PhenomiCon: Conspiracy or Con?

Most fan conventions come out of existing social groups. Fan clubs, societies, and formal or informal circles of like-minded enthusiasts come together to create events. PhenomiCon was different; it was the convergence of disparate, sometimes diametrically opposed groups, thrown together in an specific time and space for a limited window of opportunity. If there was a common denominator, it was that most of us were participants in the Atlanta SF/comics fandom scene in one way or another, staffing conventions, vending in the dealers room, screening videos in the video rooms, organizing or attending events of all kinds. 

I was one of the organizers, and part of why I started this Atlanta Fantasy Fair blog in the first place was to have somewhere I could talk about PhenomiCon, not only as a seminal Atlanta fantasy/nerd convention, but also as a life-altering event in a way that only a nerd convention can be. Many, many other people made PhenomiCon a reality and my fuzzy memories of thirty years back should not be held responsible if their contributions aren’t given proper respect. Thank you all. 

So. It’s the late 1980s. Some of us had been getting into computers, the early internet, BBSes, hacking, and what was being called “cyberpunk.” Others had been publishing and sharing zines and zine culture. Others had been into the Church Of The SubGenius, the Principia Discordia, RE:Search’s PRANKS book, performance art, hoaxes and culture jamming. Some of us had been struck by Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus trilogy and, as an extension, the paranoid but fascinating world of conspiracies – JFK assassination conspiracies, UFO conspiracies, and the occult, mystical, secret society cycle of Freemasons, Templars, et cetera. This was all swirling around our various social circles at that time, and at some point the decision was made to host a festival that would combine all these interests and see who’d come, and what, if anything, would happen. 

We decided on a name – PhenomiCon. A date – November 1-3, 1991. A location – the Powers Ferry Holiday Inn at I-285 and Powers Ferry Rd. A color for the flyer – goldenrod. We held a promotional room party at DragonCon that crammed a hotel room so fire-code-violatingly full that people were standing on the beds, hollering at the ceiling, for no discernible reason at all. That somehow convinced us that we could put on our own show. Most of the prep for the convention involved getting together at somebody's house, writing copy for flyers, program books, and USEnet posts, and figuring out who we could convince to show up for very little money. Staff and attendees alike were a collection of everyone who felt marginalized by the nerd convention scene and by society at large - computer hackers, gamers, conspiracy theorists, underground cartoonists, hemp freaks, the extreme left and right meeting around the end of the horseshoe to complain about how they'd been mistreated. There was even some guy who really wanted to talk at us about the Amiga and the Video Toaster at length, but was unable to connect that to our event. That’s one thing we learned; an event with a vague mission statement and an air of excitement would draw promoters and hustlers like a magnet, wanting to attach their thing to your thing at your expense. 

PhenomiCon maintained a defiant and abusive attitude towards other fan conventions, which looks great on paper but is absolutely terrible in practice. Convention organizations have to use the same facilities, share the same staffers, vendors and frequently the same guests and panelists. Bad blood makes all this sharing more difficult. We should have been good neighbors and saved our attitude for the stage. However, we didn’t, and as a result other conventions in town either ignored or were actively pissed off at us. Not a great place to be.

Ivan Stang, Robert Anton Wilson, empty space, Robert Sheaffer

As the convention approached I and other organizers found ourselves in states of low-grade panic, occasionally ramping up into panic of the full-blown high-grade type. This was the first time I’d ever been anywhere near this level of event organization, an event that relied on a lot of moving parts, a lot of weird people showing up when they were supposed to and doing what they said they were going to do, and not suing the hell out of us if they happened to lose money or break their leg in the process. Thirty years later, details are fuzzy. I remember offering Rev. Ivan Stang a beer, because I’d forgotten the moving and very public acknowledgement of alcoholism he made in a chapter of his marginal culture guidebook “High Weirdness By Mail.” I remember the bands being a draw completely separate from the convention itself, which is obvious in hindsight but at the time blindsided me. I remember not having any idea of where one would get weed if somebody, say one of our guests, was to want some weed. I made some poor decisions that weekend, one of which involved me totaling my car the Thursday before the convention, which is why I went around that weekend with a big bruise on my face from where my head impacted my windshield as my car impacted the retaining wall of I-75. 

