A gold star marks the spot where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office and became the first and last President of the Confederate States of America in 1861.

A lot of bad things have happened in Montgomery, Alabama. But many good things too.

The 1965 Civil Rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, and those who died in support of voting rights are commemorated in Alabama’s historic state capital.

Dr Martin Luther King was pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. His red brick and white wood church is built the site of a former slave trader’s pen.

Rosa Parks, who began the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, has a museum in town. The bus stop, near the city’s Court Square Fountain, where she boarded the bus is commemorated.

Now you can be one of the “Darlings of the Roaring Twenties”. And a member of the “Lost Generation”.

The alcoholism and descent into mental illness is optional. The sexual recklessness and infidelity too.

A two-story, clapboard Georgian vernacular house at 919 Felder Avenue, Montgomery , Alabama is available on Airbnb.com, offering a unique museum sleepover. At $150-200 per night.

Fitzgerald House, built in 1910, was the residence of “ The Great Gatsby” author F. Scott, Zelda and their daughter, Scottie ( Frances) , from 1931 to 1932. After Zelda had been released from various French and Swiss sanatoriums.

The house was saved from demolition in 1986 and is the only surviving residence of the iconic couple and the only museum dedicated to them.

Zelda Sayre was the youngest child of Alabama Supreme Court Justice, Anthony Dickson Sayre and Minnie Buckner Sayre. Judge Sayre's uncle William was a prominent Montgomery merchant whose home eventually became Jefferson Davis's first White House. Mrs. Sayre's father was a Kentucky senator in the Confederate Congress.

Minnesota-born Scott was a young army lieutenant stationed at nearby Camp Sheridan. He was waiting on orders to go to war in France, and, while he waited, writing a novel based on his Princeton college days .

Scribner’s rejected the first draft of his novel, “The Romantic Egotist,” but accepted a rewritten version, under the title “This Side of Paradise,” a year later.

Montgomery-born Zelda had graduated from Sydney Lanier High School in 1918. The couple met over afternoon tea at the Winter Palace mansion, close to the family’s house at 6 Pleasant Avenue , now a car lot.

The couple got engaged , Scott making several frantic visits to Montgomery when Zelda kept breaking if off. But they eventually married in New York in 1920 following the publication of “This Side of Paradise”.

“Her father was so against the marriage he didn’t attend the wedding. He didn’t believe Scott could afford to keep his daughter in the lifestyle to which she was accustomed,” says museum curator Sara Powell who has been responsible for much of the interior design. The on-going restoration and preservation project has been funded through private donations.

The seven-room house contains some of Zelda’s sketches and paintings ( most of her artwork was burnt by her mother ), beaded purses, her paper dolls , senior yearbook as well as his Princeton honorary diploma and “Esquire” magazines featuring Scott’s “Pat Hobby” stories which he wrote largely to pay for his wife’s frequent hospitalizations and treatment.

There are also letters between Fitzgerland and his close friend and literary critic , Edmund White. There are no letters from Ernest Heminway. Zelda loathed him. She considered him “Bogus”.

“Zelda's record collection is also one of my favorite pieces in the museum- it's difficult to pick a favorite.”

The bedroom’s pillows have quotes. “ Now there’s a green light in her eyes” , “I love her and that's the beginning and the end of everything."

The two-bedroom apartment is located just above the downstairs galleries of the Fitzgerald Museum. Guests cannot access the museum/artifacts outside of operating hours. The space was part of the original home and there is some original wallpaper. There is a full kitchen, half bath, bedroom (two twin beds), 'master' bedroom (Queen bed), dining room, living room and sunporch.

“We have handmade pillows based on Fitzgerald quotes/Zelda's sketches. Photographs and paintings by local artists and a bookshelf with plenty of Fitzgerald material. There is wi-fi access, but no cable or television.”

Zelda was the original IT girl. The first flapper. “Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart”. Zelda refused to let herself be “a back seat driver about life”.

Says Powell. “ As she describes one of her characters – she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring. They were huge celebrities. Everyone wanted to meet them. They were the original glam celebrity couple. As one schoolkid said on a tour they were the Kardashians of their day. The Beckhams to you! The Jazza Gaes liuve on between these walls.”

As are other ages. And stars.

Nathaniel Adam Coles was born in Montgomery in 1919 before moving to Chicago at the age of four. Nat King Cole’s childhood home has been relocated to the campus of the University of Alabama. Currently, only “curbside viewing” is available.

Country and western legend Hank Williams was born on Highway 31. His mother ran a boarding house in downtown Montgomery. Hank worked as a shoeshine boy and busked. In 1947, at twenty-four, he had a hit with “ Move It On Over”.

After snow cancelled his flight, Williams was killed on tour in a road accident in West Virginia in 1952. The man who fused country , folk , boogie-woogie and the blues is buried in Montgomery’s Oakwood Cemetery.

His electric blue stage suit and other “Nudie” suits , hats and cowboy boots , brown leather shoes, his first “Gibson” guitar and even the original family supper table are on view at the Hank Williams Museum on Montgomery's Commerce Street. As is the baby-blue 1952 “Cadillac Convertible” in which he died.

The Fitzgerald Museum

919 Felder Avenue

Montgomery, AL 36106

(334) 264- 4222

thefitzgeraldmuseum@gmail.com

www.airbnb.com