Metro Pulse/Cover/Tennessee Theatre

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A 1928 movie palace transforms into a performing-arts center

by Jack Neely

The grand dame of East Tennessee theaters is 75 years old this year, and would surely be celebrating its diamond anniversary with all sorts of gala events over the next few months if it weren't having her back torn off and her seats ripped out.

This time, for once, demolition has a creative intent; for the better part of the next two years, workers will be transforming this 1920s "motion-picture palace" into an even grander place: a premiere, if rather unusual, performing-arts center. Artisans from around the country will give the Tennessee a thorough going-over, replacing its seats and curtains, restoring its interior paint, changing the tilt of its balcony seating, installing an opera-worthy orchestra pit, replacing the Spartan dressing rooms, installing new restrooms and an elevator from its famously elegant basement restrooms to the re-engineered balcony. And somehow do all that without ruining the elaborate plaster detail, the signature urns in their alcoves, the recessed oval ceiling, all the things that make the place astonishing.

One Tuesday morning last month, about a dozen specialists from Australia, Venezuela, Chicago, Cleveland, and New York were roaming around the theater obviously inspired by the job, laughing, telling stories about other theaters they'd worked on. Venezuelan Luis Peris, of the Cleveland, Ohio, firm of van Dijk Westlake Reed Leskosky, is the energetic consulting architect who specializes in historic-theater renovation. He's remarking that the Tennessee was inspired by the Moorish Alhambra, the 14th-century palace of the Islamic rulers of Spain.

"This place was over the top," he says. "Fringes everywhere, tassels, birdcages. This is 1001 Nights, Alhambra, a Moorish Palace! It was a place to get away, escape reality."

"It's a good building, a grand event... It's quite exciting that this is happening. We're going to make it bigger, better, badder."

Jeff Greene, of Evergreene Painting Studios in New York, is remarking on the quality of the paint. Said to be the nation's premier authority on paint restoration, he has worked on several state capitals, including the one in Nashville, as well as the Tennessee Theatre's closest living relative, the Alabama in Birmingham. Besides the Tennessee, that larger, slightly older theater is the only other existing theater designed by the once-famous Chicago firm of Graven & Mayger.

A charismatic man with artfully tousled gray hair, Greene has been studying the Tennessee for months. His careful analysis of the Tennessee's paint jobs yielded a surprise: "It was brighter!" he says. He demonstrates with a couple of four-inch-square paint samples. "There's a dramatic difference," he says, and there is. The theater has been repainted a few times over the years, but not with the original colors. Later repaintings were done darker to match the existing paint, which was stained with coalsoot. He's going to make it look as bright as it was in 1928.

He's impressed with what he has to work with. "The great thing about the Tennessee is that it's all here. It hasn't been mucked with. It's great, relatively unique."

Meanwhile, a couple of professionals from Chicago are standing inside the theater, clapping and listening carefully. These people of Kirkegaard Associates of Chicago are puzzling over what is, to some, the theater's most problematic concern: acoustics.

Some musicians have been known to call the Tennessee's sound "excellent." However, Jonathan Darling, a dark-haired man who looks like a classical musician, says the acoustics aren't perfect. "The theater has a very unusual shape. It has a very nice, but—" and he chooses his word carefully—"distinctive acoustical quality. There's a lack of early energy, a lot of late energy. It's quite pleasing, but a little unusual."

They considered radical solutions to the subtle problem, including narrowing the house, partly by adding real boxes where the faux ones are, but these solutions could have tripled the overall cost of the renovation. Their second-best plan is involved enough, replacing tiles on the side of the theater, obtaining more acoustically apt seating, creating a band shell to direct the sound of the whole orchestra toward the audience (obviating the giant checkers suspended from the ceiling in front of the proscenium as an acoustical cheat in the '80s), and installing moveable curtains, so that the hard surfaces behind them could reflect the sound of some shows, and absorb it in others.

All these exotic specialists, every one of them, seem tickled just to be here, some of them bordering on giddy with the thrill of having an impact on this rare old joint.

The most serious-looking person in the place, the businesslike woman who looks like she's trying to herd cats, is project coordinator Darlene Smolik. Originally from rural upstate New York, the former chief operating officer for the Public Building Authority first got to know the Tennessee in the 1980s, when she attended symphony performances here. She now represents the Historic Tennessee Theatre Foundation, the non-profit that owns the theater.

