I’ve passed through Greenwood, South Carolina, countless times on back-and-forth trips between Abbeville and Newberry, two towns that contain surviving works by G.L. Norrman.
On my last pass, I was happy to find this well-preserved sign for the Dixie Drive-In, which apparently debuted with the restaurant’s opening in 1959.
This is a true Googie relic, which is quite rare in the Deep South. Sorry, I ain’t calling it Dixie.
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.
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 southwest 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.
References
The Fifth Avenue side of the Metropolitan Club enjoys just a few minutes of direct light in the winter, so I had to work fast for this picture.
It was a freezing day in January—hours before a snowstorm hit—but damn it, the result was worth the misery.
Of the many fine examples of Stanford White‘s work in New York, the Metropolitan Club is the best.
The building’s composition is simple yet refined; the elements are perfectly balanced, and the facade is delicately textured with just the right amount of ornamentation.
Someday I’ll get the detail shots.
The structure was designed in the style of an Italian palazzo and built of marble, with opulent interiors that I’ll certainly never photograph. The club, after all, was founded by millionaires and is now patronized by billionaires.
I’ll just take pics by the Halal cart across the street, thanks.
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.
