The Georgian Terrace Hotel in Midtown Atlanta, part of the Fox Theatre Historic District, was designed by architect William Lee Stoddart in a Beaux-Arts style that was intended to evoke the architecture of Paris. Construction commenced on July 21, 1910, and ended on September 8, 1911, and the hotel opened on October 2, 1911.[2] The George C. Fuller Construction Company was contractor, and the developer was Joseph F. Gatins, Jr.[2]
The original 10-story Georgian Terrace Hotel was designed to conform to Atlanta's early trolley rail lines that met at the corner of Peachtree Street and Ponce de Leon Avenue. It was one of the first hotels built outside of the city's downtown business district in a then residential neighborhood, which had been land originally owned by Richard Peters.
At a cost of $500,000, the hotel was built of butter-colored brick, marble, and limestone in the Beaux-Arts style as a Southern interpretation of the Parisian hotel. The hotel features classical architectural details, such as turreted corners, floor-to-ceiling Palladian-styled windows, and wide wrap-around columned terraces. The hotel is largely unadorned until its cornice line, which is embellished by highly-decorative terracotta.
The Peachtree Street façade is composed of a two-story-high window arcade set under a wide cornice supported on narrow pilasters and has a centered portico. The Ponce de Leon Avenue façade features a portico held up by four columns that rest on a rusticated, arcaded base. This portico was used as the Ladies Carriage entrance and provided access to the main hotel; the café terrace, which held exotic plants, tables, and chairs to resemble cafes in Europe; and a lower level of the hotel, which at one time housed the WAKE 1340AM radio station.
Originally, the hotel had a prominent, tile-buttressed, shed roof cornice that was supported by ornamented, paired brackets, but this element was removed in 1945.
The inside of the hotel was decorated with crystal and Italian-bronze chandeliers, white marble columns, ornate pilasters, paneled walls, elliptical staircases, and Italian-tiled floors. In addition to guest rooms, the hotel housed the Winter Garden, the Terrace Garden Lounging Room, which was almost entirely enclosed in glass, the Terrace Restaurant Grill Room, general management offices, an elevator, telephone booths, a curio booth, an "oak-mission" decorated Rathskeller, barber shops, a manicure parlor, and an ornate ballroom that was the setting for the 1939 Gone with the Wind Gala.
All of the hotel's original furniture and interior furnishings were from M. Rich and Brothers Co., later Rich's.[5][6][7][8][9][10]
History
On October 2, 1911, thousands of guests from Atlanta and other cities attended the opening night ceremonies of the Georgian Terrace Hotel, where they were entertained by a costumed-Spanish orchestra performing in the Grand Ballroom. Immediately, guests and the press dubbed the hotel as a "distinct step forward in Southern hoteldom" and a "Parisian hotel on a noted boulevard in a metropolitan city". Over subsequent decades, the hotel would be referred to as the "Grand Old Lady of Peachtree".[9]
Starting in 1913, famous Italian tenor Enrico Caruso along with members of The Metropolitan Opera used the hotel as their Atlanta headquarters when they came yearly to the city to perform in spring concerts. Once the Fox Theatre opened across the street from the hotel in 1929, traffic on Peachtree Street would be stopped and a red carpet rolled from the door of the hotel to the theatre entrance, allowing the opera stars and other celebrities staying at the hotel to make a grand entrance into the theatre before their shows started.
Historic front entrance
In the 1920s, Arthur Murray, who was then a student at Georgia Tech, started teaching dance classes in the hotel's Grand Ballroom. This enterprise eventually spawned his franchised-branded dance lesson business. In 1926, Georgia's chief investigator for the Solicitor General, Bert Donaldson, was murdered at the hotel. It was thought that this planned "hit" was evidence of Atlanta's underworld connections to organized crime.
In 1935, Macmillan editor Harold Latham decided to stay at the hotel while scouting the Atlanta area for new writers and manuscripts. While in town, he met Peggy Mitchell Marsh, whom he was introduced to through a mutual acquaintance. This mutual acquaintance also had told Latham that Marsh had written a novel about Atlanta during the American Civil War and Reconstruction. After several failed attempts to obtain the manuscript from Marsh, Latham finally succeeded in getting it from her in the lobby of the hotel as he was about to depart for New Orleans. Upon handing the manuscript to Latham, Marsh said, "If you really want it you may take it, but it is incomplete and unrevised."[11] That unfinished novel was completed and published in 1936 as Gone with the Wind, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. While she insisted on using her married name socially, the book was published under her maiden name of Margaret Mitchell.[12]
The premiere of Gone with the Wind was in Atlanta in 1939. All of the stars and the Director of the movie (with the exception of Vivien Leigh and her lover at the time, Laurence Olivier) stayed at the Georgian Terrace. The pre-premiere party was held at the hotel.
Contrary to popular belief, the premier showing of Gone With the Wind was not held at the Fox Theatre, but rather at Loew's Grand Theatre in downtown Atlanta. After the movie was screened there, its stars were ushered to the Georgian Terrace via a motorcade through a parade route on Peachtree Street.
