Fox Theatre (Atlanta)

Where it sits. The Fox stands at 660 Peachtree Street NE in Midtown Atlanta, on the corner of Ponce de Leon Avenue, its minarets and onion domes pushed hard against the sidewalk and its marquee wrapping the corner in several thousand bulbs. The Georgian Terrace Hotel faces it across Peachtree. The office slab immediately west, now Tower Square, is the reason the theatre still stands. North Avenue station on MARTA's north-south line is one block away, which makes the Fox one of the very few surviving American movie palaces reachable without a car.

A Shriners' temple that became a movie palace. The building was commissioned as the Yaarab Shrine Temple, headquarters for a chapter of roughly 5,000 Shriners, which is the actual explanation for the Moorish exterior — it was never conceived as a cinema. The $2.75 million project outran the fraternity's money, so they leased the auditorium to William Fox, who was then putting up theatres across the country. It opened on 25 December 1929, two months after the Wall Street crash. The theatre ran only 125 weeks before going dark; the Shriners could not meet the mortgage, Fox went bankrupt, and after the December 1932 foreclosure the complex was bought jointly by Paramount and the Georgia chain Lucas & Jenkins. The Shriners stayed on as paying tenants until 1949.

What the room does. Olivier Vinour, of Marye, Alger and Vinour, designed the 4,665-seat auditorium as an Arabian courtyard open to the sky. Ninety-six crystal stars are set into the ceiling, about a third of them wired to flicker, and a Brenograph projector installed in 1929 still drifts clouds across the plaster night. What reads as an enormous Bedouin canopy over the seats is plaster on steel rods, shaped to funnel sound up to the farthest balcony. Almost nothing is what it claims to be: the beams are plaster, the gold leaf is paint, the fireplaces were built without chimneys, and the ablution fountains in the Islamic rooms have never run. The Egyptian Ballroom copies a temple of Ramses II at Karnak, and the mezzanine Ladies Lounge holds a replica of Tutankhamun's throne and dressing tables carried on small sphinxes. The house organ, a Moller of more than 3,600 pipes known as the Mighty Mo, rises on its lift before film screenings and remains one of the largest theatre organs still working in its original installation.

On screen, and next door to it. Atlanta's most famous premiere did not happen here. Gone with the Wind opened in December 1939 at the Loew's Grand, long since demolished, because Loew's distributed it. The Fox got the parade regardless: the procession formed on Peachtree outside this marquee because the cast was staying at the Georgian Terrace across the street. Its own great premiere came on 12 November 1946, when Walt Disney introduced Song of the South from the stage; James Baskett, the film's lead, was not present. Since Georgia's 2008 production incentives turned metropolitan Atlanta into one of the busiest filming regions anywhere, the Fox has served the industry chiefly as a premiere house, awards stage and event venue rather than as a location, with digital cinema projection added in 2006 alongside the original Brenograph sing-alongs.

The wall that was left standing. Through its movie decades the Fox admitted Black patrons, but by way of a separate box office, a separate entrance and separate seating; the house integrated in 1962. The segregation wall in the second dress circle and the disused ticket window at the back entrance were deliberately retained during restoration rather than quietly removed, and guides address them directly.

Saved, and then kept. By 1974 suburban multiplexes and a hollowed-out centre had emptied the house, and Southern Bell proposed buying the site to clear it for a parking deck. A campaign formed, the building went on the National Register that May, benefit concerts followed — Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded their first live album here during the fight — and the city refused to issue a demolition permit. A land swap eventually put the tower and its deck beside the theatre instead of on top of it. The Interior Department designated the Fox a National Historic Landmark on 26 May 1976. The non-profit Atlanta Landmarks has run it since 1975 and has closed every year since in operating surplus, which is why the restoration has been continuous rather than a single campaign.

Getting in. Around 750,000 people a year come for touring Broadway, the Atlanta Ballet's Nutcracker, concerts and the summer film series. The stage is shallow by modern standards, a straightforward legacy of its cinema origins, so a few of the largest musicals cannot play here without temporary alterations. Daytime guided tours run most weeks and are the only reliable way to see the Egyptian Ballroom, the Grand Salon and the lounges properly. On show nights the surrounding garages fill by about seven; the train is simpler.