Fox Theatre
Moorish-Egyptian picture palace of 1929, now Atlanta's main touring theatre and concert house.
The Fox began as a planned headquarters for the Yaarab Temple of the Shriners, whose taste for Islamic architecture shaped the minarets, onion domes and horseshoe arches of the Peachtree Street front. When costs outran the fraternity's means, the scheme was leased to William Fox as a cinema and it opened on Christmas Day 1929. The auditorium is dressed as a Moorish courtyard, with a canopied stage, trompe-l'oeil tented boxes and a ceiling of 96 electric stars and drifting clouds.
Cinema revenues fell away and the building passed through bankruptcy and decades of decline; a demolition proposal in the mid-1970s prompted the Save the Fox campaign, and a non-profit has run the theatre since. It seats about 4,600 and presents touring musicals, comedy, concerts, dance by Atlanta Ballet and a summer and autumn film series accompanied by the 1929 Moller pipe organ known as the Mighty Mo. A long programme of restoration continues room by room.
Highlights
- Auditorium styled as a Moorish courtyard under a starlit ceiling
- 1929 Moller pipe organ, the 'Mighty Mo', played at film screenings
- Egyptian Ballroom with polychrome columns and lotus capitals
- Minarets and arcaded Peachtree Street facade
