Fox Theatre Historic District
The Fox Theatre Historic District is situated at the intersection of Peachtree Street and Ponce de Leon Avenue in the Midtown section of Atlanta. It contains three major buildings: the Fox Theatre , the Georgian Terrace Hotel and the Ponce de Leon Apartments.
Built in 1911, the Georgian Terrace Hotel is a 10-story building of brick and marble designed as a southern version of a Parisian hotel. The Peachtree Street facade is composed of a two-story high window arcade set under a wide cornice supported on narrow pilasters. The center portion of the facade is stepped back and since the cornice remains unbroken, the shallow entrance portico is created. Above this two-story base, the facade remains relatively unadorned until the actual cornice line of the building. The cornice is of highly-decorative terra-cotta flush with the face of the building.
The interior of the Georgian Terrace features a marble lobby, general management offices, a glass-enclosed lounging room, telephone booths, and elevators on the first floor. The hotel also includes a dining room, cafe, and a Ladies' Carriage entrance. The Ponce de Leon side of the hotel originally included the "Terrace Garden" designed to represent a tropical garden. Under exotic plants of widespread foliage, green and white tables and chairs were spread to resemble the cafes of Europe.
The Ponce de Leon Apartments was one of the first large, high-rise luxury apartment buildings in Atlanta. It provided residential quarters and offered apartments from one-room to dozens of rooms. Built from 1912 to 1913, the Italianate building features two towers on either side of a gently curving front facade. Balconies are found on some of the upper floors and the pyramidal hipped roofs of the two towers are covered in red tile. On the ground level of the building the base is marked by a large colonnade which curves in a concave manner with the facade. Shops can be found at both the ground and basement levels along the colonnade.
Within the Fox Theatre Historic District, the Georgian Terrace Hotel is located at 659 Peachtree St., in downtown Atlanta and is open during normal business hours; visit the hotel's website at www.thegeorgianterrace.com for more information. The Ponce de Leon Apartments at 79 Ponce de Leon Ave. are private residences and not open to the public. However, the shops in the lower levels of the building are open during normal business hours. The district also includes the Fox Theatre.
Information and photos courtesy of the National Register for Historic Places Atlanta, Georgia Travel Itinerary, a subsidiary of the National Park Service.
