They called him the Phantom — the Phantom of the Fox.

Like his well-known Parisian counterpart, he lived for decades in an ornate metropolitan theater. He had intimate knowledge of every light, every rope, every walkway and every catacomb in his cavernous Eden.

But unlike the storied figure said to haunt the Paris Opera, this Phantom was real — an ardent, somewhat solitary, supremely gifted man named Joe Patten. Until shortly before his death on April 7, at 89, Mr. Patten had lived in rococo splendor in a sprawling private apartment in Atlanta’s historic Fox Theater.

Over the course of his long love affair with the Fox, Mr. Patten, its technical director from 1974 until his retirement in 2001, became as revered a fixture of the city’s cultural life as the theater itself. He restored its magnificent pipe organ to long-lost glory and twice saved the entire building — from demolition in the 1970s and from fire in the 1990s.

But in the end, Mr. Patten was forced to wage his greatest preservation campaign on his own behalf: In old age, in a development that may properly be called Oedipal, he battled eviction at the hands of the very theater he had nurtured for so long.