History

Athens, Georgia grew up as a university town around the University of Georgia — the oldest state-chartered university in the United States, founded in 1785. The commercial strip along North Lumpkin Street, immediately north of the main campus, developed steadily through the early 20th century as the city’s principal entertainment and retail district. The construction of the Georgia Theatre in the mid-1930s represented the arrival of a full-service movie palace at this campus-adjacent address, bringing the Streamline Moderne design language that had become standard for American entertainment architecture during the New Deal era to one of the South’s most vibrant college towns.

The theater’s significance grew enormously in the early 1980s, when Athens became the epicenter of an alternative rock movement centered on the University of Georgia music scene. R.E.M., the B-52s, Pylon, and dozens of other bands performed at the Georgia Theatre during formative periods of their careers. The venue’s intimate capacity and its proximity to the university made it an essential proving ground for new music, and its booking history reads as a catalog of alternative rock’s first generation.

A fire in June 2009 destroyed the theater’s interior, but the exterior facade — the defining visual element of the building’s contribution to the Lumpkin Street streetscape — survived intact. A restoration effort preserved the original Streamline Moderne exterior while rebuilding the interior to modern performance specifications, and the Georgia Theatre reopened in 2011.