History

The Fox Theatre’s story begins not with the movies but with the Shriners. The Yaarab Temple of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine acquired the Peachtree Street site in the late 1920s with the ambition of building Atlanta’s most spectacular fraternal meeting hall. Their design brief called for a facility that would serve as a temple, hotel, and assembly space for their organization, with the exotic Islamic and Egyptian imagery that Shriner iconography traditionally favored.

When William Fox — the Hollywood mogul — offered to co-develop the property as a movie palace, the partnership produced a building more extraordinary than either party could have managed alone. The Shriners’ fraternal program required large assembly rooms and ceremonial spaces; Fox’s theatre program required an auditorium of the atmospheric type that his chain was pioneering — in which the entire experience was designed as a fantasy environment rather than a conventional picture house. The result, under Marye, Alger & Vinour’s direction, was both: a Moorish exterior sheltering a freestanding auditorium inside whose domed ceiling was engineered to simulate a night sky.

The Depression that arrived within months of the Fox’s opening was catastrophic for both partners. The Fox film empire collapsed in 1932; the Shriners lost the building to foreclosure. A succession of operators kept the Fox open through the mid-century, but by the early 1970s its scale — too large and expensive for the new multiplex era — brought it to the edge of demolition for a high-rise office tower. A community campaign, coordinated under the banner “Save the Fox,” raised the funds to purchase and restore the building. The restoration, completed in 1975, returned the Fox to full operation and established it as Atlanta’s signature cultural venue.