As Leslie Jordan's mama pulled up to the Pershing Point Hotel in 1974 to see her teenage son's new Atlanta home, she had a visitor's common reaction.

A devout Southern Baptist "with the perfect flip hairdo," his mother took one look at the dilapidated structure and the odd assortment of characters loitering out front, promptly locked her doors and gunned the engine.

File (ENLARGE)

Before the razing in the mid-1980s, the trends in the Pershing Point area favored punk over polyester.

File (ENLARGE)

For the denizens of Midtown, Pershing Point Hotel wasn't just a place — it represented a lifestyle outside the mainstream.

RELATED LINKS: • Celluloid resurrection for actor's old digs • A neighborhood's rise and fall

"My mother would not get out of the car," the diminutive actor, now 51, recalls, laughing.

With the city marking its 36th annual Gay Pride celebration this weekend, Jordan — and other Atlantans who somehow survived the cockroaches, peeling paint and eccentrics hanging out in the lobby of the once-historic hotel — recalled the hedonism of the 1970s, a significant chapter in the city's gay and lesbian history before a wrecking ball and AIDS razed it all in the 1980s.

Jordan, known for his roles in the TV shows "Will & Grace" and "Boston Legal" and the film "Sordid Lives," paid homage to his former home by writing and producing the 2000 independent film "Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel." The $165,000 film, now out on DVD, is an autobiographical account of the actor's two-year stint in Atlanta as he came to terms with his sexuality.

A young gay man from rural Tennessee, Jordan, like many other youthful transplants, had sought out Atlanta and the Pershing Point Hotel as his new residence.

"Atlanta was this gay mecca for those of us who came from small Southern towns," Jordan explains in his cadenced Southern drawl.

The hotel, despite all appearances, was a safe enclave.

Is it any wonder we ended up at the Pershing Point Hotel?, a voice-over in the film queries. "The notorious pit of naughtiness? The last stop on the train to nowhere? Home to the strange, the crazed, the lonely, the misfit, the brilliant, the deformed?"

By the time Jordan became one of the $163-a-month tenants at the property perched where Peachtree and West Peachtree streets meet on the edge of Midtown, the once-stately hotel was a few decades past its prime. In the early 1970s, the neighborhood had shifted from being among the city's poshest addresses to a haven for Atlanta's burgeoning counterculture sect.

"For many decades, it was a very tony part of town," says Michael Rose, the Atlanta History Center's archive director. "But like so many sections of the city, it fell on hard times."

In the era of love beads and tie-dye clothing, the property and its surrounding neighborhoods had become the Haight-Ashbury of Atlanta. The Pershing Point Hotel was also comparable, in terms of living conditions and the clientele it attracted, to New York's Chelsea Hotel.

Phillip Forrester, a Savannah native who was busy creating his rock 'n' roll drag persona Diamond Lil at the time, lived behind the hotel in the Stratford Hall Apartments building.

"It really was the golden age," Forrester reflects wistfully. "All the artsy types congregated there: drag queens, hippies, painters, sculptors, you name it. Back then, we called them 'bohemians.' Everybody was doing their own thing and being groovy."

The Atlanta police, however, were not impressed with such grooviness, often trying to crack down on the scene. Forrester, a freelance writer for the indie newspaper The Great Speckled Bird (a forerunner to Creative Loafing), frequently covered police harassment.

"One night, I was performing at Club Centaur, and I was in the dressing room downstairs when the cops came in with tear gas to clear the place out," Forrester remembers. "It was horrible. That's the kind of thing we had to put up with."

Police weren't the only ones the community tussled with, he said.

"Every once in a while, rednecks would drive in from the suburbs. They'd ride down Peachtree Street, looking at all the hippies and the drag queens," Forrester said. "But they were always surprised if they tried to mess with us. There were far more of us than there were of them. We'd surprise them with rotten tomatoes, and one time a bunch of us turned over one of their cars. We protected each other. It was our neighborhood, our scene.

