| Uptown Theater | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Location | East Isles, Minneapolis |
| Coordinates | 44°56′56.55″N93°17′55.00″W / 44.9490417°N 93.2986111°W |
| Built | 1939 |
| Architect | Liebenberg and Kaplan |
| Architectural style(s) | Streamline Moderne |
The Uptown Theatre is one of the oldest surviving theaters in the Twin Cities area. It was in active use from 1916 to 2020. [1] The theater reopened on June 10, 2023 as a music and event venue. [2]
The theater was originally opened as the Lagoon Theater on June 3, 1916. A name change to the Uptown on April 11, 1929, coincided with the installation of sound equipment and a screening of The Dummy. [3] A fire broke out in the ventilation system during Trade Winds on April 25, 1939, but the cinema was rebuilt soon after by the firm of Liebenberg & Kaplan. [3]
This new Uptown Theater re-opened on November 16, 1939, with The Women . [3] It was designed in streamline moderne, with two incised roundels on the exterior stone facade that portrayed themes of travel and adventure in cinema. Murals in the auditorium depict early explorers gazing at the future Minneapolis and the Father of the Waters presiding over water sprites that symbolize the lakes of the city.
The Uptown closed in 1975 but was purchased and re-opened by the Landmark Theatres chain in 1978. After years of classic double features, the theater began screening foreign and independent films starting with The Coca-Cola Kid in November 1985. The building was deemed a heritage site in 1990 and soon after remodeled their lobby to re-create art moderne and neo-baroque elements.
Landmark closed the theater on January 31, 2012, for renovation and upgrades. [4] The theater re-opened September 14, 2012, showing Sleepwalk with Me . [5] The new design added a full bar and replaced 35mm with digital projection.
The structure has a 60-foot tower that once featured a revolving beam of light marking the Uptown area of Minneapolis and could be seen for miles around. It was the first three-sided vertical tower sign in the country and had to be approved by civil aviation authorities.
The theater stands at one of the busiest intersections in the Uptown area (Hennepin-Lagoon) and has been a landmark in the area for decades. It is also one of the few cinemas in the midwest that offers balcony seating.
The Uptown screened mostly foreign and art films and ran cult films at midnight screenings. It ran The Rocky Horror Picture Show from May 19, 1978, through 1997. The film returned on a monthly basis in 2009.
The theater was known for its often clever and amusing marquees. [6] [7]
The theater closed in March 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic; Landmark Theatres was evicted in June 2021 due to unpaid back rent. [1]
The Uptown Theater was purchased by Swervo Development and it is planned to reopen as a music and event venue on May 5, 2023. [8]
The theater's iconic sign was removed for restoration in September of 2022 and replaced with a replica on August 16, 2023. [9]
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)  | This article about a theater building in the United States is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
Landmark Theatres is a movie theatre chain founded in 1974 in the United States. It was formerly dedicated to exhibiting and marketing independent and foreign films. Landmark consists of 34 theatres with 176 screens in 24 markets. It is known for both its historic and newer, more modern theatres. Helmed by its President Kevin Holloway, Landmark Theatres is part of Cohen Media Group.
The Chicago Theatre, originally known as the Balaban and Katz Chicago Theatre, is a landmark theater located on North State Street in the Loop area of Chicago, Illinois. Built in 1921, the Chicago Theatre was the flagship for the Balaban and Katz (B&K) group of theaters run by A. J. Balaban, his brother Barney Balaban and partner Sam Katz. Along with the other B&K theaters, from 1925 to 1945 the Chicago Theatre was a dominant movie theater enterprise. Currently, Madison Square Garden, Inc. owns and operates the Chicago Theatre as a 3600 seat performing arts venue for stage plays, magic shows, comedy, speeches, sporting events and popular music concerts.
The Seattle Cinerama Theatre is a landmark movie theater in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, United States. The theater opened in 1963 and was renovated in the 1990s after its acquisition by Paul Allen. The Cinerama was closed in May 2020. At the time of its 2020 closure, it was one of only three movie theaters in the world capable of showing three-panel Cinerama films. In 2023, the theater was purchased by the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) and reopened on December 14, 2023 as SIFF Cinema Downtown due to trademark issues with the "Cinerama" name.
The River Oaks Theatre is a historic movie theater located in the River Oaks Shopping Center in the Neartown community in Houston, Texas, United States, east of the River Oaks community. The theater has three projection screens; one large screen, downstairs, and two smaller screens, upstairs.
Saenger Theatre is an atmospheric theatre in downtown New Orleans, Louisiana, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. Once the flagship of Julian and Abe Saenger's theatre empire, today it is one of only a handful of Saenger movie palaces that remain.
The Normal Theater, also known as the Normal Theatre, is a cinema located in the downtown area of Normal, Illinois of the United States of America, which is located in McLean County. The theater closed for a time in the early 1990s but reopened in 1993 after being purchased and renovated by the town of Normal. It has since been in continuous operation, showing a mix of first run and classic films. The building has been on the National Register of Historic Places since July 25, 1997.
ArcLight Cinemas was an American movie theater chain that operated from 2002 to 2021. It was owned by The Decurion Corporation, which was also the parent company of Pacific Theatres. The ArcLight chain opened in 2002 as a single theater, the ArcLight Hollywood in Hollywood, Los Angeles, and later expanded to eleven locations in California, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Illinois.
