Hobbyist looking for home for empire

This is a model of the old downtown Rich's building, built by train enthusiast Frank Lowrie, 71. Curtis Compton / ccompton@ajc.com

Hobbyist looking for home for empire

By JAMIE GUMBRECHT

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Monday, February 09, 2009

Frank Lowrie’s Atlanta is about 1,700 square feet, full of trees and buildings forgotten by the real Atlanta, the one he lives in. Lowrie hand-built his city, with long-gone landmarks from history and his childhood, with trains still running everywhere.

The miniature city and trains operated for years at Underground Atlanta. These days, it’s packed up in boxes that fill Lowrie’s basement and two-car garage in southwest Atlanta. Lowrie doesn’t want it to stay that way.

His “Good Old Days Atlanta” exhibit was a class field trip favorite and nostalgia-generating machine at Underground in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and again from 1999 to 2003. Lowrie began making models as a hobby in 1974, and was known to wear his conductor hat and overalls at Underground to explain the cardboard and plaster structures.

He’s 71 now, still living with his wife in the same home where he began piecing models together as an adult. He doesn’t add much to his Atlanta anymore, except for a few key pieces he’d like to perfect — the Fox Theatre, for one. His goal now is to find a place for the city to live, something even bigger than his old space at Underground.

“I’d like to set it up somewhere where it’s permanent,” Lowrie said. “It takes about 90 days to put this up. It’s not something I can just throw up or tear down in a day or two.”

Kelli Copeland, director of specialty retail for Underground Atlanta, said they’d love to have Lowrie’s Atlanta back on display, but they don’t have a large, long-term, wheelchair-accessible space they can promise. (Underground Atlanta operators recently proposed building a $450 million casino and entertainment destination at the site; no timeline for the project has been announced.)

“He knows that we’re interested. It’s a great concept for us to have here, being so close to the zero-mile marker,” Copeland said, referring to the spot where the Western and Atlantic Railroad ended. The area became the settlement Terminus, the town of Marthasville and then the city of Atlanta.

Underground still gets phone calls asking about the old exhibitions, Copeland said. She, too, remembers the last time Lowrie’s city went on display.

“I was amazed by his craftsmanship, his attention to detail. He made the old Rich’s building look like the old Rich’s building,” she said. “It was so inspiring to see him put it all together, like a city within a city.”

After 30-some years of rebuilding Atlanta, Lowrie admits it’s nice to have some time off. He’s gotten into Japanese gardening, adding waterfalls, bridges and trees to his back yard. But if ever he found a space large enough space to hold the mini-city permanently, he said he’d go back to modeling.

As he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for a 1989 story: “I’ve never met a model railroader who was finished.”




Holding a scale model of a Stuckey's gas station, model train enthusiast Frank Lowrie, 71, says "I went to every building that was still standing, smelled them, and tasted them, before I built a model." Curtis Compton / ccompton@ajc.com

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