Atlanta Glamour and Surrealism

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Today was another day exploring Atlanta.

I started at one of the city’s most famous landmarks.

The battle to preserve it actually started the city’s preservation movement in 1975 (compare this to Savannah, where preservation started decades earlier).

That landmark is the Fox Theater.

Fox Theater

The story of the theater starts with the local Shriners’ chapter, Yaarab.

By the mid 1920s, they had outgrown their original headquarters, and wanted to build a new one.

They acquired land in Atlanta’s Midtown section, which at the time was a streetcar suburb, and had a competition to design the building.

The chapter chose an Egyptian and Moorish fantasy by local architects P. Thorton Marye and Ollivier Vinour.

The design had only one problem; it would cost far more than the chapter could afford.

Enter Hollywood impresario William Fox.

At the time, he was building a chain of luxurious vaudeville theaters, and the Shriners’ architectural vision matched his pretty well.

William Fox made a deal to lease the building’s central auditorium as a theater, as long as they named it after him.





The theater opened to the public in 1928.

The first film shown was an insignificant cartoon short called Steamboat Willie (it introduced Mickey Mouse and is now considered a film classic).

One year later, of course, the Great Depression started.

William Fox went bankrupt two years after that; most of his assets were eventually merged into what is now the 20^th Century Fox film studio.

The Shriners in turn lost the building in bankruptcy court in 1935; a group of local developers bought it and successfully ran it until the late 1960s.

The theater then fell into a steep decline.

When the local phone company offered to buy the now derelict theater in 1974 and tear it down, Atlanta residents revolted.

The subsequent campaign to save the Fox started Atlanta’s preservation movement.

The theater is now owned by a local non-profit, who has fully restored it.

It shows touring Broadway shows, and the occasional classic film.





Tours of the theater start in the Egyptian Ballroom.

The Shriners used this room for banquets.

In the 1950s, local promoters held big band concerts here that became very popular with Atlanta residents.

The décor is a riot of Egyptian motifs.

The Sun God Ra appears in several places.

The tree of life is embedded in the rug design, and the cycle of the sun through the underworld each night is painted on the walls.

During the restoration, a local Egyptian expert examined the room symbols, and discovered that everything had specific meanings.

The ceiling is painted with hieroglyphics which describe the Egyptian harvest cycle and also reference Shriner rituals.





The next room is the Grand Salon.

This one is filled with Islamic design elements.

The windows are arches.

The floor tile is a geometric pattern.

The chandeliers have flame-shaped bulbs designed to imitate candle light.

The ceiling is a leaded glass skylight.

Islamic custom dictates that people wash before eating, so a corner of the room has a tile fountain.

The tiles are now irreplaceable; they were made by a highly toxic process that is no longer in use.





The tour then enters the lodge level of the actual theater.

The theater is designed to look like a Moroccan bazaar.

The front and side contains plaster building elements painted to look like stucco.

The back contains plaster overhangs designed to look like curtains.

On either side of the stage elaborate arches hide the largest working theater organ in the South.

The stage itself was empty except for a single light.

Theater tradition dictates that the stage be lighted at all times to drive away ghosts.





The balcony above the lodge has a legacy of segregated Atlanta.

A black divider runs across the balcony about two thirds of the way up.

Until the 1960s, African Americans were only allowed to sit behind the divider.

They had to enter an exit through a separate entrance, which was reached by climbing a long fire escape stair from a side alley.





The next moment provided an unexpected connection to family history.

When I was a kid, my family would watch movies in the typical boring suburban multiplex.

During some of these, my father would reminisce about a grand movie palace in Atlanta where he saw movies while in the Army.

The most memorable feature was the ceiling, which was covered in stars during showings.

I discovered that theater was the Fox when the tour guide turned out the lights, and stars appeared.

They are created by tiny lights.

Some of them twinkle.





Many people believe that the Fox hosted the premiere of Gone With the Wind.

The movie actually premiered at Loews Grand Atlanta, which was torn down in 1978.

Loews owned MGM at the time the movie came out.

The Fox has hosted several anniversary showings, which sell out within minutes.





The next room we saw was the men’s smoking lounge.

The entrance sign is a man in Arab dress smoking a hookah.

It’s moderately ironic that the entire theater, including the lounge, is now non-smoking.

The room features more Islamic motifs.

It’s one of the few rooms in the building with no rug.

The reason is that with men dropping buts and spitting chewing tobacco, the rug would be too hard to keep clean.

Across the hall is the women’s powder room.

