69508 external_news 1314024869 1475893503 The former Sears building now known as City Hall East, at 2.1 million square feet, has been mostly vacant since Sears left in 1989. A prominent Atlanta-based developer, Jamestown Properties, which owns Chelsea Market in Manhattan, bought the building from the city last month for $27 million. It expects to spend $180 million to convert it to a mixed-use cluster of restaurants, apartments, office space and perhaps even a rooftop amusement park, all renamed Ponce City Market, by early 2014. “That’s a big hunk of building, and it’s been dead space for so long,” said David F. Haddow, a consultant and architecture professor at Georgia Tech. “But it’s not going to be easy.”

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