On Monday, a small group from Atlanta will visit Gettysburg, Pa., the famous Civil War city. They’ll be there to take a good look at the nation’s other well-known cyclorama.
I hope I didn't lose you by using that unusual word. I had to look it up myself. So I'm guessing there's a good chance you either have not heard of Atlanta's Cyclorama or are unsure what it is. And there's an even better chance you've never seen it. (View a photo gallery featuring the Cyclorama.)
It’s worth knowing about, and understanding what’s going on in Gettysburg.
A cyclorama, according to Webster’s, is “a series of large pictures, as of a landscape, put on the wall of a circular room so as to appear in natural perspective to a spectator standing in the center.”
America’s two famous Civil War cities, as you might have guessed by now, are home to two of the world’s surviving versions of this 19th-century style of visiting with history.
Atlanta’s Cyclorama is a huge 42-foot-tall by 358-foot-long painting of the Battle of Atlanta with a diorama — a three-dimensional scene with models of soldiers and landscape — in the foreground. It’s housed in a theater-in-the-round in Grant Park.
I went to Grant Park and paid my 10 bucks to check it out. (I’m a bit of a Civil War buff, and I have a faint memory of my parents taking me as a kid to see the cyclorama in Gettysburg.) What I saw was an early and crude version of what we might see today in an Imax theater — a panoramic, realistic view of the battle that occurred the afternoon of July 22, 1864.
So the Cyclorama gives you two experiences: It’s the history you would expect from a museum, plus it’s an artifact showing how people in the late 1800s entertained themselves.
There are many clever and cool things about the Cyclorama, which is owned by the city of Atlanta. My personal favorite: one of the Union soldiers in the diorama was altered to look like Clark Gable. Atlanta Mayor William Hartsfield had that done, apparently as a favor to Gable.
But our Cyclorama has a couple of problems: fewer people seem interested in going to see it, and it’s physically deteriorating and needs expensive restoration.
As my firsthand experience showed, the setting in Grant Park, where it’s been since the 1890s, is disconnected from many of Atlanta’s tourist attractions. (Zoo Atlanta is right next door, but apparently most folks who visit the zoo don’t also visit the Cyclorama.)
Also, the Cyclorama looks tired — from the seating, to the diorama to the painting itself. Even the narrated description of the battle, which sounds dated and some claim isn’t entirely accurate, crackles through the hum of aging speakers. Last weekend, I watched as a local restoration group did some annual maintenance work on the diorama, and it’s clear that the place has seen better days.
Attendance is trending down, with around 60,000 annual visitors. Many are children who pay less than I did.
As attendance has waned, the Cyclorama’s operating budget has been cut to match revenue, which is currently at about $500,000. So investment in the operation, including marketing, has suffered.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed formed a task force in July to look at the future of the Cyclorama. Some of that group is visiting Gettysburg, where supporters spent $13 million restoring its Cyclorama and more than $100 million for a new visitor’s center. That makes the bar high for us.
Among issues the task force is considering: how to create a financial model that can sustain the Cyclorama, who should operate it, and how to restore and preserve the painting. A possible move is on the table, especially considering the concentration of tourist attractions elsewhere in Atlanta.
All of this comes up during difficult financial times, and when museums are facing increased pressure to attract people.
As those in the museum business will tell you, competition for visitors requires a unique and interactive experience. Museum visitors today demand more than to just be allowed a look at interesting things.
And many museums and historical attractions enjoy endowments, which the Cyclorama lacks.
This unique piece of Atlanta history finds itself at a crossroads. The task force expects to make recommendations in May.
One of the volunteers working on the annual restoration may have said it best when I asked why she’d spend her Saturday night that way.
“We love history, and this is part of Atlanta’s history,” said Pam Cole of Marietta. “Too many things have been lost.”
Tough decisions could be ahead.
