobb County for the company's main season.

If a project this size changes how you think about a corner of Haynes Manor you already know well, Mary Stuart Iverson is glad to talk through what it means for your street specifically. Schedule a free consultation whenever the timing makes sense.