Fountain Square Theatre
1105 Shelby Street,
Indianapolis,
IN
46203
1105 Shelby Street,
Indianapolis,
IN
46203
4 people
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Showing 11 comments
The theatre interior today looks exactly like the old photos. Google maps will allow the user to go inside and see it in color. I had heard there were twinkling stars in the ceiling, and those still show in the Google pictures. It could be some new work was done, but it looks great.
May 6th, 1928 grand opening ad in photo section.
We filmed our movie WALTER in part at the exterior of this theatre, beautiful place and a great “set-like” street atmosphere too!
Joe, Thank You
DavidAE: For those who don’t know HTML, Cinema Treasures now supports Markdown Code, for which you need only square brackets and parentheses to embed a link in your text. Scroll down to the LINKS section of the page to see the example code. All you will need at Cinema Treasures are inline-style links, so all you have to do is put the text you want to become the link in square brackets, and then paste your copied URL between parentheses immediately following the closing bracket.
Here is the Markdown code output for the three links you posted:
Link one
Link two
Link three
Three Historic Indianapolis articles on the theatre:
http://historicindianapolis.com/room-with-a-view-fountain-square-theatre-building/
http://historicindianapolis.com/friday-favorite-fountain-square-theatre-building/
http://historicindianapolis.com/fountain-square/
I have to figure out how to do the links like Joe did above.
It looks to me like the entrance to the Fountain Square Theatre is at 1111 Prospect Street, not 1105 Shelby Street. The latter appears to be the address of the attached office building.
Here is the official web site. It says “[c]losed and gutted in the late 1950’s the former theatre space housed a Woolworth five and dime store, then years later a thrift shop.” The current interior is more a reinterpretation than a restoration, although the page also says that some original architectural features remain intact on the mezzanine level. The photo gallery includes one shot of the original interior, and it was quite different from what is there now.
Contrary to what was said above – it looks like the auditorium was not gutted in the 1950s. The current banquet hall shows a nicely renovated atmospheric auditorium with balcony and priscenium arch. Still have clouds painted on the ceiling. Their history article makes no mention about conversion to a Woolworth’s – they merely mention it going into decline in the 1960s. They renovated it into a banquet hall starting in 1993.
Here are some photos from the late 40s or early 50s. The last photo shows a different theater, the Granada, in the same vicinity as the Fountain Square. If the Granada is listed under a different name, please let me know the listing:
http://tinyurl.com/puddq
http://tinyurl.com/nnf77
http://tinyurl.com/n57dr
http://tinyurl.com/mgb8z
http://tinyurl.com/pm6k2
http://tinyurl.com/s3ehd
The Fountain Square Theatre still stands. The website is: http://www.fountainsquareindy.com/theatre.html
The Fountain Square Theater is stillstanding and is used often for swing dances and weddings. The adjacant soda shop and 1920 duckpin lanes are all restored. AS reported above, the theater was used as a shopping/ thrift store, but has since been reclaimed.