Little Five Points keeps its music hidden behind the shopfronts. Aisle 5 at 1123 Euclid Avenue NE, in Atlanta's most defiantly alternative district, is a 300-capacity music venue, bar and restaurant tucked behind a retail space that fronts the avenue - the side entrance marked by wall art that changes often enough to double as a local landmark in rotation. The room runs the straightforward small-club formula: stage at one end, standing room to the back bar, and a booking policy that keeps the c.....

A lush green oasis in the heart of Atlanta, the Atlanta Botanical Garden spreads across thirty acres beside Piedmont Park, combining manicured display gardens, woodland trails and striking glasshouses. Founded in the 1970s, it has grown into one of the city's most popular attractions, celebrated for its orchid collection, its tropical conservatory and its elevated walkway through the treetops. The garden was established to create a public botanical showcase in the city, and over the decades it .....

Atlanta's concert hall was born from the city's deepest grief. Atlanta Symphony Hall opened on 19 October 1968 inside the Memorial Arts Center at 1280 Peachtree Street - the complex, now the Woodruff Arts Center, built in memory of the 106 Atlanta arts patrons killed in the 1962 Orly air crash while returning from a museum tour of Europe. Robert Shaw conducted the inaugural concert, an all-French program honouring the French citizens whose contributions helped raise the building. The 1,762-seat.....

Martin Luther King Sr. preached the first service; the bass bins arrived a century later. Believe Music Hall at 181 Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard occupies the 1907 church that Mechanicsville knew as the mighty fortress - designed by Alexander Campbell Bruce, Atlanta's first American Institute of Architects member, home to St. John's Methodist and later St. Stephens Missionary Baptist, whose opening-night sermon in 1958 was delivered by the elder King. The building passed through years of secul.....

College football's oldest FBS stadium was built by the students who filled it. Bobby Dodd Stadium at Georgia Tech, on North Avenue at Techwood Drive in downtown Atlanta, has hosted football on the site since 1905 and as a proper stadium since 1913, when a 15,000-dollar gift from trustee John W. Grant - given in memory of his son Hugh Inman Grant, for whom the field was named - funded concrete west stands that Tech students largely built themselves. The horseshoe grew with the century: east stand.....

An Olympic venue hides in plain sight on a historically Black college campus in Atlanta. CAU Panther Stadium at 735 Beckwith Street SW, on the campus of Clark Atlanta University in the Atlanta University Center district, was built for the 1996 Summer Olympics as the secondary venue for field hockey, hosting the men's and women's preliminary competitions from 20 July to 2 August 1996 and lawn bowls during the Paralympics that followed. Before the Games the site was a grassy practice lot; the Olym.....

Built as the gathering place for the 1996 Summer Olympics, Centennial Olympic Park is a twenty-one-acre green space in the heart of downtown Atlanta that has become a permanent civic landmark. Created to give the Games a central public square, it remains a hub of celebration and recreation, anchored by a distinctive fountain shaped like the interlocking rings of the Olympic symbol. The park was carved out of a run-down stretch of downtown for the centennial Olympics, the hundredth anniversary o.....

No stadium in America has lived three lives quite like this one. Center Parc Stadium at 755 Hank Aaron Drive SE in Atlanta's Summerhill neighbourhood began as Centennial Olympic Stadium, the 209-million-dollar, 85,000-seat centrepiece of the 1996 Summer Olympics that hosted the opening and closing ceremonies and Michael Johnson's 200-metre world record. Immediately after the Paralympics it was rebuilt - as designed from the start - into the 50,000-seat Turner Field ballpark, where the Atlanta Br.....

A long-standing fixture of Atlanta's live-music scene, Center Stage is a versatile performance complex on West Peachtree Street in the Midtown district. Originally built in the 1960s as a venue for theatrical productions, the building has evolved into a multi-room music and events destination, with its flagship theatre joined by two additional spaces that together host a wide range of concerts, shows and private functions throughout the year. The main Center Stage Theater is a seated and standi.....

A wave of steam-bent oak now cocoons the stage where The Color Purple first met an audience. The Coca-Cola Stage at Alliance Theatre, inside the Woodruff Arts Center's Memorial Arts Building at 1280 Peachtree Street NE in Midtown Atlanta, is the renamed and rebuilt main stage of the Alliance Theatre, the Tony Award-winning regional company founded in 1968 on a campus it shares with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the High Museum of Art - one of the largest arts centres in the world, drawing m.....