Windward Parkway Ran On Telecom. Verizon Place May Be Its Last Chapter.
Drive west on Windward Parkway from GA 400 toward Highway 9 and you pass a campus of three office buildings that have sat empty for years. One, Two and Three Verizon Place. If you lived in north Fulton any time in the last twenty-five years, you probably drove past them a thousand times without thinking about it. Unless you worked there, you never had a reason to go inside.
On September 21, Milton City Council approved an agreement to buy the whole campus: 51.32 acres for $26.25 million, from Cellco Partnership and GTE Wireless LLC, the two Verizon companies that own it. The city's staff report is blunt about the buildings. It calls them "liabilities that the City anticipates demolishing." The land is what Milton wants.
It's a good moment to remember what that stretch of road used to be, long before the state named this part of GA 400 the Technology Corridor in 2022.
When Alpharetta's Biggest Employers Made Phones Ring
The City of Alpharetta keeps a list of its ten largest employers in every annual financial report. The 2001 list reads like a roll call of the telecom boom.
AT&T was first, with 2,700 employees. Nortel Networks was second, also with 2,700. Verizon was fifth with 1,500, Lucent sixth with 1,119, and WorldCom eighth with 1,000.
Add those five together and you get 9,019 people. The whole top ten that year employed 15,001. Six of every ten jobs at Alpharetta's biggest employers were in telecom.
Those weren't call centers in strip malls. Nortel opened its Alpharetta headquarters at 5405 Windward Parkway in 1998, a four-story, 247,000-square-foot building on 18 acres. By the spring of 2001, Nortel was pressing ahead with a 377,000-square-foot expansion of that campus that, according to Site Selection magazine, would "house about 3,000 employees." Down the road, GTE's wireless business built the campus that became Verizon's when Verizon Wireless was formed in 2000 and absorbed GTE's wireless operations.
The Paychecks
Telecom jobs paid well, and that money landed in north Fulton's neighborhoods, restaurants and schools.
Federal wage records put a number on it. In 2001, Fulton County had 25,437 private-sector telecommunications jobs, and the average one paid $68,072 a year. The average private job of any kind in the county paid $48,765. A telecom job paid about 40 percent more.
Apply that average to the 9,019 telecom employees on Alpharetta's 2001 list and you get roughly $614 million a year in wages from five companies, in 2001 dollars. It's a rough figure, since the county average includes jobs well outside Alpharetta, but it shows the scale. That's the payroll that bought houses in Windward, White Columns and every subdivision in between.
How Fast It Turned
The boom didn't last. Nortel announced deep job cuts early in 2001 as its revenue forecasts collapsed. Its second Alpharetta building, a six-story, 376,000-square-foot tower, was still under construction when, in the words of the developer, "the technology bubble burst and Nortel went from growing exponentially to no longer needing much of their existing (and under construction) space." Cingular Wireless took the building instead. North Fulton ended 2001 with more than 4 million square feet of empty office space. Nortel itself filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2009.
Alpharetta's 2006 employer list shows how quickly the map changed. Nortel, Verizon and WorldCom were gone from the top ten. AT&T was down to 2,000, Lucent to 906. Cingular was there with 1,200. The new names were ADP, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric and UPS Supply Chain Solutions. Alpharetta didn't shrink. It changed jobs.
Verizon stayed longer than most. In 2009 the state announced a new 600-job Verizon Wireless customer service center in Sanctuary Park, and the announcement noted the company's "395,000 square-foot Campus in Alpharetta" and close to 4,000 employees in Georgia. The address on Windward Parkway is in Milton now, since Milton became a city in December 2006, but for most of its life everyone called it Alpharetta.
The Last Employee Left In 2020
According to Appen Media, there have been no employees on the Verizon Place campus since 2020. The people who worked there now either work from home or are based at Verizon's corporate campus at 5055 North Point Parkway in Alpharetta. "While we are consolidating our local office footprint, we remain deeply committed to north Fulton," a Verizon spokesperson told the paper. Verizon will keep an antenna on the property as part of the deal.
The rest of Windward's telecom buildings found new tenants. Nortel's old headquarters at 5405 Windward Parkway sold in 2021 for $48 million and was 93 percent leased at the time to other businesses. The countywide numbers tell the same story. Fulton County had 12,621 telecom jobs in 2024, half the 2001 count. The ones that remain pay very well, an average of $171,329, but there are far fewer of them.
What Happens Next
The September vote wasn't the purchase itself. It approved a purchase agreement with a 60-day due-diligence period, a $100,000 deposit, and a second $500,000 deposit if the city decides to go ahead. Appen Media reports that a second council vote is expected in late November, with closing around the start of December.
If it goes through, Milton would control about 75.74 acres in that part of Deerfield, counting two parcels it already bought nearby on Deerfield Parkway. City Manager Steve Krokoff describes the idea as "a recreation-centered destination that serves residents while supporting appropriate private investment." The city has long said it needs more athletic fields, and Deerfield is the city's principal commercial district. Some of the land may be sold to private developers to bring the cost down. No plans have been approved yet, and the city still has to price demolition and cleanup before it decides.
For anyone who lives near Windward and Deerfield, that's worth following. Ballfields and trails would make for a very different neighbor than an empty office park, and the details, including traffic, parking and what gets built on the land the city sells, are still open. I'll keep an eye on the November vote.
For the rest of us, it's a reminder of how much of north Fulton was built on a single industry. A lot of the homes around here were bought with telecom paychecks. The buildings that paid for them are about to become something else.
Sources: City of Alpharetta Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, FY2006 (principal employers, 2001 and 2006); U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Fulton County, 2001 and 2024; City of Milton agenda report, September 21, 2026; Appen Media, September 23, 2026; Site Selection, May 2001; Greenstone Properties; Institutional Real Estate, Inc. and Atlanta Business Chronicle, October 2021; Trade & Industry Development, April 2009; Metro Atlanta CEO, November 2022.
