Going Down? : Party on the Roof, Potty in the Basement

The fact that we would have an elevator up to a rooftop patio bar was thrilling! It really brought home the reality of the rebuild and just how amazing the final product would be. An elevator, my god we nearly swooned at the idea. HA!

Unfortunately for the workers, it was going to be one of the last things installed. All the construction materials were going to get carried by hand and passed up as things moved vertically. Cranes are really expensive, so they are only brought in for things too heavy to manhandle. Don't get me wrong, plenty of materials were raised by cranes and forklifts, but a huge amount of materials were simply carried up as they were needed.

The bricklayers and their helpers set up a scaffold system in the areas where they needed to build walls etc. They had it down to a science and worked very smoothly as a team. It was very impressive af. They used manpower alone to pass all the brick and mud up by hand as the building grew. They worked in a team and some guys were trowel guys, setting the cinderblock, and some guys were slinging buckets of mud and stacks of cinder blocks, while other guys cutting blocks down to size and mixing mud (brick mortar).

The welders would regularly have to carry 4X8 sheets of steel plate up the stairs to complete different sections as the structure grew. As I mentioned, most of the steel was pre-built according to the blueprints. The steel is lifted into place by a crane usually and then bolted together. Eventually, all these junctions would be welded to add additional strength to the structure. But in plenty of places, custom fabrication had to be undertaken. As the building progresses, the foreman works very hard to keep the measurement tolerances in line with best practices. Slight changes during construction at the bottom of the building will introduce significant margins of error at the top.

Both of the new stairwells were steel structures that were partially assembled off-site and then lifted into place by crane. The architects made a very small error in the drawings concerning the elevation measurements. There was approximately a four to six-inch difference between where a pre-built stairway section landed, and where the actual doorway in the block wall was. Whoops! These steelworkers are very very good at adapting to small errors and otherwise making the best of ill-fitting sections. These giant pre-built sections of steel just do not always fit perfectly together. But this 4" gap was not something they could fix onsite. Almost the entire stairway had to be redesigned, and the delivered sections pulled out and then fabricated from scratch! That missing width of a 2X4 on a single layer of the elevation drawings turned out to be a very costly mistake.

There was nothing but narrow stairs throughout the old building. Because the original entrance was facing south, the basement was well below the level of Lumpkin Street. The building was remodeled approximately 50 years ago, and the entrance moved to the east side, on Clayton St, Where the giant neon Georgia Theater marquee was added at that time by the movie house corporation, The Georgia Theater Company. They own a ton of movie theater/multiplexes throughout the state to this day.

As I mentioned previously, a raised wooden platform had been built inside to meet the threshold of the new front doorway back when the GATH was converted to a theater. There were two narrow sets of stairs from the wooden deck down to the concrete where the seats were bolted to the floor. Over time, the seats disappeared one by one until eventually there were all gone.

The only means in the old building of getting to the second-floor bathrooms/ offices and then to the third-floor balcony, was via the staircase by the front door (there was a fire exit in the other corner upstairs, but it was an emergency use only area). Getting up and down the stairway was a tight fit and it was often jammed with people. The old bathrooms were on the second level and were very small. The women's room was a constant crush and a major headache for years. To this day I'm still amazed that the Fire Chief allowed it! The lady's bathroom had 8 tiny stalls and the men's was half that size. The plans for the new building had a huge set of bathrooms in the basement, as well as a set on the roof. The lady's bathroom was 12 full-size stalls and six sinks and mirrors in an adjoining foyer just inside the doorway. It was huge compared to the old place.

The redesign of the building utilizing the basement as the space for the bathrooms, storage & walk-in, gigantic ice makers, additional offices, it was genius. Think of it, every human being could benefit from bigger bathrooms at the GATH. You can't argue with that. The new roof patio/bar was going to revolutionize the building in the same way the infrastructure and cutting edge AV technology were going to revolutionize the place as a world-class music venue.

I designed the AV systems and their controls so that all the PA, video, and monitoring equipment was centrally located in the Production Office, located in the basement. All the main entrance points for data, phone, cable TV, plus all the connections to every speaker cabinet, every truss motor, every lighting instrument, and every video surface/projector was routed through the office or the dimmer room. It was my secret central control station! More importantly, it kept a lot of expensive digital equipment out of the crazy humidity and heat and crusty dust. Clean, cool air for the electronics. It was all an amazing leap forward for all of mankind as far as I was concerned. HA!

The size of the stage had grown by a significant amount, and all the Monitor Mixer controls and wiring were now on the side of the stage that 99.9% of every band in the world wants. After so many years in the old building, despite all its charms, this was going to be like leaping into the future. Land your flying car at the car park next door and transport your ass over to the party.

The owners and architects did an admirable job of keeping the spirit of the original building in mind throughout. It wasn't going to be carpet and brass rails. The building would maintain it's olde style ambiance, be visually comparable to the original interior, yet would be vastly improved in every way. Incredible!