City: Atlanta, GA

Category: Tours & Attractions

Telephone: (770) 794-5530

Description: Marietta’s lovely old Park Square is something of an anomaly in a city of 60,000, seat of 700,000-strong Cobb County. The square’s centerpiece, Glover Park, is a leafy Victorian throwback with big trees, flowering plants, a gazebo, a bandstand, benches, a fountain, and kids’ play areas. Low-rise early-20th-century mercantile buildings on three sides of the square house a slew of antiques shops and other stores offering clothing, gifts, stationery, toys, garden accessories, folk art, contemporary art, and a pet bakery. Modern Cobb County government buildings are on the square’s fourth side. Restaurants offer many types of ethnic cuisine, including Turkish, Slovakian, Italian, Australian, Mexican, Irish, and American fare. Pubs and music clubs feature live music. Theatre in the Square (770-422-8369, www.theatreinthesquare.com) is one of metro Atlanta’s best professional companies.Before ducking into any of the above, stop at the Marietta Welcome Center in the 1898 Western & Atlantic train depot (4 Depot St., 800-835-0445 and 770-429-1115, www.themariettasquare.com) for maps and information on museums and walking/driving tours of the city’s five national historic districts. Marietta is about 25 miles northwest of downtown Atlanta, by I-75 and US 41. One of the metro area’s most famous icons is a mile east of the square. Since the early 1960s, motorists navigating the highways of Marietta and Cobb County have set their GPS by “the Big Chicken,” a 56-foot-tall, red and white sheet metal rooster that preens on the front of a KFC outlet on busy US 41/Cobb Parkway. The Chicken was “hatched” in 1963 by the owner of a fast-food restaurant. In the 1970s, KFC bought the restaurant, Big Chicken and all. When it was severely damaged by a 1993 tornado, KFC bowed to public demand and spent a reputed $700,000 on its makeover.