Smolik says the budget for the entire project is $20 million, which, as it turns out, is comparable to the original adjusted-for-inflation construction cost of the whole theater ($2 million, in 1928 dollars). They have raised two-thirds of the money they need, assuming there's not a surprise that punches the total skyward. There are a few questions in light of the current fiscal climate. The Sundquist administration was committed to pitching in $4 million in state dollars (for whatever it's worth, the Tennessee was designated the Official State Theater of Tennessee in 1999). "We're still hoping that will come forth," she says. The city has pledged $4 million; half of it is in hand, the other half is waiting to be approved in one of the toughest budget years in recent memory. Knox County has donated $3 million. Congressman Jimmy Duncan has found $740,000 in HUD money; an additional $405,000 has been approved by the U.S. House, and is waiting for the OK from the Senate.

The private sector is stepping up in comparable numbers. Mobile-home tycoon Jim Clayton is donating the proceeds of his autobiography (which, for those who are acquainted with the book business, may not be a huge amount). An anonymous donor has pitched in a $1 million challenge grant.

Wallace Baumann, who has made a study of all sorts of theaters in Knoxville, is the project's elder statesman. He remembers coming here with his mother in 1931—he thinks it was his sixth birthday. "This is my favorite place in Knoxville, and it always has been." He's a member of the theater's governing board, and of the building committee. He says promoters have approached hundreds, perhaps a thousand potential contributors. Many have chipped in, but he was impressed with their verbal responses. "Not a single person had a single bad thing to say. All, unanimously, said they loved the theater."

It's expensive, but Smolik says it could be worse, citing the recent restoration of Baltimore's Hippodrome, which reached $125 million.

The poster outside juxtaposes adjectives to describe the interior: "Breathtaking DILAPIDATED interior; Plush THREADBARE seats; Opulent CRUMBLING plaster detail." Still, the price tag and the bother of closing the theater for so long has caused a few patrons to grumble privately that the old girl isn't all that bad.

But performers, the handicapped, and more discerning audience members cite numerous problems with the place. The shallow depth of the stage is a damning flaw for many large productions. The Tennessee was designed for movies, not opera, but it has been the principal venue for Knoxville opera since the 1980s; its chief complaint is the diminutive orchestra pit. "The current pit seats 35 unhappy musicians," says Becky Pryor of AC Entertainment, a sometime clarinetist herself. "You have to cut the extra strings, and it makes the strings sound thin. That works for Mozart, but not for Puccini or Wagner." The new, more capacious pit will work much better, seating as many as 60. The expansion should also render some more seating in the house, bringing the total from just over 1,500 to about 1,570.

Some of its problems are out of sight of everybody but the projectionist. The stairway leading up to the projection booth, its plaster crumbling from leaks patched 15 years ago, looks like a stairway in a tenement.

"The Tennessee is an old friend to those of us who live here," Smolik says, and old friends have a way of overlooking personal flaws. "People coming in from the outside might not be as forgiving of its quirks."

Some of those visitors, of course, are performers. The cramped honeycomb of 30-odd dressing rooms behind and beneath the stage, two floors of them, never looked like much to begin with, but now could pass for wards in a third-world hospital. The small unisex bathroom is a whoever-gets-there-first amenity. Even the maestro's tiny chamber doesn't have a washroom. Several years ago, Actors Equity made a formal complaint about the backstage accommodations, raising issues that have been only partially addressed in the years since. The renovation will more than double the square-footage of dressing room space, with 48 "equity stations," or dressing spots, each with—at least—mirrors, lights, and a stool.

Much of it will be made possible by way of the most noticeable external change in the building. Today, the back of the Tennessee's backstage is a solid, high brick wall, featuring faux arches, over the State Street sidewalk. Early this summer, workmen will tear that out and build it back again, bigger, expanded 20 feet to the rear, 14 feet in the air over the sidewalk and one full lane of State Street. Dew says their contractor has promised to save the terra cotta detail of the exterior; they'll reconstruct the arched designs of the rear on the new cantilever. That addition alone accounts for a big chunk of the total price, at $5-to-7 million.

It will approach the First Presbyterian Church graveyard, resting place of a few senators and the founders of Knoxville and UT, and will call for significant trimming of the graveyard's huge elm tree that spreads over the street there. Early plans were more invasive, calling for the backstage area to be stretched all the way over State Street, shadowing the graveyard. The church's leadership opposed that plan. Even the current one will occlude some familiar vistas of the graveyard. But today, Pastor Carswell Hughes has only praise for the theater planners, who he says have been "very solicitous."