When the theater was built, no proper woman would appear in public without her makeup, and this room was used to touch up.

It features a series of tables with mirrors.

On each table are two plaster sphinxes painted gold.

The originals were stolen by vandals who thought they were real gold, and they were recreated during the restoration.





The final feature we saw was the entrance lobby.

This is the one area where William Fox insisted a change be made to the original design.

The original design had a very short walkway from the lobby to a side street.

William Fox insisted that the walkway go to the major street in the area, Peachtree.

The final lobby walkway is nearly as large as the stage.

It provides a convenient queuing area out of the rain.

Margaret Mitchell House and Gone With the Wind

After the theater, I went to a historic site that looms large in Southern culture, the birthplace of Gone With the Wind.

It’s now called the Margaret Mitchell House, although calling it a house is a stretch.

The building was built as a single family home, and was later turned into four apartments.

Margret Mitchell and her husband rented one of them, and while living there she wrote her book.

She called the place “The Dump”.





Atlanta residents have mixed feelings about the book and movie.

They love the attention that both gave to the city, and all the tourist business it attracts.

They hate the fact that far too many of those tourists expect residents to live in plantation houses with Greek columns and wear hoopskirts (see Southern Nostalgia).





Margret Mitchell was born in 1900 near Atlanta.

Her grandfather was a Confederate officer.

She would always listen to him and other family members tell stories.

She claims she did not realize that the South had lost the war until she was ten years old!

She loved creative writing in school, and the museum has some samples.

She attended Smith for a while, but left to care for her parents. She got married during this time period, but it did not go well.

She got divorced after nine months, a scandalous move at the time.





She needed income, so she applied for a job at the Atlanta Journal.

They turned her down; women were not considered serious reporters at the time.

Instead, she got a job at their Sunday Magazine, writing about house decorating, social parties, and other “female” topics.

She still managed to squeeze in more serious stuff.

She went to Milan in the late 1920s to write about the fashion shows, and sent home a story on an ambitious politician named Mussolini.

The museum has the typewriter she used during this period.





While working at the paper, she got married for the second time.

Her new husband was a fellow reporter and copy editor, John Marsh.

Their marriage was a very happy one, but also a fairly poor one.

Newspaper salaries paid the bills, but not much more than that.





One day in 1926, Margret injured her ankle, and the healing process was slow and difficult.

Her husband suggested she write a book to ease the pain.

She started writing a rambling story about the South during reconstruction.

Large parts of it were based on incidents she heard about growing up.

She wrote the chapters in random order over many months.

She kept each one in a manila envelope.

Eventually, there were so many of them they formed a stack four feet high.

The museum has a sample of the original manuscript.

A note to junior high English teachers everywhere (including mine): Margret Mitchell was a very poor speller.

Her pages are filled with cross-outs and scribbled changes.

Without her husband’s patient copy editing, one of the most famous books in the English language would never have gotten done.





One day in 1935, literary agent Harold Latham came to Atlanta looking for new Southern writers.

Margret had told a local writers group about her book, and a member suggested she see the agent.

She refused.

Latham was both polite and very persistent, and she eventually gave him a copy of the manuscript.

He bought it two days later, and a phenomenon was born.

Gone With the Wind fans like to claim the book has sold more copies than any book except the Bible.

Margret was rather overwhelmed by all this.

She never wrote another book in her life, and dedicated most of her time to philanthropy.





The museum has a section on the movie.

Gone with the Wind has been criticized for romanticizing the Old South and papering over its bad parts, especially slavery.

This section tries to push the idea that most of this impression comes from changes made for the movie.

In the book, the O’Hara family is middle class Irish farmers; in the movie they are plantation owners.

Scenes and locations specific to Atlanta were changed to something more generic.

The movie also toned down the white supremacist views of several characters and dropped their membership in the KKK.





The actual apartment is seen on guided tours.

It’s heavily restored at this point, so the furniture is generic to the era, not what Margret Mitchell actually used.

The apartment is very small, even smaller than Martin Luther King’s birth house.

It contains only four rooms.

The first room is a combination of living room and office.

Margret’s desk is crammed into a corner, with a typewriter and a stack of envelopes.

She arranged it so she could look out the window as she worked.

The next room is a small bedroom.

There is room for the bed, a closet, and little else.

The bed was short enough that her husband’s feet hung off the end.

The next room is the dining room, which has little space beyond the table.

Finally, there is the kitchen, which is the size of a large closet.

The guide points out the Coca-Cola themed bottle opener on the wall, one of the few things known to have been there when the Mitchell’s lived there.

