Tampa Theatre/Photo courtesy of Pixabay
A large renovation project for Tampa Theatre is underway for the historic downtown movie palace built in 1926. The theatre is scheduled to reopen in late December after the project is completed.
New seats, carpet, concessions stand and other major improvements are included in the $6-million project. The annual Holiday Classics, the theatre’s popular film series, starts on Nov. 17 and will be moved to nearby Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park.
“Like other lavish downtown movie palaces around the country, Tampa Theatre was enormously popular when it opened. For the first time in history, the common person had access to opulence on a scale never before imagined. For 25 cents they could escape into a fantasyland for two hours, enjoy first-class entertainment and be treated like royalty by uniformed platoons of ushers and attendants,” according to the theatre’s website.
The theatre, which was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1978, is today managed by the not-for-profit Tampa Theatre Foundation.