That first PhenomiCon happened, regardless of driving skills or panic. Robert Anton Wilson came and impressed us all with his wisdom while amusing us with his New Jersey accent. The Rev. Ivan Stang of the Church of The SubGenius arrived with a giant Dobbshead, ready to Devival. Local occult rock act King/Kill 33 played their hit song “We Never Went To The Moon.” The panel rooms discussed fanzines, comics, Bigfoot, the Roswell Incident, Area 51, and the Christian Crusade to Stamp Out Science Fiction. The Conspiracy LARP game sent seekers throughout the hotel searching for hidden truths. The cult movie video room was where we learned the difference between "Stranger Than Paradise" and "Strangers IN Paradise". UFO theorists and skeptics organizations mixed uneasily. UFO skeptic Robert Sheaffer of CSICOP debated Robert Anton Wilson. And in the vendors room, the Libertarian Party offered their political orientation test to all comers (turns out we’re all various flavors of Libertarian, surprise!) 

RAW gets the spirit of Eris into his pineal gland

Other 1991 guests included characters like Milton William “Bill” Cooper, a UFO writer who would later go straight down the Illuminati-conspiracy-new world order-tax evasion rabbit hole and die in a standoff with police. Don Ware from the Mutual UFO Network spoke on UFOs and their implications on world religions. Robin Quayle talked about mutilating cattle. Mark Jaeger, Charlie Pilcher,and Caryl Dennis delivered a three-part panel covering a UFO History of the World, while marijuana enthusiast and Dr. Hook keyboardist Joe Ionno spoke about, and perhaps on, hemp. 

the Skeptics review PhenomiCon

Apparently there was a costume contest and an amateur film festival, but the SubGenius Devival was the highlight of the convention, filling the main event room. While most anybody who wanted to deliver personal testimony of how “Bob” had changed their lives was allowed to rant, both Robert Anton Wilson and Rev. Stang delivered top notch preaching, and I was shot and killed by Stang myself. 

Rev. Lefty Vacationland preaches the word of "Bob"

Obviously we were going to have to have another PhenomiCon. I forget why we moved from the Powers Ferry, but we moved to a venerable Atlanta hotel and event location which had started as a Dunfey’s Royal Coach and briefly became a Radisson before settling on calling itself the Castlegate Hotel & Conference Center, which is where PhenomiCon 1992 was held November 13-15. In the interim between PhenomiCons, the organization published a short-lived zine titled “Chapel Perilous” that served to promote the upcoming show, sell leftover 1991 merch, and engage the community that had survived the first P-Con.

PhenomiCon’s guest list expanded. Perhaps the star of the 1992 show was local Atlanta figure Kerry Wendell Thornley – author of the Discordian bible “Principia Discordia,” and possible second Lee Harvey Oswald. Thornley had served in the Marines with Oswald, kind of resembled Oswald, used him as the inspiration for a pre-assassination novel, had lived in New Orleans around the same time as Oswald, and sometimes believed he’d also been programmed as an assassin. Thornley’s Oswald novel “Idle Warriors” had just been republished by Atlanta publisher Illuminet Press (RIP, Ron Bonds) and Thornley’s self-published writings were freely available on the telephone poles in Atlanta’s Little Five Points. 