The plan still calls for obtaining air rights over State Street, which will have to be approved by City Council soon. Architect Richard Dew points out that they won't need to support the overhang with a conventional cantilever-style support on the bottom. The rear of the Tennessee will, effectively, hang from its own roof trusses.

The expansion will not only make the stage itself deeper. The new backstage area—the stage box, as it's called—will also be about a story—15 feet—taller than the place we know, to accommodate the lowering of large operatic sets onto the stage.

Also in the plan are interior fireproof stairs, obviating the original fire escapes still visible on the outside of the theater. (It's a little astonishing that, in its 75 years, the Tennessee never had a significant fire.) The theater has also purchased retail space facing Clinch Avenue for possible future development as additional dressing rooms.

One of the chief practical advantages of the new Tennessee will be the option of loading trucks directly into the backstage; previous productions have wheeled heavy equipment in through the lobby, a practice believed to have contributed to the cracks in the tile lobby floor.

Early configurations of the expansion proposed various solutions to the problem, most of which would have had a significant impact on its cheek-by-jowl neighbors: historic residential buildings facing State and Church, ranging from modest apartment housing to prospective upscale condos. Others that might have been affected are parking areas for offices facing Gay Street and space in a major transportation/cineplex project. Some options threatened to be controversial.

Most recently, planners considered a complicated design to back trucks down an alley off Church Street, beside the century-old townhouse best known as the Knoxville Business College building. The project would have called for the removal of the rear portion of the building; considering that it was a non-historic addition, it would have been OK with owner David Dewhirst, who has been renovating that old townhouse known for its marble facade with a distinctive lopsided keyhole-shaped door. It would also have called for some impressive angled-backing finesse on the part of truck drivers. However, the foundation wasn't able to negotiate an affordable deal for a courtyard parking area in the center of the block, used by commuters who work in the old Journal Arcade building on Gay.

The path of least resistance turned out to be cheaper, anyway: just let them park on one of State Street's two one-way lanes, where heavy traffic is rare.

Inside, Smolik is discussing with the acoustics people (acousticians, they're called) one of many aspects of the renovation that few amateurs might think about, or even know about. A long glass window, covered on both sides by curtains, separates the house from the lobby. Smolik sees it as a significant safety hazard, especially at the rowdier, stand-up shows the Tennessee sometimes hosts.

Smolik has a lot to think about. "We have to balance safety, codes, frugality, sound, preservation, ADA requirements, and the IRS."

"What a nice soup," quips Becky Pryor. She's the point person for AC, which has managed the Tennessee and booked its shows for the last seven years. Her first memory of the Tennessee is during its KSO era, when she came here on a date to see a pianist with the KSO in 1986. "It made such an impact, evoked such a response in me, that I remember everything about it."

Luis Peris has worked on theater projects all over the country; he calls the renovation of the Tennessee relatively "easy." Unlike many theater projects, the Tennessee doesn't have to be revived.

"The house is already alive," he says. "I've worked in projects where the house is dead. There's no need to build momentum. I was here for the Buena Vista Social Club," he says, referring to the well-known Cuban ensemble that performed at the Tennessee in February. "The house was packed, alive, and fun."

Obviously, it won't be like that for the next year-and-a-half. There are hazards connected with closing down a theater for any length of time. It's called, ominously, "going dark."

"Once you go dark," Smolik says, "until you get her done, she doesn't really open up." (Several principals refer to the Tennessee by the feminine pronoun, as if she were a ship.) Becky Pryor adds her concern that the great big place won't be making any income for a year-and-a-half.

Some downtown businesses may be more worried than the building committee. Restaurants within walking distance of the theater tend to do their best dinner business on the Tennessee's show nights. Shows will continue in other venues, of course. The Civic Auditorium, which will replace the Tennessee for many shows, lacks a neighborhood of bars and restaurants. Until 2005, live entertainment downtown, from symphony concerts to country shindigs, isn't likely to have quite as much spillover benefit to evening restaurant business that downtown has taken for granted for the last few years.

Knoxvillians will have a few more opportunities to visit the Tennessee before it goes dark. The Opera Company will perform The Italian Girl In Algiers there this weekend as the centerpiece of the Rossini festival. Progressive bluegrass band Nickel Creek is playing there on the 28th, followed two days later by rock 'n' roll cult band Ween. Kirk Trevor will conduct his final performances as maestro of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra in mid-May. AC is working on a show or two for the last week of May. The final day will be a fundraising telethon on Sunday, June 1, when they'll show a classic movie, to be announced, as part of a live simulcast on Channel 6.