The Uptown Theater, known as The Uptown, was a single-screen movie theater in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Opened in 1936, it hosted the world premieres of such movies as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jurassic Park. It closed in March 2020.
An atmospheric theatre is a type of movie palace design which was popular in the late 1920s. Atmospheric theatres were designed and decorated to evoke the feeling of a particular time and place for patrons, through the use of projectors, architectural elements and ornamentation that evoked a sense of being outdoors. This was intended to make the patron a more active participant in the setting.
The Mainstreet Theater, also commonly referred to as The Empire Theater, is a historic theater in downtown Kansas City, Missouri in the Power & Light District. The theater was landmarked and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in February 2007.
The Bama Theatre is a historic theatre in Tuscaloosa, Alabama that currently serves as the city's performing arts center. Its modern redevelopment is the result of cooperation between the Arts Council of Tuscaloosa and the Tuscaloosa County Parks and Recreation Authority. The three-story brick and limestone building is located at the corner of Gary Fitts Street and Greensboro Avenue in downtown Tuscaloosa. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) on August 30, 1984. It is also a contributing building in the Downtown Tuscaloosa Historic District, NRHP-listed in 1985.
The Alabama Theatre is a historic movie theater located at the intersection of Alabama Street and Shepherd Drive in the Upper Kirby district of Houston, Texas. Constructed in 1939, in the Art Deco and Streamline Moderne styles as a suburban theater, the Alabama primarily booked roadshow engagements through most of its history. Today, the theater is home to a Trader Joe's grocery store. It is one of the buildings of the Alabama Shepherd Shopping Center, owned by Weingarten Realty.
The Nimoy Theater, formerly known as Crest, Majestic Crest and Bigfoot Crest Theatre, is a movie theatre located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. It was founded as the UCLAN in 1941, and was built for live performances but switched to a newsreel cinema during World War II. Through ownership changes, it has been known at various times as UCLAN Theatre, Crest Theatre, and Metro Theatre. The original 500-seat art deco style theater was designed by Arthur W. Hawes.
The Hollywood Theater is a historic theater building in Minneapolis which is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. The Art Deco theater building opened on October 26, 1935, and the marquee proclaimed it the "Incomparable Showcase of the Northwest". The theater, designed by architects Jack Liebenberg and Seeman Kaplan, had a generous budget that allowed for elaborate decoration in the Streamline Deco style of design; its facade and structure made a "powerful statement of geometric mass punctuated by the entrance, exits, and three small windows that served the projection booth." Liebenberg and Kaplan went on to design the Riverview Theatre in Minneapolis and the Terrace Theatre in Robbinsdale. The building featured a tall vertical sign, a patterned terrazzo floor, gilded pillars, and acoustical tiles in geometric patterns. It had a seating capacity of just under 1000. Much of the interior features are influenced by the Zig-Zag Moderne and Streamline Moderne styles. The exterior is built of smooth Kasota limestone with vertical lines that transition to horizontal.
The Riverview Theater is a cinema in the Howe neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Designed by Liebenberg and Kaplan, the theater was built by theater owners Bill and Sidney Volk in 1948. After building a subsequent theater in a new ultramodern style, the Volks returned to the Riverview in 1956 and had its lobby area heavily renovated and updated. The Riverview remains one of several surviving single-screen cinemas in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area and typically showed second-run films until the COVID-19 pandemic, when it switched to showing first-run movies. Since the early 2000s, it has been consistently recognized by City Pages as one of the best movie theaters in the area.
The Trylon Cinema is a 90-seat movie theater in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The cinema was founded and is currently run by Take-Up Productions, a group of volunteers who got their start at the Oak Street Cinema before establishing the Trylon in 2009 within a former warehouse. A 2017 expansion resulted in an increase in the cinema's seating capacity and accessibility. Throughout its history, the venue has featured a variety of regular programming, ranging from career retrospectives of famous directors to B movies and cult films. The Trylon has been well received by critics who have praised its film lineup, intimacy, and atmosphere.
The Metro Theater is a defunct movie theater at 2626 Broadway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. It was designed by architecture firm Boak and Paris and built between 1932 and 1933. The theater is designed in the Art Deco style and originally contained 550 seats. Although the theater's interior was demolished after it was closed in 2005, the original facade remains intact as of 2023 and is a New York City designated landmark.
The Main Art Theater was a movie theater located at 118 North Main Street in downtown Royal Oak, Michigan, at the corner of Main Street and 11 Mile Road. Opened on August 7, 1941 by Robert Anthony, it was originally a single-screen theater with 800 seats. In 1983, the original 800-seat theater was split into two theaters during renovations, and a third theater was added to the building in 1993.
The Downer Theatre is an historic cinema in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States, formerly operated by Landmark Theatres. Opened in 1915, it was the oldest continually operating cinema in the city of Milwaukee. It is located in the Upper East Side neighborhood of the East Side of Milwaukee. The cinema became part of the Landmark Theatre chain in 1990, and was renovated and converted to a twin-screen venue. The theatre closed in September 2023. In March of 2024, the reopening of the theatre was announced after being purchased by Milwaukee Film.
The Uptown Theatre is a historic movie theater in Utica, New York. It opened on December 29, 1927, during the silent film and Vaudeville eras, and is the city's oldest surviving theater, predating the Stanley Theater by eight months. It was part of the Kallet chain of movie theaters, like the Capitol Theatre in nearby Rome and other theaters no longer standing throughout Upstate New York.