PhenomiCon 1992 t-shirt graphics

Other new guests included author of "Black Helicopters Over America" Jim Keith (who would die as a result of injuries sustained at Burning Man 1999), Gemstone File conspiracy researcher Stephanie Caruana, cyberpunk SF author Bruce Sterling, Apocalypse Culture writer & Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey, “Conspiracies, Cover-Ups And Crimes” author Jonathan Vankin, and “marginal culture” figures like Bob “Abolition Of Work” Black. The Rev. Ivan Stang would return with a crew of SubGeniuses including St. Janor Hypercleats and the SubG band “The Swinging Love Corpses.” 1992’s panels included “Vampires: Myth or Reality,” talks on UFOs and conspiracies and anti-work, an “Introduction to S&M,” “Atlanta’s Position in the New World Order,” and “Conspiracy-a-Go-Go.” One speaker showed a highlight reel of the Masonic imagery contained in Kubrick’s “2001,” and we found out that screening Russ Meyer films might draw an audience that was, shall we say, unironic in its consumption of adult material. 

they played for two solid hours

Looming over the 1992 PhenomiCon was a palpable feeling that the coalition between the hipster conspiracy tourists and the actual conspiracy nuts was collapsing. I mean, getting endless telephone calls from UFO kooks demanding to be read the entire schedule over the phone isn’t behavior that endears the community to convention organizers. Stang and Bob Black were then in a marginal-culture pissing match, which wasn’t helped when Phenomicon put them together on a panel. Were we trolls? (around this time a SubG artist mailed Bob Black a homemade explosive device consisting of a flash cube and some firecrackers, an act which can and will get somebody arrested.) Up and coming space-surf-rock band Man Or AstroMan? came to PhenomiCon for pretty much nothing – thank you, fellas, you’re still the best - to perform on the main stage after the Devival. However, the Swinging Love Corpses kept corpsing and corpsing and corpsing, their long-hair rock-star wigs falling onto the stage, the drone of their tuneless howling driving everyone out of the room, the failure of Phenomicon to grasp stage management as a critical part of live events becoming painfully apparent. So MOAM? set up in the hallway outside, in the downstairs motor lobby of the Castlegate, and they blew the doors off the place with a blistering set. Thanks again, guys. 

Picture late Saturday night in the wreckage of the main events hall at the Castlegate; the big-deal SubGenius clergy have left, the rock bands have packed up, all that’s left is garbage and techno-trash and staffers standing around in the middle of it all, wondering where the fun went. The organizers and staff were exhausted, irritated at each other, or had gone into thousands of dollars of debt trying to make the thing happen. Or all three. Maybe we’d proved our point with two PhenomiCons. Maybe it was time to hang it up and let the conspiracy win.

the breakout star: my vintage industrial lamp, shown here

Most of what PhenomiCon did - the UFOs, the Kennedy conspiracy stuff, the computer hacking, that whole Mondo 2000 smart-drink world, well, all that got mainstreamed pretty quickly. The big PhenomiCon events like the SubGenius devival and the edgy Masonic-imagery rock bands became yearly events at DragonCon. TV every week featured the paranoid rants of every flying saucer-obsessed P-Con guest on The X-Files or an A&E show about ancient aliens. The cutting edge computer stuff became something you could do at home by yourself over AOL. There was no need for us to have a PhenomiCon when PhenomiCon was happening all the time everywhere already. 

There was a half-hearted talk of a third show in 1993, but that didn't get any traction, and we did have one meeting about doing a show in 1999 or 2000, but the whole landscape of hacking, cyberpunk, UFOlogy and conspiratoria had all shifted too dramatically. A few high-profile hacker arrests, paranoid cult standoffs and terrorist bombings will do that to a subculture. Dampening any remaining enthusiasm was the sad truth that there's a big world of alien abduction experts, crystal healer past life channellers and Illuminati insiders all getting rich peddling patent nonsense to gullible suckers, and that's a world I don't want to even be tangentially connected with. One visit from the Men In Black was plenty! We’ve all seen firsthand in recent days what the mindless amplification of conspiracy thinking can do to public life, and PhenomiCon was a part of that, whether it meant to be or not. 