Looking Back

Before you mess with a building that's more beloved than some grandmothers, you'd better know the history of the place.

When the Tennessee opened, McGhee Tyson Airport was on Sutherland Avenue, and West Knoxville ended at a new development called Sequoyah Hills. There was no Great Smoky Mountains National Park, no TVA lakes. Oak Ridge was a remote farming community most Knoxvillians had never heard of.

A mostly industrial town of 100,000, Knoxville did host a couple of small hilltop colleges, one black, one white. The Vols were struggling to build a regional reputation for football under the leadership of a young army major. Knoxville had two radio stations that were on the air several hours a day.

Knoxvillians' chief entertainment wasn't watersports, or hiking, or football. What Knoxvillians did in 1928 was go to the movies. The city had plenty of movie theaters, small ones, large ones, some that combined vaudeville and film. For a few cents, Knoxvillians could escape the tedium of the mills.

The 1,000-seat Riviera was large, but the Tennessee, which opened just one block away, sat nearly twice as many, and was, moreover, something different: it was a "motion picture palace." They were the cat's meow across America in 1928, these glamorous, over-the-top rococo cathedrals of entertainment. They weren't common before 1921, nor after 1930, but at the height of the extravagant Jazz Age, they were all the rage, and for that brief time no town could consider itself much of a city without one.

The Tennessee was established here by the Paramount Studio, which had built comparable theaters across the country. They worked with local furniture tycoon/developer C.B. Atkin, who had put together a mallet-shaped space adjacent to the 20-year-old Burwell Building (no longer Knoxville's tallest skyscraper, it needed a new distinction). The space Graven & Mayger had to deal with was an awkward one, a couple of storefronts' worth of Gay Street frontage leading to a short but broad space butting against State Street. It would clearly call for an unusual design.

They broke ground in late 1927, the year of The Jazz Singer, and finished in less than a year. Maybe it was the extravagant times, when the only limit to the stock market was the blue skies that Jolson sang about, but Paramount and its architects went all out. It wasn't one of the biggest movie palaces in the South, but some claimed the Tennessee was the grandest.

The result was a theater that was an astonishing combination of styles, dominated by the Alhambra-style Moorish, but with Italian, French, oriental, and art-deco elements (mainly in the women's lounge), plus a few region-specific dogwood blossoms here and there—but even so, it was not as incoherently bizarre as many of its era. Embellishing the public spaces, from those early days, was a collection of art from sources now mysterious, including classical statuary, paintings, and furniture, much of it of 19th-century European origin. The architects dealt with their unusual space with an unusually wide seating area, and a recessed oval-domed ceiling. The fact that the oval was lateral, parallel to the stage, is one of the Tennessee's rarest distinctions.

Custom-built by Wurlitzer just for the Tennessee was the elaborate pipe organ. An organist had been vital to accompany silent films in that era, but as it turned out, this Wurlitzer never served that purpose; by 1928, all of Paramount's major releases, even those shot as silents, featured Vitaphone synchronized recorded scores, played on records in the projection booth. The Wurlitzer organist entertained crowds between features.

The Tennessee Theatre's first show, on Oct. 1, 1928, was The Fleet's In, a Clara Bow picture about a dime-store clerk who falls in love with a sailor and dances with him at the famous Roseland dance hall in San Francisco. Accompanied by a Movietone musical score, this vehicle for the sex symbol had been shot on silent film only three months before it was shown at the Tennessee. Unfortunately, like many films of its era, it's now lost. The movie that inaugurated the Tennessee is unavailable in any form.

First-run motion pictures were the Tennessee's bread and butter for almost half a century. However, the Tennessee also featured a stage and, during its early years, it hosted its share of live shows. Fanny Brice in the Ziegfeld Follies, Glenn Miller, Desi Arnaz, the very young Cuban bandleader, all performed here. Stars like Helen Hayes and Fifi D'Orsay performed in plays here in the '30s. Cowboy star Tom Mix showed up on the Tennessee's stage with his horse in 1933. So did some locals—though not necessarily with quadrupeds—like country-music icon Roy Acuff; biographies suggest that the local fiddler who was destined to change popular music may have met his first paying audience from the stage of the Tennessee around 1930.

