An incredibly sad sight as I drove up Prince Avenue this morning after the call the Georgia Theatre was on fire — huge billowing black and gray clouds of smoke were pouring into the blue morning sky.
I knew at that moment, before I’d even gotten close, that this was likely the end of the Ga. Theatre as we know it.
A few dozen spectators looked on, talking about the history of the theater — “I’ve seen so many great shows there,” I heard one say.
Athens Chamber president Doc Eldridge’s cell phone was ringing off the hook as he took call after call, obliging radio and newspaper reporters with his memories of the theater. He’d been “to many picture shows there” as a little boy he said, and it became a music venue in the 1970s. He put me in touch with the man who gave it its musical incarnation, Sheffy McArthur, who opened it in 1978 with friends Sam Smart, Hap Harris and George Fontaine.
“It’s really sad,” McArthur said. “I just think of all the history, the bands that played there — we helped create the beginning of the Athens music scene.” He counted off artists that had performed in his three years running the place — B.B. King (who returns to Athens at the Classic Center in October), Muddy Waters, Jerry Jeff Walker, Sea Level, Steve Morris, Chuck Leavell, Randall Bramblett, David Allen Coe, Davis Causey, John Prine…
“We built the stage there,” he said.
McArthur said he “tipped his hat” to current owner Wilmot Greene, who’d put so much work into the renovation of the theater in recent years.
Eldridge looked on as a new round of flames started up in the rooftop of the building, and two ladders with firefighters pointed hoses into the huge sea of flames. Onlookers repeated sentiments that thankfully the fire started in the morning, apparently, not when the theater was full of people. Even so, Eldridge said, there are people in danger.
“One thing I don’t think people realize is there are a lot of people in harm’s way — we’ve got three or four men up there in oxygen masks engulfed in smoke trying to put this thing out, and can you imagine the heat they’re experiencing? This is when you’re really grateful for the work these folks do for us.”
Lt. Reginald Hunter, an investigator and senior fire prevention officer with Athens-Clarke County, said he wouldn’t speculate how the fire started and gave a look of “yeah right” when I asked if he thought there’d be anything left of the theater. (Well, I had to ask — it’s hard to believe it’s just gone.) “There was no sprinkler system and with all the wood in that building…” Hunter said the building was grandfathered in for its age on the building code required now for sprinkler systems.
“I’m just glad it was at a time when it wasn’t full of people,” Hunter said. The investigation, he said, will start with “what’s most burned, moving to what’s least burned.”