After the fact PhenomiCon became a legend of sorts, this mysterious event that came and went, leaving nothing behind but memories and debt. In its afterlife as a topic of USEnet forum posts, online columns and letters to fanzines P-Con assumed perhaps greater importance than it had in reality. PhenomiCon was referenced in a wide variety of popular and scholarly books, including Kembrew McLeod’s “Pranksters: Making Mischief In The Modern World,” “Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy And Power In American Culture” by Mark Fenster, and Kenn Thomas’ “Parapolitics: Conspiracy In Contemporary America.” 

Mcleod's "Pranksters" covers PhenomiCon

The early 1990s might have been the only time a first-time convention could have attracted the guests P-Con did. In a few years most PhenomiCon guests would either command large speaking fees, or be unable to speak entirely, as in, a lot of PhenomiCon guests have since passed away. Maybe the stars really did align perfectly there for an instant, enabling us to conjure a big bubbling melting pot of outsiders all bouncing off each other. Maybe the world needed a space where flying saucer fabulists could spin their yarns while also being challenged by the audience, where the paranoid and the suspicious could get out of their bunkers and their own heads, if just for a weekend.

-Dave Merrill

Thanks to Ed Hill, Jason Finegan, Rod Ramsey, and especially Scott Weikert, for making it all happen

Look Away Look Away Look Away Dixie Trek

In 1980 the Atlanta Star Trek Society was formed to further the ideals of IDIC and the vision of Gene Roddenberry throughout the United Federation of Planets, or at least Atlanta GA. They hosted their first convention on the Emory University campus. In 1982 they changed their name to Dixie Trek and organizers William Smith, Owen Ogletree, and Ron Nastrom moved off-campus and into the wider world of Atlanta fan events.

Personally I was never a big Star Trek fan – beyond the Kirk-Spock-McCoy dynamic and the overwrought 1960s TV writing there isn't much there for me – but if you became a science fiction nerd in the late 1970s, Trek was an ecosystem that you moved through and dealt with regardless of your personal feelings about the show. As a teenage nerd for whom conventions were the most fulfilling social events, I wasn't going to miss one, even it was mostly about Star Trek.

Mark Lenard and fan at Dixie Trek '84 - photo by Don Harden

As near as historians can figure, the modern-era Dixie Trek began in April of 1984 with a two-day show at the Oglethorpe College Student Center, a venue which would later host the one-day Dr. Who event "Brit-Con." Guest Mark Lenard - Spock's father Sarek, the first TV Romulan, and many other roles - was a hit with the fans.

Moving out of the collegiate atmosphere, 1985's Dixie Trek happened May 17-19 at the Northlake Hilton, which is now a Doubletree and which was the site of many small Atlanta fan events in the 1980s. Guests at the '85 show included Jon "Dr. Who" Pertwee, Terry "I Invented The Daleks" Nation and Majel "Nurse Chapel" Barret. The video room at this convention may have been the first time I ever saw Blake's 7. It is certainly the first and only time I was ever in the same hotel suite eating Moon Pies with the guy that invented the Daleks.

I was more of a Dr. Who fan than a Trekkie (I blame Monty Python), so Dixie Trek's growing emphasis on British entertainment was a welcome development, helped by organizer William Smith's connections to Atlanta's PBS station, then airing Dr. Who among its other, tweedier BBC programmes.

BREAKING NEWS: DR WHO HAS A GUITAR

For their 1986 show Dixie Trek moved slightly west to the Sheraton Century Center, a fine establishment with a management that understood the nerd market. Guest Peter "Dr. Who #5" Davidson absolutely charmed the pants off Atlanta, both at the convention and via live remotes broadcast on PBS. My memories of this show are fuzzy but I believe they involve carting a load of fellow geeky teens around in my Mom's van, and being pulled out of a room party that involved people drinking BEER and SMOKING.

"Do I want to go to the Star Trek con, or stay home and watch Star Trek?"

Dixie Trek's 1987 show was May 22-24 downtown at the Hyatt Regency, an Atlanta landmark whose revolving restaurant, the Polaris, was a fixture of the city skyline for decades. Dixie Trek was poised for the big time, but tragedy struck; their headline guest Leonard Nimoy canceled to go work on "Three Men And A Baby." The show had to soldier on with Robin "Saavik #2" Curtis, Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund, comic artist George Perez, Janet "Tegan" Fielding, and Mark "Spock's Dad" Lenard. I believe I wound up dropping in and out of this show but not buying a badge. I'm sorry guys.

