In our ongoing “Throwback Atlanta” series, we’re on a quest to look closely at our city’s history that may be hiding in plain sight. In each installment, we highlight three long-standing cultural institutions that have managed to escape the bulldozer — and how they have (or in some cases have not) retained the original spark of creativity or uniqueness that drew people in at the outset.

We also perform an autopsy on one piece of our past that no longer stands — though perhaps lives on in the form of abiding nostalgia. Along the way, we’ll tap into the insights of a local historian, in this case, Lemos, to help guide our quest.

Still standing

Credit: undefined

Credit: undefined

The Colonnade Restaurant — 1927

The almost century-old restaurant beloved for its extensive meat-and-three menu has lived by many credos. “Plenty of American and foreign dishes at popular prices,” proclaims an ad from the 1950s. “ALWAYS THE BEST OF FOOD,” reads an all-caps newspaper endorsement from 1941. A common selling point that unites decade after decade of customer marketing since the restaurant began cites the generous free parking.

And, indeed, on a recent visit for dinner on a Friday night, that was still as true as ever.

The establishment’s original location was a white-columned house at the intersection of Piedmont and Lindbergh. It closed during World War II, reopened during the 1950s, and then moved to its current location on Cheshire Bridge Road in 1962.

The restaurant was renovated in 1979 and expanded by 5,000 square feet ― thanks to the energetic new ownership of restaurateur Paul Jones, who brought in his family to help run the place and would go on to shepherd it through decades of steady service. His daughter, Jodi Stallings, grew up in the restaurant business and now runs it with her husband David.

Situated next to the retro-looking Cheshire Motor Inn, the restaurant shares a block with a lingerie boutique, a martial arts school and an antiques store. Inside, the dining room is oddly frozen in time with its ‘70s-style patterned rug and four-top tables that include a foldout feature more typical of home kitchens. The restaurant has been featured in the Robert Redford film “A Walk in the Woods” and on the Netflix series “Ozark.”

In the early aughts, the executive chef at the time, Ryan Cobb, made a stir (literally) by preparing kudzu dishes in a variety of ways — fried, boiled and stuffed. But that’s about as adventurous as it gets. Nowadays, you’ll find fried chicken, mac and cheese and other Southern comfort food staples, as well as steaks and seafood.

Finally, in what might be deemed the best advertisement of all, the restaurant was briefly shutdown due to a blaze fueled by kitchen grease and a faulty fan in the early 1990s. In 1992 the Atlanta Constitution reported that when the fire began, “the 30 or so patrons didn’t dash for the door empty-handed” but grabbed food on-the-go as they made their emergency exit.

Credit: Bita Honarvar

Credit: Bita Honarvar

Lenox Square mall — 1959

In George Romero’s 1978 horror classic “Dawn of the Dead,” which takes place in a mall, there’s a famous exchange between survivors about why the zombies are slowly shuffling into the shopping center in hordes.

“What are they doing? Why do they come here?” one asks.

“Some kind of instinct. Memory of what they used to do,” responds the other. “This was an important place in their lives.”

It stands to reason, then, that should a zombie apocalypse hit the ATL, a la “The Walking Dead,” we’d probably have gaggles of living dead gravitating toward the long-standing Buckhead mall.

Lenox Square was developed in 1959 by Ed Noble, the son of a wealthy Oklahoma oilman, in what was then seen as the suburbs. He wound up waging a two-year zoning battle to develop the John Ottley estate into a hub of commerce. The fight went all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court.

The original anchors were two department stores that no longer exist: Davison’s and Rich’s.

Rich’s was a treasured commercial mainstay for generations of Atlanta families. It was started in 1867 by a 26-year-old Jewish Hungarian immigrant named Morris Rich (Anglicized from Mauritius Reich), who borrowed $500 from his brother to build a dry goods store on Whitehall Street in Castleberry Hill. The store’s wild success led to its prolific expansion to locations across the city, including Lenox Square.

Rich’s eventually succumbed to its competition, Macy’s, which bought the enterprise out in the mid-’80s and then eliminated it altogether in 2005.

By the late 1960s, the mall was considered the largest shopping center south of Washington D.C., and over the years it has been known to attract celebrity guests ranging from the late, great Muhammad Ali to rapper and producer Lil Jon.

In the beginning, it didn’t resemble what we now recognize as a typical mall. It started as a series of stores connected by sidewalks, parking and landscaping. The move to enclose it occurred in the early 1970s.

Designed by an interior architect team from Los Angeles, the upgrade was “in keeping with modern concepts of controlled climate,” as a 1973 piece in the Atlanta Constitution gushed. (The same article later described the mall’s new interior as “like the fairy tale of the ugly duckling, suddenly the beautiful adult swan emerged.”

The mall has always featured an array of high-end stores — today, it includes recognizable chic brands like Armani, Luis Vuitton and Tiffany’s. Over the years, it has also housed a bowling alley, veterinarian’s office, Delta ticketing stop, post office and stockbroker. Neiman Marcus has resided at the mall since 1972.

Over the years it was the site of many beloved community traditions including Priscilla the Pink Pig, a children’s train ride at Rich’s (and then Macy’s) that was mothballed during the pandemic, and the annual Christmas tree lighting, which was retired after 74 years last December.

