Glass office towers line Peachtree Street, with the High Museum of Art and a handful of older buildings in between.
What Midtown looks like
Peachtree Street through Midtown is lined with office towers and condominium high rises, from North Avenue to 17th Street. Downtown Atlanta is at the south end of that stretch and Buckhead is at the north end.
, built between 1969 and 1973, was the first mixed use development in the Southeast. MARTA's subway opened in 1981. After went up at West Peachtree and 14th Streets in 1987, the surrounding parking lots filled in with office towers.
The on Crescent Avenue, where Mitchell wrote most of Gone with the Wind, now stands with the 1987 office tower at 999 Peachtree rising behind it. At Piedmont Avenue and Ponce de Leon Avenue, the 1883 survived the 1917 Atlanta fire, when neighboring houses were dynamited as a firebreak. It became a restaurant in the 1970s, and since 2005 has been the Savannah College of Art and Design's Ivy Hall.
Midtown also has a dense cluster of arts institutions, the and the High Museum of Art among them. The Fox opened in 1929 as a 4,665 seat movie palace at Peachtree Street and Ponce de Leon Avenue, across from the . When Gone with the Wind premiered in 1939, at the Loew's Grand downtown, the film's cast stayed at the Georgian Terrace and was driven to the premiere by motorcade.
sits at the neighborhood's eastern edge, 189 acres with its own lake. Lake Clara Meer was built for the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition.
Films shot in Midtown
Two buildings account for most of what has filmed in Midtown, the High Museum of Art and the .
The Resident, 2018
The Fox medical drama The Resident used the High Museum of Art's Richard Meier designed atrium as the lobby of its fictional Chastain Park Memorial Hospital, with the museum's main entrance doubling as the hospital's own entry gate. The museum has also stood in for a London museum in Black Panther. It played a dystopian Chicago faction headquarters in the Divergent series.
The Change-Up, 2011
The comedy The Change-Up used the hotel's Grand Ballroom as the fictional Plantation Oaks Country Club, filmed in the fall of 2010. The 1974 film Cockfighter had earlier scenes at the hotel. A 2007 commercial for Bacardi, directed by Robert Rodriguez and starring George Clooney, was shot there as well.
What Midtown can double for
Documented · present day
Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, on the National Mall
The High Museum stood in for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, in the scene where Sam Wilson donates Captain America's shield. The production filmed inside the museum's Wieland Pavilion, part of the 2005 Renzo Piano expansion. Piano clad the new galleries in white aluminum panels to match Richard Meier's original building. The galleries take daylight through molded skylights rather than windows, so the space works as a large modern museum interior with no exterior wall to identify. The production only needed a gallery that looked like a federal museum, not a specific match to the Smithsonian's own 1976 marble building on the Mall.
Meier's spiral ramp and glass rotunda are recognizable from outside and stayed out of the shot. The production added its own case and wall text for the shield, since the High's real signage and collection would otherwise give away that this is an art museum, not an aerospace one.
Architectural comparison · 1983 to 1987
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, PPG Place, in downtown Pittsburgh
Philip Johnson and John Burgee designed at West Peachtree and 14th Streets in 1987, three years after their PPG Place went up in downtown Pittsburgh. Both towers give a corporate office building a neo-Gothic crown instead of the flat roofline most 1980s towers used. Vertical ribs rise to pointed pinnacles over a stepped, tapering top. is pink granite topped by a single copper pyramid, while PPG Place is sheathed in reflective glass with 231 smaller spires across its six buildings, so the comparison holds for the silhouette against the sky rather than for the wall material up close.
's granite is a warm pink and PPG Place's cladding is silver glass, so anything closer than a wide, backlit shot of the crown would show the difference. Peachtree Street's other glass towers would also need to stay out of frame, 999 Peachtree and 1010 Midtown among them, since they would place the shot on Peachtree Street rather than in downtown Pittsburgh.
Speculative · present day
Dallas, Texas, the State Thomas Historic District, in Uptown
The is a small brick Victorian house with the glass tower at 999 Peachtree rising directly behind it. Dallas has its own pocket of preserved Victorian houses from the same period in the State Thomas Historic District in Uptown, now standing alongside condominium and apartment towers built up since the 1980s. The general picture of an old house kept standing amid new high rise construction could work in either place, though State Thomas's houses are mostly wood frame with painted siding rather than the 's brick, so a shot close enough to show the exterior wall would give it away.
Keep any shot close enough to see the siding out of frame, since State Thomas is wood frame construction and the is brick. Modern signage and parked cars in Uptown Dallas would also need to stay out of a wide shot.
