ATLANTA -- It has been home to a famous novelist and to vagrants, burned by an arsonist, exploited for obscure artistic purposes -- and generally reviled by Atlantans.
But now the dilapidated, charred ruin where Margaret Mitchell wrote most of "Gone With the Wind" is about to be restored to turn-of-the-century glory by a German industrial company.
Daimler-Benz AG of Stuttgart, Germany, maker of Mercedes-Benz automobiles, said this month that it has approached the site's current owner, an Atlanta developer, with a plan to buy and restore the building before the 1996 Olympic Games.
"One of the reasons we got into this project is that we, like everybody else all over the world, are familiar with 'Gone With the Wind,' " said Bernd Harling, director of corporate communications for Daimler-Benz North America.
Atlantans are not just familiar with "Gone With the Wind," but haunted by it. The novel has sold more copies than any book except the Bible. But the South it depicts is one that many Atlantans disdain.
"I think there is a real ambivalence about our history," said Mary Rose Taylor, president of Margaret Mitchell House, the small but dogged group of preservationists who have fought for more than seven years to restore the house. "We're embarrassed, ashamed in some ways."
Slavery is not the only skeleton. "To be Southern was to be backward, inferior," Ms. Taylor said. "Many people in Atlanta would just as soon forget all about it."
And many others are indifferent. Franklin Garrett, 88, the official historian of the city, said, "Unfortunately -- well, maybe that's not quite the right word -- but many of the people who live here now are relative newcomers to Atlanta and are not very familiar with its history.
"Atlanta, unlike almost all other cities in Georgia of any size, has always been gung-ho for progress," he said. "You might say Atlanta adopted a Rhett Butler attitude rather than an Ashley Wilkes point of view."
Rick Beard of the Atlanta History Center said, "Atlanta was the first city in the South to decide to bury its animosities toward the North after the Civil War, and it was primarily for business reasons."
Mr. Beard was one of four executives of Atlanta's nascent historical preservation movement to write a letter in support of saving the building after it was burned in September by an unknown arsonist. Mitchell would have taken the opposite view, according to those who knew her.
Friends said Mitchell, who died in 1949, was adamant that no monument to her or her book be built. Her family carried out her request that her private papers be destroyed and her birth home razed. She herself referred to the nondescript apartment house as "the Dump."
Atlantans have shown little interest in the house, which was abandoned in 1978, and no one objected when an artist decided in September to festoon the building with 40,000 inflated surgical gloves.
Only days after the gloves were put in place, the arsonist struck.
Mitchell and her husband, John Marsh, occupied a two-room basement apartment from 1925 to 1932 while she was writing the book. It was not significantly damaged.
Now, a bottom-line mentality is stirring action. With the approach of the 1996 Olympic Games, city officials have been exploring every opportunity to create tourist attractions.
Mr. Harling said the company would use the renovated building as a hospitality center and a tourist attraction during the Olympics. Afterward, he said, the house will be given to the city or to Ms. Taylor's nonprofit foundation.