Dixie Trek '88 was held May 13-15 back in the Sheraton Century Center, with guests Johnathan Frakes from ST:TNG, along with Julie "Catwoman" Newmar, Paul "Avon" Darrow, and SF author Brad "I am at every convention" Strickland. Our anime club programmed a weekend of Japanese animation for the show, which meant hauling our VCR and a box full of tapes down to the hotel and screening 4^th-generation untranslated copies of films like Project A-Ko and Macross.

we're talkin' FUN

Dixie Trek '89 - June 16-18 - moved to the Radisson, which was at one time known as the Dunfey's Royal Coach and later the Castlegate, a well-known fan convention destination with overbearing and confusing architecture and a staff that didn't care what went on as long as the bills got paid. It's my recollection that I spent much of this convention wandering around with my anime nerd pals, scoffing at the Trekkies and distributing insulting literature. At the time if we weren't on staff running an anime video room, our custom was to show anime out of our own hotel room and bring snacks and drinks and have what punk band Black Flag would call a "TV Party." So we probably did that. Details are spotty but apparently one of the guests was Dr. Who #3 Jon Pertwee.

1990's Dixie Trek was June 15-17 in the selfsame Radisson/Castlegate, and the listed guests included Gates McFadden and Denise Crosby from ST:TNG and Marta Kristen, Billy Mumy and Mark Goddard from Lost In Space. It's my understanding that a pregnant McFadden had to cancel, which is just as well as the Castlegate was not the healthiest place for children or other living things. I'm pretty sure I did not attend this convention.

Dixie Trek '91 happened on May 10-12 in the now officially named Castlegate. Guests included ST:TOS's Walter Koenig, ST:TNG's Suzie Plakson, Lost In Space's June Lockhart, comic author Peter David, and comic artist George Perez. I did not attend this show either; my spare time was taken up with seeing bands and college, and my convention-going time was taken up with visiting Dallas for anime stuff and trying to get Phenomicon started. But more on that later.

are we still talkin' fun?

In 1992 Dixie-Trek moved to the Century Center for a May 17-19 show. The Century Center may have at this point been a Marriott - it's switched back and forth a few times - and Denise "Pet Sematary" Crosby and Jonathan "Oh the pain, the pain of it all" Harris made return visits. I was not there.

Dixie Trek '93 was again at the Sheraton Century Center with guests Nichelle "Uhura" Nichols, Gary "Land Of the Giants" Conway, and David Hedison, one of only two men who portrayed James Bond's pal Felix Leiter twice.

In 1994 Dixie-Trek was back at the Castlegate May 14-16 with a rare convention guest appearance by Christopher "Superman" Reeve and Noel "Lois Lane" Neill - and that was it for Dixie-Trek. Star Trek as a fandom-inspiring franchise was on the wane in the 1990s; diminishing returns on films and a cycle of lackluster TV programs failed to keep the public's interest in the face of newer, fresher genre offerings, and like many other conventions Dixie Trek struggled to get new attendees and to keep the ones it had. The Castlegate was cursed to be the hotel where conventions go to die; in 1995 the Atlanta Fantasy Fair's final convention would take place there as well, and a series of smaller shows would fail to survive its fake Olde English exterior. Of course, 1995 would also see Anime Weekend Atlanta premiere at the same hotel, and it's still going 22 years later. Incidentally, the former site of the Castlegate is now a Wal-Mart, which seems to be doing fine.

