Details on how Jim Crockett Promotions
wound up taping wrestling in the studios of WTBS in Atlanta can be found
in this article:
OLE & SOLIE: THE EVOLUTION OF TV WRESTLING IN GEORGIA
AFTER BLACK SATURDAY
1050 TECHWOOD DRIVE - THEN & TODAY
Compare and contrast the images below. The
first image is an aerial image of the Techwood Drive area from the
mid-1960s (which looked very similar to this during the 70s and 80s when
wrestling TV was taped there.) The 2nd image is a modern satellite
image. Both images show the WTBS Techwood Drive studios on the right and
Alexander Memorial Coliseum on the campus of Georgia Tech University on
the left. A third areal image below shows the modern day look of the
giant Turner Broadcasting offices and studios, which now include studios
for Turner Network Television (TNT) and production labs and studios for
the Cartoon Network.
In my 1987 image of the front of the Turner
Broadcasting building (above), you can see the circular fountain in
front of the columned porch. In the first image below you can make out
that same circular fountain in front of the porch which juts out from
the building. In the modern-day satellite image below it, you can see
the fountain has been shifted slightly forward and replaced by a
small circular lawn. The larger lawn that extended to Techwood Drive
seen in the first photo has been swallowed up by the widening of I-85
seen in the satellite image below.
In the third image below, an aerial image
from 2003, you can clearly see the familiar columns and fountain which
is now just past a heavily secured gate. The front facade and the
columns remain today, but nothing much else is the same.
The
yellow star in the older aerial image marks the general location where
fans would line up to go in for the TV tapings. The wrestlers would also
park here and enter the building here.
Turner Broadcasting Corporation - 2003
In this aerial image, you can see the
familiar columns (seen in the 1964 image, and my image from 1987 as
well.)
More info.
Thanks to Brian Rogers for his contributions to this page.
Before it was WTBS.....
Photo by Gene Gordon.
Courtesy of Scooter Lesley © Ditchcat Photography
Before the Atlanta
independent station was known as WTBS, its call letters were WTCG.
Seen in this wonderful
photograph from the mid-1970s are host Gordon Solie and Fred Miller (in
the shadows behind Gordon) walking onto the set of Georgia Championship
Wrestling. It is shot through the ropes of the studio wrestling ring, a
camera with the WTCG Atlanta insignia seen at left.
STUDIO
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