High Art Museum

The next major sight was the High Art Museum.

The museum is named for an early patron, who donated the museum’s first building.

It was torn down in 1968.

What replaced it is a marvel of modern architecture.

Richard Meier created a fantasy of white minimalism, with the galleries arranged around a central courtyard.

Two decades later, Renzo Piano created an addition, also a white minimalist masterpiece.

I enjoyed these buildings much more than the Tampa Art Museum (see (Sort of) Wild Florida); the architecture calls less attention to itself.





I enjoyed the High Museum quite a bit.

Like the best midsized museums, it knows its strengths and focuses on them.

In this case, those strengths are contemporary art, American art, and southern folk art.





The museum has an entire floor dedicated to contemporary work.

Some of it is head scratching, but most is accessible.

They had several large scale canvases from Alex Katz.

They had the painted boards from Ellsworth Kelly, which blend the boundary between painting and sculpture.

They had a series of sculptures by Gerhard Richter that consist of glass panels in various arrangements.

These created really tricky reflection effects.

The lobby has a huge sculpture of fiberglass fruit by Claes Oldenburg.





The American art is arranged more or less chronologically.

Each room is dedicated to a particular period of time, not movement.

Seeing American Scene Realism next to modernist experiments was initially jarring, but I ultimately liked it.

As expected, the displays had a number of works by Southern artists that nobody outside the region has ever heard of.

There were relatively few works by big names, but I’m used to that by this point.





The last strength is folk art.

This museum defines “folk art” as art by anyone with no formal artistic training.

Most southern museums have a folk art section containing historic decorative arts and crafts.

This museum only collects folk art made after 1970, making it unique in the US.

The art is certainly rawer than the professionally finished work seen elsewhere.

Much of the work was sculpture, with some paintings thrown in.

For anyone who has been to the Museum of Bad Art near Boston, this section makes for a fascinating comparison.

Many of the techniques on display are similar, but the results are far different.

Many of the pieces have highly personal, often religious, themes, and this makes them work.

(The Museum of Bad Art, by contrast, has pictures of blue aliens and memorials to someone’s cat).

The museum is worth visiting for this section by itself.

World of Coca Cola

My next site was a museum of a very different type, the World of Coca Cola.

The brochure claims this place will “show you the inner life of the world’s favorite beverage”.

That it does, but not in the way the designers probably intended.

The museum plays like a surreal corporate theme park, one dreamt up by a middle-age marketing manager trying to appeal to the cool kids.

Since much of Coke’s success is based on clever marketing, it’s as appropriate as anything.





The tour begins with a film called “Welcome to the Happiness Factory”.

It’s a Technicolor CGI overload that had me cringing in my seat.

The script is painfully cheesy, and not in a good way.

The film is hosted by a blue cat who wears shades and talks like a 50s jazzman; I hope it’s apparent that his name just has to be “Cool Cat”.

He opens the film with “Welcome to Coca Cola in Hotlanta”, and things go downhill from there.

(For those who don’t follow urban slang, “Hotlanta” was a nickname for Atlanta used by rappers over a decade ago. Now, locals consider it so outdated that even guidebooks warn not to use it).





After the film is over, visitors get to see the actual exhibits.

The first one is a tour of Coca Cola history.

The drink was invented in 1886 by an Atlanta druggist, John Stith Pemberton, as a cold remedy.

It didn’t sell well, so he sold the recipe to a local businessman, Frank Mason Robinson.

Robinson realized it would work better as a soft drink, tweaked the formula, and started selling it at soda fountains around town.

He came up with the name Coca-Cola.

It took off, and a legend was born.

That formula is now one of the corporate world’s deeper secrets.





Much of Coca-Cola’s success is due to marketing, and the museum does not hide this fact.

The company pioneered sports sponsorships, getting involved in the Olympics in 1928.

They were the first to create beverages for niche markets, and the first to refine them through public taste tests.

The museum has an entire wall of drinks they have produced over the years.

There are entire displays of Coca-Cola print ads.

There is also a display on the famous bottle, which was specifically designed to look different to every other soda bottle in existence.

It’s distinctive enough that it was successfully trademarked.





The second exhibit is a demonstration of how a Coca Cola bottling plant works.

It’s all designed to impress people with how high-tech it all is.

Do visitors know that every bottle has a serial number laser-etched on the bottom, so it can be traced back to where it was made?

Are visitors impressed that all bottles are washed just before adding the carbonated water, to minimize contamination?