Dixie Trek may have remained obscure if not for the October 19 2009 episode of "Big Bang Theory," in which the character Sheldon relates the story of his feud with TNG actor Wil Wheaton and how it began at a Mississippi convention called, yes, "Dixie Trek". One might think that if REAL nerds were writing "Big Bang Theory," they'd know Dixie Trek was a real convention, one Wil Wheaton never attended. Then again, highlighting the Atlanta SF fan scene of the 80s is what this blog is about, so maybe we should have written about Dixie Trek sooner so that these overpaid fake-nerd Hollywood writers would be able to look this stuff up on the Google. You're welcome.

So long, Dixie Trek. May the infinite diversity of infinite combinations grok your Spock... always.

Special thanks to William Smith, Owen Ogletree, and Ron Nastrom

the castlegate

Sure, it was a dump. Even when it was open for business, it had broken windows and sagging ceilings and a funky smell that you could never really get away from. It spent three years vacant, a home for derelicts and stray animals and the occasional body, it was briefly a big pile of rubble right next to Interstate 75 after the ministrations of the wrecking ball of Price & Sons Demolition, and now the property is home to a Wal-Mart. But for years it was Atlanta's event home away from home.

Thanks to years of hosting Star Trek cons, comic book shows, and the first Anime Weekend Atlanta, memories of the place are burned into the brains of many local nerds such as myself. But I wasn't aware that the hulking shadow of the Castlegate loomed large in the history of Atlanta as a whole. Built more than thirty years ago as the Dunfey's Royal Coach, this sprawling hunk of mid-70s crap sat on sixteen acres of prime northside Atlanta real estate. Constructed in the style that would be affectionately known as "mock Tudor," if anybody had ever held any affection for it, similar hotels would dot America's interstate off-ramps throughout the 1970s and beyond. In Atlanta, the Dunfey's nightclub would become one of the city's foremost battlegrounds of the sexual revolution. As the haze from the 70s cleared, the Dunfey's would survive a few Atlanta Fantasy Fairs and the persistent rumor of Burt Reynolds' car crashing into the lobby (reportedly in the film The Cannonball Run, though a careful viewing of the movie reveals otherwise), but the future would see the hotel's management and branding change several times. The facility would be known as a Radisson and as a Howard Johnsons, and as it was called when I was most familiar with it, the Castlegate.

I've always been told that the Atlanta Fantasy Fair was forced to leave the Dunfey's, as it was then known, because an over-enthusiastic congoer attacked the elevator doors with an axe. I doubt this story, because a casual perusal of the Castlegate's clients and events reveals that they wouldn't turn anyone away. Gun shows, talent shows, dog shows, record shows, and Indian weddings. 1996 Olympics memorabilia auctions and chess championships. Antique radio Mega Swap Meets. Pot festivals. UFO conferences. Prizefights. Jon-Benet Ramsey-style beauty contests. Alumni associations. Magic: The Gathering tournaments. By the time the 1990s rolled around, the Castlegate was the destination of choice for any gathering of more than three people and less than $3,000 to spend.

Atlanta Pin Show souvenir pin, 1995

And why not? The Radisson/Howard Johnsons/Castlegate was conveniently located, it had lots of parking and restaurants of all kinds close by, and quite a bit of convention space at reasonable rates. It wasn't downtown, so you were spared the no-parking, no-food, no-nothing desert of Atlanta After Dark, and yet it was close enough to downtown to make it a central location for the entire metro area. Best of all, you could be noisy, throw parties, play your live action role playing games, and generally do whatever you wanted with the knowledge that nobody from the hotel was going to lift a finger to stop you.

Vintage Radio Swap Meet in the Castlegate ballroom circa 1998

As such, this made the Castlegate the place where conventions were born, and where they died. Anime Weekend Atlanta started there in 1995 with 300 attendees, and 20 years later 25,000 people attend the show. On the other hand, both Dixie-Trek and the Atlanta Fantasy Fair limped to the Castlegate to hold their final shows, and other shows like Outworld tried to use the Castlegate as a starting point and never got out of the gate. Even my first attempt at conventioneering - the ill-fated Phenomicon convention Scott Weikert and myself ran - had its second and final year at the Castlegate. Of course, part of this dismal success/failure ratio is the whimsical, underfunded nature of fan conventions and the people who run them.

