Fox Theatre, Atlanta — Visitor Guide & Things to Do Nearby

The Fox Theatre in Atlanta stands as a building that almost wasn't, a palace of entertainment that nearly remained a Shriners' temple. Originally intended as the Yaarab Temple, a meeting hall for the Shriners (a fraternal organization), the building was designed with a Moorish architectural theme inspired by the Alhambra in Spain and the Temple of Karnak in Egypt. Construction began in 1927, but the building proved too expensive for the Shriners to complete. The cost spiraled, funding dried up, and the project sat unfinished.

Enter William Fox, a movie magnate who leased the auditorium from the Shriners and transformed it into a movie palace. The Fox Theatre opened on Christmas Day 1929, just two months after the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression. The timing could not have been worse for most businesses, but the Fox opened anyway, a bold assertion of faith in entertainment and spectacle during economic catastrophe.

The building's Moorish features remain the most striking aspect of its design: minarets, domes, ablution fountains, and ornamental details that evoke Islamic architecture and colonial exotica. The main curtain is perhaps the most extravagant touch, hand-sewn with sequins and rhinestones depicting mosques, rulers, and scenes of exotic splendor. That curtain, rising and falling before each film, was entertainment in itself, a preview of the sensory extravagance that followed.

The theater cost $2,228,570.50 to construct, an extraordinary sum at the time, and it seats 4,665 people. During its heyday, it showed first-run movies to audiences who were transported from the economic hardship of the Depression to a dreamworld of Moorish splendor. The architecture was a form of escapism, a way of briefly inhabiting a fantasy of wealth and exoticism.

Today, the Fox Theatre remains an active performance venue, hosting theatrical productions, concerts, and special events. The building has been preserved and restored, maintaining its Moorish grandeur and its original curtain. It stands as a monument to early 20th-century ambition and entertainment, a building designed to transport and transform.