The story
Briarcliff spreads its 1920s wings over forty-plus acres on Briarcliff Road in Atlanta — the mansion of Asa Griggs Candler Jr., son of Coca-Cola's founder, whose estate boasted gardens, a swimming pavilion Atlantans paid to use, and famously a private zoo whose lions and elephants serenaded the neighbourhood until complaints dispersed it to the city's zoo; Candler's later life included struggles and institutional care told here with dignity, and after hospital-campus decades the property passed to Emory University, which holds the sealed, deteriorating mansion pending long-debated restoration. Its gothic decay made it a film fixture — series and features shot here — and crew and neighbourhood telling supplies the lore: figures at the broken windows, piano notes from the shuttered music room, animal sounds where the zoo dens stood, footsteps on the grand stair and cold in the pavilion — undocumented, atmospheric, of the ruin years. The house is closed absolutely: no entry, exterior glimpses from public ways only, stated plainly. Present Briarcliff as Jazz Age extravagance first, its telling the sound of a mansion waiting.