But even with that lively pedigree, the Tennessee was always mainly a movie theater. In that regard, it had few rivals. With nothing to compare to it this side of Atlanta, it became the theater that got the first crack at new movies, even a handful of movies billed as "world premieres."

When it closed for refurbishing for 10 days in 1966, it was said to be the end of an unbroken 38-year span of operation. That renovation is one of the problems the new renovation means to fix. The balcony was rearranged on a different slant, or "raft," which worked OK for movies, less well for live shows where the action was on the stage. The number of seats was reduced from almost 2,000 to a more-comfortable 1,545.

The Tennessee remained unchallenged as Knoxville's premier movie venue through about 1970. Smitten with breezy drives in the suburbs, families started favoring suburban theaters, drive-ins and, later, multiplexes. Cineplexes, with much smaller theaters that permitted showing a variety of films at lower risk to the owner, became the norm. The change came largely as a result of a shift in how the studios did business. Hollywood was falling on hard times by the 1960s, and began to demand 90 percent of the take from theaters during the first week, then cutting better deals later. Theaters couldn't make much money on a film until after it had been out for a few weeks. A theater as large as the Tennessee, showing movies to 1,500 people at a time until they got tired of it, didn't stand much of a chance.

Furthermore, studios began favoring suburban theaters with their first runs. The Tennessee stopped showing new movies in late 1977, 49 years and two months after it started.

Tim Burns, the Tennessee's longtime technical director, is fond of quoting West Town's first theater developer, who predicted that the Tennessee would fade from view and would one day be a "parking lot." Instead, 30 years later, that original West Town theater, demolished years ago, is now a parking lot, and the Tennessee is a much-used showpiece, the subject of a $20-million renovation.

Movies would come back. Downtown entertainment would come back. But the giant single-screen movie theater wouldn't.

Though never abandoned, the Tennessee Theater was, for a few years, an oddity; no longer a practical movie theater, but not yet a regular performing-arts space. It may have seemed like a white elephant when Dick Broadcasting, owners of WIVK, bought the place, including the Burwell Building, in 1981, got it listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and gave it a mostly cosmetic renovation.

The World's Fair brought it some attention, using the Tennessee for one more "world premiere" of a forgettable Kenny Rogers movie called Six Pack, and for performances of Drumwright, a regionally based Broadway-style musical starring John Cullum. By 1985, it had become the home of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, and Knoxville's principal venue for performing arts. It was problematic for some orchestral performances, though, especially those that featured major operas.

In 1996, Dick sold the Burwell Building and yielded the Tennessee to the Historic Tennessee Theatre Foundation, which contracted AC Entertainment to operate it as mainly a live-entertainment venue, hosting performers ranging from John Prine to Diana Krall to Johnny Cash to Bob Dylan to the Everly Brothers (returning to the site where they licked their wounds after Cas Walker fired them in 1955), working with the symphony/opera/ballet schedule with occasional classic movies. In the late '90s, the Tennessee's exterior got what may have been its greatest national exposure standing in for an Indianapolis theater called the "Ennesse" in the movie October Sky.

It's not clear how many customers go to see the shows, and how many go to see the Tennessee. The theater's rare appeal may have been most obvious during a Valentine's Day showing last year of The Philadelphia Story. The black-and-white movie is over 60 years old. It has been available on videotape for 20 years. Most of its actors are dead. No new theater ever wastes valuable theater time showing old movies.

But the Tennessee showed it anyway—on a Thursday night, yet. And AC had the temerity to charge new-movie ticket prices. It very nearly sold out.

"We sold 1,400 tickets," remembers Pryor. Latecomers weren't able to find seats, and Pryor had to stand in front and ask people to move toward the middle, as if it were a crowded wedding. These 1,400 could have seen the same movie more conveniently, and for much less money, at home. But they wanted to see it at the Tennessee.

A Backstage Pass

No one knows their way around the old lady like Tim Burns. He's about the only one who doesn't need permission to enter the strangest room in greater Knoxville. It's a big, cavernous room, with a strangely warped floor made of something that looks like egg-carton cardboard, grooved with ruts that look like gutters. In the middle, obscuring the other side of the room, is a big, unclimbable hill of the stuff. And everywhere you look, hundreds of narrow steel strips sprout to the high ceiling like a bamboo thicket, seemingly growing from the weird floor. They're everywhere, some of them spirally twisted, some not. A wobbly wood-plank catwalk takes you around the perfectly oval hill, and in a few places you have to duck low. Colored lights glow from the floor. It's too weird to be dreamlike.

