From Shrine Headquarters to Movie Palace: The Story of 660 Peachtree Street

On Christmas Day 1929, Atlantans passed beneath the ornate façade at 660 Peachtree Street NE and entered a theater unlike the city’s ordinary picture houses.

Inside, Moorish and Egyptian decorative motifs surrounded an enormous auditorium. A massive Wurlitzer organ supplied sound and spectacle. Films shared the program with live vaudeville, and the building’s sheer scale made a night at the movies feel almost ceremonial.

That effect was no accident. But the building had not begun as a conventional movie palace.

The story of 660 Peachtree St NE, Atlanta, GA, begins with the Yaarab Temple of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. In 1929, the Shriners opened the imposing structure as their new headquarters. Its exotic Middle Eastern-inspired architecture reflected the visual language the organization used at the time: domes, arches and elaborate ornament intended to transport visitors far beyond Peachtree Street.

Then finances changed the building’s future.

The Shriners soon encountered financial difficulty and leased the auditorium to William Fox, the movie mogul whose name became inseparable from grand American theaters. Fox transformed the space into a lavish public entertainment venue while preserving and amplifying the architectural fantasy already embedded in the building.

The Fox Theatre opened to the public on December 25, 1929. Its combination of motion pictures, vaudeville and architectural spectacle immediately distinguished it in Atlanta’s cultural landscape.

The timing makes the opening especially striking. The stock market had crashed only weeks earlier, and the country was moving toward the Great Depression. Yet audiences still arrived to sit beneath extravagant ornament, listen to the Wurlitzer and watch stories unfold onstage and onscreen. The building offered more than a program. It offered temporary departure from the everyday world.

That is what the best historic buildings do: they collect lives they were never designed to hold.

At 660 Peachtree, a headquarters became a theater without entirely shedding its first identity. The auditorium’s theatrical power came partly from architecture conceived for another institution and another purpose. Rather than erase that origin, the movie palace absorbed it. The result was neither an ordinary lodge nor a standard cinema, but something specific to Atlanta.

I live in Los Angeles, where movie palaces often feel like physical evidence that entertainment once demanded architecture equal to the occasion. The Fox makes the same argument more forcefully: a screen alone is not a place. The arrival, the ceiling, the organ and the shared gasp of a crowd all belong to the story.

Addresses can flatten history. “660 Peachtree St NE” looks like a location in a database, but the address carries an institutional ambition, a financial reversal and a public reinvention. Each phase remains legible because the building survived long enough for people to remember what happened there.

That record also shows why accurate property histories matter. Owners, preservationists, archivists and licensed real estate professionals serve as custodians of the documents that connect an address to its earlier uses. Architecture provides clues, but deeds, listings, photographs and firsthand accounts keep memory from drifting into folklore.

The Fox Theatre’s origin is compelling because it was not a straight line. It began with one grand plan and became famous through another. Financial trouble could have reduced the building to a cautionary footnote. Instead, adaptation gave Atlanta a landmark.

Read and contribute to the Homestalgia record for 660 Peachtree Street NE at https://www.homestalgia.com/home/660-peachtree-st-ne-atlanta-ga-30308 — then add the story of your own home.