Costs come due for Council on gift of AJC building

• Joeff Davis
• Memories…the former AJC newsroom, as it now appears

Nothing in life is truly free, as the cliche goes. And today, Atlanta City Council members are being reminded of that axiom in the form of cold, hard numbers — including long lines of zeros.

You'll recall that the AJC's parent company, Cox Enterprises, donated the newly emptied newspaper building at 72 Marietta Street to the city last November. Although Cox never really detailed its motives in giving away a property valued at about $50 million, most onlookers interpreted the move to be a smart, generous and mutually beneficial tax write-off.

The old AJC building is actually two buildings — or three, depending how you figure it — forming an "L" and stretching the entire block from Fairlie Street to Spring Street. There's the familiar nine-story office building that fronts Marietta Street and once held the newsroom, the "Deadline Diner" commissary and other offices. But behind that, separated by a wide alleyway but linked by a skyway, is a trapezoidal, hangar-sized structure that juts into the Gultch. About half that second building housed the ginourmous AJC press and the other half was used as warehouse space.

How big was the press? I'd guess about three or four stories tall and maybe as long as a football field, but judge from yourself from the photos after the jump.