The Queen Anne-style J.M. Beath Residence in Atlanta’s Inman Park neighborhood, better known as the Beath-Dickey House, is the only known extant work by A.McC. Nixon, an architect who began his practice in Texas circa 1881 1 2 and first appeared in Atlanta in 1888.3
In late 1890, Nixon partnered with J.M.P. Lindsey under the name Nixon & Lindsey.4 The firm dissolved in 1894,5 shortly before a court trial in which the pair were acquitted on charges of larceny after trust stemming from their supervision of a home’s construction in 1891.6 7 8 9 The client had accused the pair of pocketing money intended for the contractors, but the matter was successfully proven to be a simple accounting error.10
After the trial, Nixon’s work in Atlanta dwindled, and in July 1896, his personal possessions and business contents were sold at public auction to pay off debt.11 Apparently in poor health, he moved to England in July 1896, where he died that October.12
Nixon wasn’t an especially good designer, and the Beath House’s clumsy, top-heavy design is typical of his oeuvre. In 1891, he also designed the similarly styled D.H. Dougherty Residence (later J.R. Hopkins Residence, demolished),16 which has been erroneously attributed to both G.L. Norrman and W.L. Stoddart.17 Atlanta really doesn’t know its own history.
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This Queen Anne-style home is Atlanta’s only known extant work designed by J.W. Golucke (1857-1907),1 2 a shyster carpenter who built a career on smooth talk and grand delusions of being a legitimate architect.
A thoroughly fraudulent and incompetent designer, Golucke was one of several “Atlanta architects” of his era who did little actual work in the city, primarily peddling their shoddy plans to poor, rural communities that didn’t know any better. Thus, if you travel through backwoods Georgia, you’ll find more than a dozen county courthouses by Golucke’s design3 — all of them terrible.
Golucke fittingly died in a south Georgia jail cell while being held on charges of forgery,4 weeks after attempting suicide under the influence of drugs.5 6 His work is not celebrated here.
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Atlanta’s overall architectural quality is among the worst of any major U.S. city, and you will never find a harsher critic than I of its subpar built environment.
May it never be said, though, that I do not praise the few works in the city that are actually worthy of admiration. Here’s one: the 1991 expansion of the Georgian Terrace Hotel, designed by Smallwood Reynolds Stewart Stewart & Associates of Atlanta.
The 20-story tower was attached to the original 1911 structure—the first of dozens of luxury hotels in the eastern United States designed by W.L. Stoddart of New York,3 4 5 who had deep ties to Atlanta,6 7 8 and designed several other buildings in the city, notably the Winecoff Hotel,9 10 site of the deadliest hotel fire in United States history.
Efficient and prolific, Stoddart became a wealthy man from his many projects, although his legacy is all but forgotten today. I would argue that’s because he spent the bulk of his career sacrificing his creative talent—and there is ample evidence that he had actual talent—by lazily repeating the same designs, which became increasingly flavorless and banal.
Compare Stoddart’s Poinsett Hotel in Greenville, South Carolina;11 the Francis Marion Hotel in Charleston, South Carolina;12 or the Hotel Savannah in Savannah, Georgia:13 the 3 buildings are nearly identical in appearance and plan.
Thomas Wolfe was scathingly accurate in his assessment of Stoddart’s Battery Park Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina: “It was being stamped out of the same mold, as if by some gigantic biscuit-cutter of hotels that had produced a thousand others like it all over the country.”14
After decades of neglect, the Georgian Terrace was abandoned in the 1980s and taken over by squatters, further damaged by a series of fires.15 16 Spared from inevitable demolition, the structure was initially renovated into luxury apartments,17 18 19 with Smallwood’s soaring glass-and-steel atrium, seen here, ingeniously connecting Stoddart’s hotel building with the modern addition.
Considered radical at the time, the design met with some local opposition20 21(isn’t that always the case?), but in the years since, the expanded Georgian Terrace—once again a hotel—has become an integral part of Midtown Atlanta, and is something rare for the city: a beautiful and unique space that preserves history.
