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. The George C. Fuller Construction Company was contractor, and the developer was Joseph F. Gatins, Jr.
A 19-story wing, designed by Smallwood, Reynolds, Stewart, Stewart and Associates, was added in 1991. A major renovation was completed in 2009.
The Georgian Terrace is a member of Historic Hotels of America, the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Architecture
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.
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".
Since its opening, the hotel has been the place for numerous historical events and housed several prominent guests, including Clark Gable, Tallulah Bankhead, Calvin Coolidge, John J. Pershing, Walt Disney, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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.
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.