The City of Gainesville soon will have a new showcase facility to serve both lake paddlers and the community.
The Boathouse at Lake Lanier Olympic Park should be completed in the spring of 2024.
Officials gathered for a ceremonial groundbreaking for the facility, on Clarks Bridge Road, Friday morning.
The Boathouse will serve as home for the Lanier Canoe and Kayak Club and the Lake Lanier Rowing Club.
For athletes in the clubs, there will be a joint training/workout facility, office space, storage, locker rooms, and direct access to the docks on the basement level.
Gainesville Tourism Director Robyn Lynch said the facility will be much more than a boathouse. Designed to blend in with the neighborhood, it will serve as a home for the legacy rowing clubs, but also will provide needed meeting space for the community.
The main floor will be an event facility, with a ballroom that will seat 400 people, or can be divided into smaller spaces.
The upstairs will have an executive boardroom and offices.
“Obviously, the first thing we're going to do, and our first priority was for the clubs – to provide that great space for training athletes, for visiting athletes to come in, our youth and adult programs with rowing and canoe kayak,” Lynch said. “So that was our priority. So, they're going to get brand new spaces that they've needed for a really long time to help grow their programs. But in addition to that, we're going to have 17,000 square feet of meeting rooms. We're going to have a grand ballroom that can be split up into three sections – so, three smaller rooms. We’ll have an executive boardroom that's going to be quite large, an outdoor pavilion on the back side that overlooks Lake Lanier, patios across the back so it'll be the only lakefront venue in the city of Gainesville and really only the second one in the county next to Lake Lanier Islands Resort.”
Gainesville Ward 1 Councilman Danny Dunagan said the new facility is overdue but is needed to replace one that was never intended to be permanent.
“We've always thought that this park was a great asset to the city and the county,” Dunagan said. “And we worked hard to keep it up. And when the time was right, we were able to move forward, get a master plan together, get the Corps to OK the master plan, and then start the replacement of the boathouses, which were in bad shape. I mean, they were just patched. The heating and air was quitting on them and it was just in bad shape. So, it means a lot. There's a lot of hard work from a lot of good people that got to where we are today.”
Dunagan acknowledged the tri-chairs of Gainesville-Hall ’96, Steve Gilliam, Mary Hart Wilheit, and Jim Mathis, who worked to bring the Olympic Games to Gainesville.
Other speakers included Mimi Collins, chairwoman of the Lake Lanier Olympic Park Foundation, and Brian Rochester of Rochester & Associates.
Lynch said over the past six years, city leadership, along with the city council and the Lake Lanier Olympic Park Foundation, have had a vision of rebuilding the boathouse into a facility that would mirror the reputation of the park and the racecourse have as one of the top venues in the world.
Lynch says the foundation board and architect spent two years meeting with paddlers, coaches, special event planners, and community stakeholders to design a boathouse that will meet the community’s needs for additional meeting, conference, and special event space, and to support the Olympics mission to cultivate champions both in sport and in life, to deliver experiences that inspire communities, and to celebrate the area’s Olympics legacy for generations to come.
“We will also have a space dedicated to the legacy of the Olympics,” Lynch said. “Not only do we want to honor the 1996 Games and how our community came together to present Gainesville as the Hospitality Capital of the World, but to celebrate all that Gainesville has to offer our community and visitors alike. We're really excited I think the community's going to get behind it and I'm looking forward to having special events here weddings conferences and just having it open for the community."
