ReZoom

Atlanta’s hottest nightlife scene was once buried deep beneath the city’s streets. Today, the party revives in full glory once a year ...

New Orleans has Bourbon Street. Chicago has Rush Street. New York has Times Square. And, for a few halcyon years in the 1970s, Atlanta's Underground rivaled the other, more famous venues as the place to be.

It was a time when legendary jazz performer Piano Red held court at Muhlenbrink's Saloon, and locals and tourists rubbed shoulders in the crowded subterranean streets with celebrities like Gregg Allman, Cher, the Rolling Stones and the cast of The Waltons. Touring musicians made regular stops at the music venues of the Underground. Junior Walker and the All-Stars had a stint at the nightclub Scarlet O'Hara, and Atlanta-born country music hall-of-famer, Roy Drusky, performed at the Rustler's Den.

"There is eating and drinking and singing and dancing in the streets," reported a journalist in the September 1970 issue of American Motorist magazine. "Things to do, to look upon, to touch, to experience and to talk about for a long time to come.... There's really no other place like it, anywhere. Great, new sparkling and friendly Atlanta nurses in its depths a new and unique kind of catacombs, Underground Atlanta, for everybody."

The Underground was created in 1968 by two young developers, Jack Paterson and Steve Fuller. The two bought up four blocks of storefronts that had been abandoned since the 1920s when the City of Atlanta created concrete viaducts to elevate the street above the busy rail tracks, prompting business owners to move their storefronts to the new, second-story street level.

The original spaces below that once housed the shops and businesses that were either abandoned or used as storage. Hidden beneath the new street system, the storefronts were preserved like the city of Pompeii. Decorative brickwork, hand-painted signs and carved doorways were all hidden from view until Paterson and Fuller decided to lease the historic spaces to a new generation of business owners, stipulating that the businesses retain the historic details.

The roster of merchants in the 1970s included bars like Sgt. Pepper's, where one could hear live music; the Irish pub Blarney Stone; a cabaret theater called Gone with the Wits; the Apothecary Lounge, which served up shrimp and oysters accompanied by live jazz; and Burning of Atlanta, a bar whose "glowing atmosphere recreates the historic event," according to a newspaper ad.

Former Georgia Governor Lester G. Maddox ran the Pickwick Restaurant, a resurrection of an establishment that he operated in the mid-1960s, before he was elected Governor in a narrow runoff election. (Maddox closed the original Pickwick after being requested to desegregate it when he refused to admit a group of black customers.)

"Just about any night in the week, you could stand at one end of Old Alabama St. and see nothing but a sea of faces," an off-duty policeman told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times in an article appearing on March 17, 1976.

But by the late 1970s, the Underground's glory days seemed short-lived. "Business has dwindled sharply over the last two years," reported the 1976 Los Angeles Times article. "Debt-ridden shopkeepers and club operators are moving out. Both the economic recession and fears of inner-city crime, if not crime itself, have prompted many Atlantans to go to the city's outskirts for night life, leaving downtown Underground to hotel-dwelling conventioneers and other visitors."

In 1980, the Underground closed, the victim of suburban flight and the construction of the MARTA transit system, which overtook parking as well as several blocks of clubs. Underground Atlanta reopened in 1989, and the current operators are working hard to return the space as a destination it once was. Like its original incarnation, today's Underground has souvenir shops, a food court and a handful of nightclubs, though not nearly as many as the 80-some tenants that the area originally housed.

But, for at least once night each year, the streets are thronged with revelers once again. On New Year's Eve a giant peach descends amidst fireworks and live music. It's kind of Underground Atlanta's version of Brigadoon every year.