Roosevelt Drive-In

The Roosevelt Drive-In in College Park, Georgia, opened on September 1, 1950, with The Nevadan, on Roosevelt Highway south of Atlanta. It held 500 cars. No source says outright where the name came from, but the road it stood on is the likely answer: that stretch of U.S. 29 runs toward Warm Springs, and the highway took the president's name.

The tower did the advertising. ROOSEVELT ran down a tall narrow column in stacked letters, with Drive-In in script on the marquee at its foot. On top sat an open ball of metal bands. Boxoffice reported in November 1950 that the lighted ball revolved and got attention from the road. A 1954 photograph in the Atlanta History Center's collection shows the theater, there filed under Red Oak.

A contributor to Cinema Treasures recalls an Atlanta newspaper feature from the early 1980s on the manager, Roy Overton, who had run the place for more than 30 years and may have been its only manager. He told the paper he had never watched a picture he showed. The bills ran to science fiction and horror in the 1950s and 1960s, and the price eventually came down to $2 a carload.

The theater sat under the approach to the Atlanta airport, and the noise was part of its trouble. A June 1982 photo shows it still there, and it closed that year. For decades afterward trees grew up through the lot, with speaker poles and a switch box left among them. Developers cleared the land around 2019 for what looked like a warehouse.