AWA video room, 1995

But another element is the Castlegate itself. As mentioned before, the staff simply didn't care, and that's a knife that cuts both ways. Sure, hotel reps looking the other way for a few stains or broken lights is good; but ignoring complaints about rats, insects, malfunctioning AC and lack of hot water is not. The Castlegate had a swimming pool that was never filled, a tennis court that was completely overgrown with kudzu, and a back parking lot with more weeds than asphalt. Windows were broken, door locks didn't work, there was a meeting room full of construction junk and a shopping cart from the nearby Kroger, and a bathroom none dared enter. The low ceilings and maze-like arrangement of the building didn't help matters. The guest rooms were situated on long hallways that radiated out from the lobby in two directions - if you were unlucky to get a room on the far end of the facility, that meant a long, long walk. If that hallway happens to involve stairs, too bad! There might be an access corridor with a ramp, but you'll have to find it for yourself.

Castlegate elevator circa 1995

Quirks of the facility aside, the Castlegate's less-than-helpful employees frequently made a bad situation worse. Failing to honor agreements about convention space usage and double-booking guest rooms isn't just annoying, it's downright criminal, and these sorts of problems can suck the enthusiasm right out of your average volunteer convention organizer. It was always a crapshoot going into the Castlegate; maybe your festival would make it out alive, and maybe it wouldn't.

actual Castlegate footage from child beauty pageant documentary "Painted Babies"

Of course, if you make it out alive, you'll have plenty of war stories. Two AWA staffers found themselves on an elevator with a hotel employee, and they commented on the kudzu-engulfed tennis court. The hotel employee's reply - "What tennis court? The Castlegate doesn't have a tennis court."

tennis, anyone?

As the 90s progressed, the Castlegate found itself bought by the Hare Krishnas, who used a wing of the facility for offices and services. The hotel was named in court proceedings surrounding bribes for concession franchises at Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport - apparently payoffs were made during breakfast at the Castlegate's restaurant. The hotel finally closed its doors for good in December of 1999, but the story wasn't yet over- amid rumors of re-opening under different names, or the site being used as a Home Depot or IKEA location, the building was used by the United States Marine Corps in August of 2000 for an urban warfare excercise.

Whether or not there actually was a "Dirty Dozen" list of abandoned Atlanta properties that the city wanted torn down is open to debate. The fact is, the property was up for sale for over a year (only $20 million!), but finally the Castlegate heard the call of the wreckin' ball. I've got mixed emotions about it myself; sure, it was a slime-pit and an eyesore, but the place was a big part of my life and it's never pleasant to see something like that go. Not only was it the site of my first real convention experience -it was the site of my senior-year high school prom. My project for admission into the Graphic Design department at GSU was to design logos and promotional material for a business of our choosing - and I chose the Castlegate. It was where I severed my involvement with the Church Of The Subgenius; the paunchy, wig-sporting Sub-G "band" refused to vacate the stage, so I grabbed the collection plate and told Estrus recording artists Man or Astro-Man? to set up in the damn hall, so that we could hear some real music. The Castlegate was the site of the last Atlanta Fantasy Fair and the first Anime Weekend Atlanta. It was where I learned to get things in writing, how to jimmy a lock, why you should never rely on the room's built-in Muzak speakers, and whether or not a sucker-tipped dart can break a hotel light fixture (it can).

Atlanta might be better off without the rats, the odors, and the inoperative A/C, but there isn't another low-cost, hassle-free option for the kind of shows the Castlegate championed. The kind of freedom in planning and executing events you got at the Castlegate was a rare thing, and it's sorely missed. Whatever rises in its stead - whether it's a high-rise apartment block, a Home Depot, or somebody's corporate headquarters - you can bet it won't be as much fun, or smell nearly as funky.

-Dave Merrill

edited 2017 to include more information on the current property and to add photos found on the internets, thank you Castlegate documentarians