The Graveyard Tavern building has been part of East Atlanta since the Roaring Twenties, spanning nearly 80 years of Atlanta history. Here’s a self-guided tour and chronology of the building that will help you see how it has “evolved” since the Jazz Age.

The Renovation
Our renovation was done in a way to bring the building up to all modern code requirements while respecting the history and architecture of the building and neighborhood.  We exposed most of the original building materials and used new materials in a way to function as guideposts to the history of the place – if you look carefully, the building will tell you its story.  The new construction is all custom millwork, designed to fit in with the 1930s architecture of the building.

The Original Building and Addition
If you stand in the northwest corner of the building (at the corner of Glenwood and Joseph Avenue) you are in the original building, which was constructed as a feed store in 1927 and was originally free-standing.  The rest of the building was added on in 1939.  From this corner you can see the change in building construction by looking up at the roof joists or down at the flooring.  The roof joists in the original building run north and south; in the 1939 addition, they run east and west.  The flooring in the oldest part of the building is heart pine; you can see where the flooring changes to red oak in the 1939 addition if you walk to the east.

The Storefront
Walk along the storefront to the center of the building.  If you stand at the “prow” of the bar and face the front of the building, you’ll be looking at the original front doorway, which from the street is framed by a graceful brick archway.  We use this now as a secondary entrance; we added the new “sunken” main entrance to the east in order to make the building more accessible and give us more open floor space along the storefront.  The storefront windows and doors were all custom milled to match original doors we found when we renovated the building.

Floors and Walls
As you walk back toward the large booths along the south wall, look at how the flooring changes in the 1939 addition – red oak in the front of the room, then heart pine as you walk past the bar and booths, then new yellow pine flooring in areas where we had to replace the floor.  We’re mystified by the red oak flooring – was it a showroom or customer area?  Did they just use whatever they could find and switched to heart pine when they ran out of red oak?

Walk back to the lounge in the southwest corner.  From the lounge area, take a look at the south and west walls of the building and how the wood siding changes as you go from the front of the building to the back.  The “stripes” appear because we filled in damaged areas in the walls with flooring we salvaged when we put in the new floors for the kitchen and bar area.  Our original plan was to paint over the patched-in siding, but we liked the way the stripes looked so we left it alone.

The Windows
The large double-hung windows in the west wall are original to the building and have been restored; the matching windows in the lounge area are also original to the building, but in new openings. Where did they come from?  To our surprise, we found them boarded up in the east wall of the building -- the building used to be freestanding in the 1930s; the building that adjoins us to the east was built in the 1940’s, and they must have boarded up the windows at that time.

The Doors
Go stand by the snooker tables (these are vintage 1948 Brunswick Anniversary snooker tables, a matched set, lovingly restored.)  The double doors opening to the small balcony on the Joseph Avenue side of the building were originally loading doors for farm wagons that pulled up to the side of the building to load in feed and seed.  The doors you see are actually the original doors from the 1920s.  We found them when we renovated the building – they were boarded up in the wall when we bought the building and we found them when we started the renovation.  Since they were original to the building we used them as the model for all of the new storefront doors along Glenwood.  Their “exact” replicas are in the center archway door.

The Heart Pine Bar
And for the last bit of history, take a look at our beautiful bar.  We had to remove some massive 14” wide heart pine structural beams to drop the floor for our new accessible entrance.  We remilled the heart pine beams to become the top of the bar.  Given the size of the timbers, the wood itself is probably more than 500 years old, and surely has several stories of its own to tell.