Memories of Marietta, Georgia
She often visits her high school best friend Lindi in Marietta, GA where we grew up but this time she went back to our old neighborhood where she’d been years before on a nostalgic visit.
She told me what happened to our standby mall, Cobb Center, built in 1964, and how the old theatre there where I had my first date had been gone. Cobb Center was originally known as “Cobb County Shopping Center” in “Fair Oaks” though it was in Smyrna which is virtually the same as Marietta, just another suburb really. The mall was a super-regional one when it opened.
“Ever time I think about Cobb Center I just get sad thinking about it,” said James Legg who shopped there with his mom as a kid in the 80s.
I remember shopping there with my mom when it was an outdoor mall when I was three. It was enclosed in the 1970s and renamed “Cobb Center Mall” in an attempt to compete with Cumberland Mall which opened nearby by with a bigger, more impressive mall in 1973. Now Cumberland is undergoing an extreme makeover because of dwindling business.
In design Cobb Center as L-shaped, wrapping around the Rich’s store that served as its primary anchor and only one at first. In the last years of the mall it was renovated around 1987. In 1998 the game was over. With the mall gone all but the front entrances to the Rich’s were sealed off, a Publix opened in the strip and the former parking lot where my step dad used to give me driving lessons behind the store was converted into soccer fields.
Then I started thinking about all those old places as she recounted what our old neighborhood was like now – how it had changed yet stayed the same in some ways.
We walked to The Village Store, which is still there, twice a day and cheer leaded at the nearby Milton Park for The Redskins in Little League.
At the time in 1970 there were no Hispanic families in our neighborhood except for one. Since then there has been a population explosion of them and lots of restaurants are now Mexican-style.
One of them was Dante’s Pizza, ran by Dante Tomaselli who we were on a first name basis with and where we ate frequently. He always used to tell me to tell my dad hi.
The Marlboro Twin Drive-In where I first saw “Walking Tall” and “The Godfather” became apartments.
The Belmont Theatre where me, my sisters, and stepsisters saw “Jaws” in 1975 with a line wrapped around the old building at night, was at 2464 Atlanta Road in Smyrna. When I was five my mom worked at the JCPenney Outlet Store there part-time.
The single-screen theatre which has since closed was where we also saw “Logan’s Run.” A basic 1970s strip mall theatre short on ambiance and technology but a fairly decent venue just same. The Belmont had several odd features like other theatres around there which I didn’t consider weird at the time like the restrooms being upstairs.
Then there was The Strand Theatre, later turned into a blue jean store, in Marietta Square (Glover Park). It was a single-screen, too and we saw movies like “Food of The Gods,” a low-budget horror movie in the 70s.
Over the years Marietta Square has proven to be a center of the city in more than one way. At the north end of the square is a concert stage which features live acts on a regular basis, during lunch and in the evening (something new). Clockwise from the bandstand are a huge children’s playground which features a replica of The General, a popular locomotive that was chased into American History by Texas. At the south end of the park is the gazebo, shaded by a huge oak tree. The square also housed my original eye doctor’s office where I learned at age six I would have to wear glasses. At Christmas the square is decked out in amazing Christmas lights which we used to go see and now kids can go there and visit with Santa.
The Parkaire Twin Theatre in Marietta only had two screens and 1,000 seats. It was built by the Loews Company in 1974. The location, while it may be the site of rush hour gridlock today was nothing but cow pastures in 1974.
“It was a very nice theater but spent most of its life as a discount house, a shame since it was such a nice operation that was never able to get going,” said Raymond Stewart.
Stan Malone of cinematreasures.org said Lowes opened the theatre in the early summer of 1974 with “Chinatown” and another feature whose name escapes him.
A new Central Library was built in 1989. The old one used to be a huge, great place to hang out as a kid and I can remember spending hours there. It was also located in the Marietta Square. Now in its third life the original building serves as the Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art with its historic Greek Revival architecture.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the well-known Marietta landmark “The Big Chicken,” as in the Kentucky Fried Chicken chicken. Johnny Reb’s was a Marietta greasy spoon with a challenge. He turned to Georgia Tech 1957 graduate Hubert Puckett to design and building the sheet metal structure that rose 56 feet above the ground.
If you wanted to meet someone you’d tell them to “Meet me at The Big Chicken” and everyone in town knew where to go.
Over the years the structure created at the corner of Highway 120 and U.S. 41 suffered from time and the elements which took its toll on the last remnant of Tubby’s fast food restaurant. Finally in 1993 the end of The Big Chicken was near. But after much uproar among residents when it was threatened to be torn down it was renovated and stands in front of a KFC still at 1970 N. Cobb Parkway.