During the premiere of Song of the South, which did take place at the Fox Theatre, Walt Disney stayed at the hotel. He returned to his room before the film started; unexpected audience reactions of any kind upset him and he preferred not to watch it with the audience.
The Georgian Terrace Hotel saw quite a few changes in the 1940s. It had become a residential hotel in 1945 and had been modernized with air-conditioning, new plumbing, and some interior changes. In 1945, the prominent tile-buttressed, shed roof cornice was removed.
By 1981, revenues were in steady decline and the hotel closed its doors for the first time in its 70-year history. By the middle of that decade, the hotel had been boarded up and condemned. In 1986, however, the hotel was listed as a part of the "Fox Theatre District" on the National Register of Historic Places, which successfully blocked plans for its demolition.
The 1990s saw a rebirth of the hotel. In 1991, the hotel was converted into a luxury apartment building, and a new 19-story wing complete with a rooftop pool was built to resemble the original 10-story Beaux-Arts-style hotel. In 1997, the apartments were vacated, and the property reopened as a luxury hotel.
The first decade of the 21st century saw two major renovations done at the hotel, one in 2000 and one in 2009, which included the opening of Livingston's Restaurant and Bar and Mims Café, both named after early Atlanta Mayor Livingston Mims, who had built his house in 1879 on the corner where the hotel now stands.
In the fall of 2010, the Georgian Terrace's Grand Ballroom was used as a filming location for the Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds film The Change-Up. In the film, the ballroom doubles as Plantation Oaks Country Club.[6][7][8][14][15]
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American novelist and journalist. Mitchell wrote only one novel, published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel Gone with the Wind, for which she won the National Book Award for Fiction for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Long after her death, a collection of Mitchell's girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, titled Lost Laysen, were published. A collection of newspaper articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta Journal was republished in book form.
Georgia-Pacific Center is a 212.45 m (697.0 ft), 1,567,011 sq.ft skyscraper in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, United States. It contains 52 stories of office space and was finished in 1982. Before the six-year era of tall skyscrapers to be built in Atlanta, it was Atlanta's second-tallest building from 1982 to 1987. It has a stair-like design that staggers down to the ground, and is clad in pink granite quarried from Marble Falls, Texas.
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Midtown Atlanta, or Midtown, is a high-density commercial and residential neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia. The exact geographical extent of the area is ill-defined due to differing definitions used by the city, residents, and local business groups. However, the commercial core of the area is anchored by a series of high-rise office buildings, condominiums, hotels, and high-end retail along Peachtree Street between North Avenue and 17th Street. Midtown, situated between Downtown to the south and Buckhead to the north, is the second-largest business district in Metro Atlanta. In 2011, Midtown had a resident population of 41,681 and a business population of 81,418.
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Francis Palmer Smith was an architect active in Atlanta and elsewhere in the Southeastern United States. He was the director of the Georgia Tech College of Architecture from 1909–1922.
Lois Dwight Cole Taylor was an American editor and writer of children's literature. She wrote with her husband Allan Taylor as Allan Dwight. Their most successful novel was Drums in the Forest, first printed in 1936 and up to a 22nd printing in 1970. Most of her own novels were written as Anne Elliot. She also wrote as Anne Lattin, Nancy Dudley, Lynn Avery and Caroline Arnett.
Susan "Sue" Dowdell Myrick was an American journalist, educator, author, and conservationist. Her friendship with author Margaret Mitchell led to Myrick's role as a technical advisor and dialect coach during the production of Gone with the Wind (1939), ensuring the film accurately portrayed the accents, customs, and manners of the South. Due to this expertise she has been called the "Emily Post of the South". Myrick also was a columnist, reporter, and associate editor for Macon-based newspaper The Telegraph, working at the paper for fifty years.
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Annie Elizabeth Fitzgerald Stephens was an American landowner, businesswoman, and political activist. She was born to a prominent planting family in Clayton County, Georgia, and grew up on the family plantation, Rural Home. The daughter of an Irish immigrant, she was a devout Catholic. Stephens was involved in real estate endeavors in Atlanta and sued the federal government after General William Tecumseh Sherman's Siege of Atlanta, during the American Civil War, damaged some of her properties. Some historians, literary critics, and film critics, including Molly Haskell, consider her to be the inspiration behind the fictional character Scarlett O'Hara, from Stephens' granddaughter Margaret Mitchell's novel, Gone with the Wind.
Eugene Muse Mitchell was an American lawyer, politician, and historian. He served as the President of the Atlanta Board of Education from 1911 to 1912, during which time he eliminated the use of corporal punishment in city schools. He owned a law firm in Atlanta, and was a co-founder of the Atlanta Historical Society. He was married to the prominent Catholic activist and suffragist Maybelle Stephens Mitchell and was the father of Margaret Mitchell, who wrote the novel Gone With the Wind.
↑ Craig, Robert M. (1995). Atlanta Architecture: Art Deco to Modern Classic, 1929-1959. Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc. p.78. ISBN978-0-88289-961-9.
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