Still, one of the strangest and saddest departures from Lenox was that of the fabled resident organ grinder, Sam “The Monkey Man” Ketchum. The Woodstock resident and his pet monkey, Willie, entertained shoppers from 1959 until 1988 when, according to the New York Times, Ketchum was told he detracted from the “luxury” experience of the place. Management had deemed that a character straight out of a Fellini film no longer belonged in a place featuring a facade made of marble pulled from a quarry in Rome, Italy.

Same but different

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / hshin@ajc.com

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / hshin@ajc.com

Apache Café — 2001

Before it was Apache Café, it was Yin Yang Café, cofounded in 1994 on 3rd Street in Midtown by Decatur native Reggie Ealy. He had recently returned from an artist residency in Sweden (where he rubbed elbows with George Chang, who would go on to found MJQ just across town) and found himself struggling to reacclimate to U.S. culture.

Along with his friends Andre Zarka and Paul Sobin, Ealy threw himself into starting a hub for creative folks to come and try new things without barriers ― including artistic expressions not seen as cash cows at the time like spoken word and jazz.

“It wasn’t about making a whole bunch of money because that’s not what the concept was. It was about doing something we loved with the music, with the food,” he explained in “Spring & 3rd: The Story of Yin Yang Café,” a locally produced documentary streaming on Tubi.

An epicenter of the city’s emerging neo soul movement, it fostered the early careers of performers like India. Arie, Anthony David and Bone Crusher. Erykah Badu and George Benson were known to have stopped by — even Prince, as rumor had it.

Poet Abyss Graham, aka Team Abyss, remembers those days vividly. “It was like our ‘Cheers.’ You wanted to go where everybody knows your name? Yin Yang was the place.”

A rent hike forced the space to close in 1997, and it left a void. Then in 2001, Asa Fain, a drummer who had performed frequently at Yin Yang, and his wife Karen Fain reopened the spot and named it Apache Café. Initially they planned to just run a vegetarian restaurant, but the community encouraged them to open it back up to artists.

Once Apache began to host events, it rapidly established a reputation as the scene where cool cats congregated.

“It was like Studio 54 but without the cocaine,” said Graham. It served as an incubator for musicians, rappers, poets and performers. That energy, those “Basquiat lounge vibes,” Graham said, sustained throughout the first two decades of the millennium.

Graham was part of a collective called the Live Poet Society, which ran the Black Light Open Mic every last Friday of the month. For the event, they would come in from their corporate day jobs and set up glow-in-the-dark paintings under black light, and they encouraged attendees to paint themselves.

The debut night of Black Light Open Mic sold out, and subsequent nights were so full the fire marshal came by to warn them that they were at maximum capacity.

Unfortunately, rent woes came knocking again, and in 2019 the 3rd Street location closed and Apache relocated to a new home on Marietta Street, where it has become, in many ways, a more standard events venue.

One of the key happenings at Apache in the early aughts was Fight Club, hosted by the charismatic D.R.E.S. the Beatnik, always clad in his signature beret. He brought captivating freestyle rap battles to the stage, packing people in, shoulder to shoulder, to watch contenders conjure fiery rhymes from thin air.

“A lot of talent was magnetically attracted to this place. You could always do something at Apache seven days a week,” Graham said. “Freaknik bought me here, but funk and jazz kept me.”

Gone, baby, gone

Credit: Special

Credit: Special

SciTrek — 1988-2004

SciTrek. Utter these two syllables to any Millennial who grew up in Atlanta, and chances are a flash of bittersweet nostalgia will ricochet over their face, followed by a wistful sigh.

The Museum of Science and Technology in Atlanta, or SciTrek, was an ambitious but ultimately doomed STEM-focused museum for kids from the late ‘80s through the early aughts. It was a place where many of the “best field trips ever” took place according to — ahem — local kids coming up during that time (including yours truly).

Victoria Lemos recently delved into the history of SciTrek on Archive Atlanta and said it was one of the most popular episodes she’s recorded. Still, after spending time examining its legacy, “I still don’t understand the magic,” she said. “I think the magic is only knowable if you went to it.”

Part of that enduring fondness may stem from the gap SciTrek filled at the time. There was no Tellus Science Museum. There was no Children’s Museum downtown. The Fernbank Museum had not yet opened, although the smaller-scale Fernbank Science Center had been around for a while, as detailed in our first Throwback article.

In an idea first hatched by Mary O’Connor and Sue Trotter in the early 1980s, the museum would open its doors in 1988, with significant support from the city of Atlanta and the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation. It welcomed 350,000 visitors in its first year and was named one of the country’s best science museums by Good Housekeeping magazine in 2001.

The 96,000-square-foot facility situated next to the Atlanta Civic Center had an annual budget of $2.5 million and it boasted 140 exhibits that infused a sense of wonder into science.

Highlights included the immersive Weather Machine, which gave museum patrons a taste of extreme phenomena like tornadoes; the Electrostatic Generator that provided a literally hair-raising experience; and the Shadow Wall that harnessed the power of phosphorescence to imprint kids’ shadows on the wall.

Unfortunately, the museum may have flown too close to the sun, running up significant debt that would lead to its demise when combined with a loss of state and federal funding.

“SciTrek is almost a great example, I think, of the Atlanta model, which is to go, ‘Let’s get it half done and just wing it,’” Lemos said. “I don’t want to dismiss it, because (the SciTrek staff) did a lot of work, but really, they opened this museum $2 million short of what they originally needed. From the get-go, it just wasn’t going to work.”

In 2004, SciTrek closed and all the exhibit materials were auctioned off or donated, but its Challenger Learning Center lives on at the Fernbank Science Center.