But look down at where the light bulbs are, and you'll see narrow openings, like gun slots. You look down, far down, and see the familiar interior of the Tennessee Theatre.

The Tennessee Theatre's famous ceiling is made of molded plaster, barely two inches thick, suspended from the real roof by those metal strips. The horsehair used for its fabrication in 1928 still clings to the upper side of it. The gutters you see in the floor are actually the reverse image of what appear from below to be sturdy support beams. Up here in what Burns calls "the attic," you see as nowhere else that it's all a magnificent illusion.

He points out the ductwork; it doesn't look historic, but is. "This was the first building in Knoxville to have central heat and air," he says. The rectangular metal piping is 75 years old. But it's not one of the things that needs to be fixed. It works fine. Renovators are going to keep it in the new design.

In spite of the plaster illusions, Burns says the building as a whole is solid. "This thing's built like a fortress," he says. "The engineers say there's no sign of settlement. It's just the massiveness of the structure. It has impressed the experts.

"There are no ghosts in here at all," says Burns. He doesn't necessarily disbelieve in ghosts in general; he just says, flatly, that there are no ghosts in the Tennessee. "I did a tour at the Bijou in the '70s," he says. "That place is haunted."

It has a lot of original equipment, all of it in good shape, all of it to be preserved in the new version of the old joint. Burns demonstrates the Peter Clark steel counterweights. Except for the fabric, the movie screen is the original one used from the '20s until it was—temporarily, as it turned out—replaced by a much wider Cinemascope screen in the early '50s. It weighs one ton, and so do its counterweights. "I'm moving two tons," says Burns, demonstrating the strong, silent ropes and well-oiled pulleys as he raises and lowers the old screen. Though no bodybuilder, Burns isn't breaking a sweat.

The second-strangest place in the Tennessee is above stage right. If you start climbing up a hidden steel-rung ladder, stop about halfway up, and open the door, you might expect to find a tardy rabbit with a pocket watch. Instead, you'll find yourself in a tiny room, windowless but brightly lit, with a desk and a PC. It's the brains of the Wurlitzer organ, somewhere down below. The computer gives the organ ideas. Given the chance, this computer can play the organ by itself.

Through a door, the next room holds about half the organ's pipes. Though shiny from a recent renovation, they're the Wurlitzer's original pipes, installed during the Coolidge administration.

Burns is grateful that the Tennessee, unlike many of its peers, still has its original organ. The guy who knows it best is Bill Snyder, the engineering professor and former UT chancellor who plays the thing most often.

He grew up going to the Tennessee, and remembers it from high school in the '50s as the swankiest place to take a date. Snyder, who began fiddling with his Washington Presbyterian Church organ when he was a kid, became intrigued with the organ's complicated mechanics.

"Never in my imagination did I think I would get a chance to play the organ at the Tennessee," he says. But in the late '70s, after the theater had been closed for a spell, he heard it was going to reopen, and he offered to play the organ, gratis. The then-manager happily agreed. Though the Wurlitzer was then barely workable, Snyder says, "it was a big thrill." He helped get the thing running again, and has played it ever since, both for the theater's classic-movie series and for occasional recitals. He typically closes with the "Tennessee Waltz."

The Wurlitzer was absent for a year, undergoing a thorough renovation before it returned in late 2001. Though it may seem a pity that the organ has to go silent again so soon, Snyder says the timing was deliberate. "It was the lead project in the total renovation of the theater," he say. "I think it paid off in publicity."

The delicate Wurlitzer will be moved out of the theater for the duration of the restoration, and put on display in the lobby of the Miller's Building nearby.

Today Snyder is chairman of the fundraising committee, and is pleased with the effort's progress. "It's going well, but we have a ways to go," he says.

"I don't know how to express my enthusiasm for the project," he says. "With all that's happening downtown, it will be a real cornerstone for all the development to come."

Wallace Baumann emphasizes that, in spite of the expansions and modernizations, the intent of the restoration is to make the theater look much like it did when it opened. Even older folks won't recognize some of the changes. He mentions in particular the "aisle standards," the decorative ends of each row of seats, which will be restored in character with the theater.

"I don't think anybody can know what it will be like until they step in and see what it looked like in 1928," Baumann says. "It will be a showplace in several states. Word will get out about what we've done. It's going to be an amazing thing."