Wait until the demonstration of the case packing robot.

The bottling process itself is certainly interesting, but the presentation left much to be desired.





The museum has an exhibit called “Coca Cola in Popular Culture”.

It has several displays of how Coke products show up in other works.

It has a gallery of art containing Coca Cola references.

It has a display on Coke collectables, and the obsessive lengths people will go to obtain them.

Tucked way in the back is a single display on what may be the company’s biggest misfire, New Coke.

Hard-core beverage drinkers remember the day in 1985 when the Coke Company announced it was changing its sacred formula.

The result was a public relations nightmare.

Coca Cola quickly realized its mistake, and brought back the original as “Coke Classic”.

The display presents all this as a demonstration of the depth of peoples’ feelings for the product rather than a bad corporate decision.





The final memorable item is the tasting station.

Coca Cola sells soda around the world.

Many of them are specifically designed for particular markets, and are very different to what is available in the United States.

The tasting station offers the opportunity to try many of them.

The soda ranges from nearly indigestibly bitter (Italy) to intense tropical fruit (South Africa) to incredibly high-tech health drinks (Japan).

For me, this was the best part of the entire visit.



The World of Coke is next to Centennial Olympic Park, so I spent some time wandering around.

The park has a very good view of the Atlanta skyline.

The central, and most popular feature, is the rings fountain.

The Olympic rings are drawn out in stone.

Water jets along the rings go off in various patterns.

Three times a day, the jets are synchronized to music to create a water ballet.

I got there late enough that I missed the show.

The Varsity

I had dinner tonight in one of Atlanta’s most famous restaurants, the Varsity.

This place calls itself the world’s largest drive-in.

It looks like a huge fifties diner, but they actually serve fast food.

They claim to serve more hamburgers in a day than the average McDonald’s does in a month.

It’s known for its quirky ordering lingo: a hot dog to go is “a naked dog walking” and a hamburger with everything on it is “a glorified steak”.

Atlanta residents love this place so much that it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.





The most appropriate car to arrive in is, of course, a beat up ancient sedan with college bumper stickers on it.

Failing that, a convertible with the top down will certainly do.

I ate at the curb.

The onion rings (“bag of rags”) are as addictive as advertised, but everything else was average.

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Photos

Fox Theater marquee
The marquee of the Fox Theater, the last remaining 1920s movie palace in Atlanta

Egyptian Ballroom
The Egyptian Ballroom at the Fox Theater. Note the wings over the stage, the fan scupture to its right, the shafts of wheat on top of the columns, and the heiroglyphics barely visible on the ceiling beams.

Grand Salon
The Grand Salon at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. Note the moorish doorways, the Islamic patterns on the ceiling beams, and the central skylight. The light in the distance has bulbs shaped like candle flames.

Grand Terrace
Open Terrace next to the Grand Salon. The Moorish acrhicture continues outside.

Fox Theater main auditorium
The main auditorium at the Fox Theater, designed to look like a Moroccan bazaar. The light is to scare away ghosts. This view is rare; visitors are not allowed to shoot the stage while a show is running.

Segregated seating at the Fox
Until the mid 1960s, African American patrons had to enter the theater by a fire escape and sit behind this divider.

Fox ceiling stars
Star lights on the ceiling of the Fox Theater. This photo required a long exposure.

Entrance lobby
The lobby behind the marquee of the Fox Theater. It is nearly as large as the stage!

Margaret Mitchell House
The apartment building where Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind. She rented the apartment on the ground floor right, which she called "The Dump".

Tara
This entrance door is the single remaining piece of the set of Tara, from the movie version of Gone With the Wind.

High Art Museum, Richard Meier
The High Art Museum building, by Richard Meier

High Art Museum, Renzo Piano
The addition to the High Art Museum by Renzo Piano

Atlanta Skyline
The downtown Atlanta skyline, from Centennial Olympic Park

Fountain of Rings
The Fountain of Rings shoots water jets.

Coke ads
A small sampling of Coke's history of ads

Soda around the world
A small sampling of Coca-Cola's world wide sodas

Varsity facade
The entrance to Atlanta's legendary Varsity.

Varsity drive in stations
Drive in stations at the "worlds largest drive in". Yes, that is a parking garage in the distance.

Shriner seal
On the floor of the stairs to the Egyptian Ballroom, Fox Theater

Egyptian ballroom ceiling
Hieroglyphics referencing Shriner rituals on the ceiling of the Egyptian Ballroom

Flaming chandelierrs
Lights imitating candle flames in the Grand Salon