Victorian houses surround the city's oldest park, with a 19th century cemetery on the north edge.
What Grant Park looks like
Large two-story houses face Grant Park itself. Smaller Queen Anne cottages and craftsman bungalows fill the side streets, including Rosalia Street and Augusta Avenue. Most of the buildings here date from the 1880s through the early twentieth century. Together with Inman Park, the neighborhood holds the largest remaining stretch of Victorian houses in Atlanta.
Lemuel P. Grant, an engineer, gave the city about 100 acres here in 1883 to found Atlanta's first park. The park and the neighborhood are both named for him. His own house, an 1858 mansion at the park's edge, is the oldest house still standing on its original site in Atlanta.
The park was replanned in 1903 by the Olmsted Brothers. began here in 1889, when a lumber merchant named George Gress bought animals from a failed circus and gave them to the city. A building in the park held the Cyclorama, a painting of the Battle of Atlanta, from 1921 to 2015. The painting then moved to the Atlanta History Center. uses the building now, as offices.
The 1925 building on Rosalia Street opened as Girls High School. It was renamed in 1947 and closed as a school in 1985. It is apartments today. A stone building on Glenwood Avenue was the city's prison from 1897 to 1924, and is offices today.
sits on the neighborhood's north edge, on 48 acres the city bought in 1850 as its first cemetery. It holds an estimated 70,000 graves, among them the novelist Margaret Mitchell and 27 former Atlanta mayors. Its brick and stone gates date to 1896. The Bell Tower beside them, built in 1899 as a sexton's office, now holds the cemetery's visitor center.
Films shot in Grant Park
In September 2013, the production behind Furious 7 filmed a funeral and a car chase through several of 's older sections.
Furious 7, 2015
The Toretto family's funeral for Han was staged inside . The car chase that follows runs through several of its oldest sections, including the African American Burial Grounds and Old Hunter Street, before exiting through the main gate onto streets standing in for downtown Los Angeles. Historic Oakland Foundation's own account and a contemporaneous Atlanta Journal-Constitution report both place the production here in September 2013, with Vin Diesel, Jason Statham and Paul Walker on set.
Watchmen, 2019
The same gate plays the exterior of a fictional cemetery called Tartarus Acres in a 2019 episode of the series Watchmen. The funeral scene inside that episode was filmed at a different cemetery.
MacGyver, 2018
The Bell Tower at plays a crematorium in a 2018 episode of the series MacGyver. It was built in 1899 as the sexton's office. The title character crashes his car into it to keep a partner from being incinerated inside.
What Grant Park can double for
Documented · present day
Los Angeles, California
In September 2013, the production behind Furious 7 filmed the Toretto family's funeral for Han inside . The car chase that follows runs through several of the cemetery's oldest sections and exits through the main gate onto a street standing in for downtown Los Angeles. Historic Oakland Foundation's own account and a contemporaneous Atlanta Journal-Constitution report both place the production here in September 2013, with Vin Diesel, Jason Statham and Paul Walker on set.
OAKLAND is lettered across the brick arch of the cemetery gate, identifying it in any static shot. The sequence keeps the cars moving through frame instead of holding on the gate itself.
Architectural comparison · the 1900s through the 1920s
Houston, Texas, Woodland Heights
Grant Park's craftsman bungalows and Queen Anne cottages on streets like Rosalia Street and Augusta Avenue are close in scale and period to Woodland Heights, a Houston streetcar suburb platted in 1907 around Bayland Avenue. Woodland Heights homes carry the same generous front porches and street-facing lawns Grant Park's side streets have. Woodland Heights started with Queen Anne houses, then filled in with bungalows and Foursquares through the 1910s and 1920s. That later stretch is the closest match to Grant Park's own side streets. The larger two story houses facing the park itself predate Woodland Heights by decades, and so does the 1858 L.P. Grant Mansion at the park's edge.
Grant Park's street signs name the neighborhood directly, and so does the painted signage on corner storefronts like Bennett's Market and Grant Park Coffee. A shot standing in for Houston needs to stay on the residential blocks, away from that corner. Parked cars and any modern satellite dishes on the porches would need the same control in either city.
Architectural comparison · the 1890s
Cleveland, Ohio, Riverside Cemetery's gatehouse, on the city's west side
Riverside Cemetery's gatehouse in Cleveland went up in 1897, two years before Oakland's Bell Tower. It serves the same purpose, a Gothic and Romanesque Revival building at the main gate of a large nineteenth century rural cemetery. Architect Charles Hopkinson built it of red brownstone under a tile roof, heavier and darker than the stone and stucco Oakland used. Both are castle-like enough that a passerby would take them for an administrative building rather than a chapel, without either one naming the cemetery in its own facade.
sits close enough to downtown that its skyline shows through the trees from parts of the grounds. A wide shot facing that way gives Atlanta away immediately. The Bell Tower itself stands near the main gate and can be framed against the cemetery's older monuments instead, with the skyline kept out of frame.