"For once, they were the outsiders."

Drugs and designers

Atlanta's Midtown (the area between Piedmont Avenue and Peachtree and 10th streets) served as ground zero for the city's counterculture scenesters — drugstores, soda fountains and shoe stores were slowly being replaced by clothing shops stocked with clogs, headbands and Earth Shoes. Head shops, carrying a vast array of "smoking" accessories, along with bottles of eight-track tape player head cleaner, sprouted up in the neighborhood.

Jordan, who would later share a jail cell with actor Robert Downey Jr. on substance abuse charges before going on to co-star with him on "Ally McBeal," is blunt about the drug use at the time.

"It really was a daily part of our lives," he says. "That's why I called the film 'Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel,' partly because I could literally never seem to find my room."

Veteran Atlanta drag performer Charlie Brown can vouch for the accuracy of a key scene in "Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel" where residents await a prescription in a shady doctor's office.

"You could get all your partying drugs, black beauties, yellow jackets, Quaaludes, you name it, all legally prescribed as 'diet pills,' " Brown, now 56, recalls. "It's a wonder that any of us made it out alive."

During the day, Jordan sold clothes at Comes the Sun, a Buckhead shop that influenced local fashion trends. The Allman Brothers were fitted for denim and leather pants at the shop.

"It was the center of the universe," Jordan says. In his spare time, Jordan also managed to earn a degree in fashion merchandising at the Art Institute of Atlanta.

At nightclubs like Sweet Gum Head, Numbers, Hollywood Hots, Peaches Backdoor and, later, the 24-hour Backstreet, fashion flourished. David Bowie's androgynous look, polyester disco threads and, later, Sex Pistols-inspired punk piercings and leather jackets all reigned at the Pershing Point.

What you wore was drastically important, Brown says.

"When you walked into a club, you walked in. You wore something that let everybody know that you were there to terrorize the club. Everybody was dressed."

"It was the last vestiges of glitter rock," Jordan reflects. "I looked like a little rock 'n 'roll troll doll!"

Keeping memories

When it came time to immortalize the Pershing Point Hotel on film, thrift shops were combed for vintage clothing. Jordan, the film's writer, producer and lead actor, had won most of the movie's budget from a filmmaker contest in Los Angeles. Clothing manufacturer Dockers tried to give the actor $10,000 worth of its tan pleated pants.

"I told them, 'It's a period piece,' " Jordan recalls with a shudder. " 'I need the cash!' "

During this year's multi-month run of "Like a Dog on Linoleum," Jordan's one-man show at 14th Street Playhouse, he had an opportunity to reacquaint himself with old friends from Pershing Point.

"People come up to me and say, 'Oh, honey, I remember you,' " says Jordan. "But I don't always remember them, mind you."

Recently, Jordan returned to the site of the hotel for an AJC photo shoot. Concedes the actor, "It took me a few minutes to figure out exactly where the hotel had been. It's all changed so much."

In the last century, typical of Atlanta's need to constantly reinvent itself, the site has gone from ritzy residential to seedy to ritzy retail.

When the wrecking ball finally took down the Pershing Point and the Stratford Hall in December 1985, the neighborhood, ironically, was back on the upswing, thanks to neighbors Colony Square and the High Museum.

It was only after its demolition that city planners and the Atlanta Preservation Center openly lamented the building.

The Atlanta History Center's Rose was among Pershing Point's mourners. He included the hotel in his 2001 photography book, "Atlanta: Then and Now."

Rose confides that, openly dismayed, he snuck onto the site in 1985 and made off with a pair of diamond-shaped limestone cornerstones from the rubble.

The stones now reside in his garden at his "Smynings" home, near Vinings and Smyrna.

Says Rose: "I used to walk past it all the time and remember thinking how sad it was that they were tearing it down. I couldn't preserve the whole building, but at least a piece of it is still around. It's a little piece of Midtown in my backyard."