Princess Theatre
300 East Center Street,
Le Roy,
IL
61752
300 East Center Street,
Le Roy,
IL
61752
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LeRoy’s Princess Theatre may reopen Scott Miller and Sue Bratcher Nov 6, 2006 0 LEROY — The historic Princess Theatre in LeRoy may reopen by Thanksgiving, pending negotiations with an interested buyer.
Mike Hanafin, owner of the True Value Hardware and NAPA Auto Parts stores in LeRoy, wants to purchase the property and the city agreed to pony up $50,000 toward the project.
“It’s betterment of the community. My family’s here. We don’t plan on going anywhere, and we don’t want the theater going anywhere,” Hanafin said, saying his daughters and grandchildren were regulars at the theater.
One Week Super Sale – OPEN NOW! From now through October 16, choose from AMAZING subscription offers.… “If all goes well, I could be showing movies by Thanksgiving.”
The building hasn’t been sold yet, however. The asking price is $275,000.
The LeRoy City Council recently agreed to reimburse Hanafin $50,000 in tax increment financing funds to acquire the property. Tax money generated within a TIF district stays within that area to make further improvements.
The TIF funding is contingent on an initial investment of $280,000 from Hanafin, who plans to rehab the building and parking lot, even though the property went through a major overhaul two years ago.
“With an old theater, I don’t think you’re ever done,” Hanafin said.
Exact renovation plans aren’t set, he said.
It’s the second time in as many years the city has coughed up cash to reopen the Princess.
To aid the revitalization of LeRoy’s once sluggish downtown, the city loaned the current owners $65,000 in 2004 to help cover a $200,000 theater renovation project.
City Administrator Jeff Clawson previously said he expects the city to receive payment when the building is sold. He was unavailable Tuesday.
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Google’s new lineup of phones and gadgets: A quick glance Co-owner David Kraft put the property for sale in October. He said he didn’t know about Hanafin’s requests.
The Princess Theater had deteriorated before Kraft and Kris and Susan Spaulding gutted it two years ago. The building had sat vacant for nearly 20 years.
Records indicate the last movie was shown in 1982. A country-music center occupied the building for a couple years in the late 1980s, and the building briefly housed a teen dance hall in 1990.
During the vacant years, however, a leaky roof left the ceiling, paneling, plaster and everything else inside water damaged.
Then Kraft and the Spauldings updated everything. They built a new roof, put up new roof rafters and added steel beams to support the walls. The group installed a new sound system, a larger movie screen and church pews and bistro seating in the lobby for those who wanted to congregate after movies.
The original blueprints of the Princess Theatre are in the Arthur L. Pillsbury Collection at the McLean County Museum of History. Pillsbury was on of the leading architects in Bloomington, Illinois, over the three decades prior to his untimely death in an automobile accident in 1925. His involvement in the Princess Theatre project was noted in the April 15, 1916, issue of The American Contractor:
The Pillsbury collection inventory list says that Pillsbury designed the theater in LeRoy for Marcus West in 1916, and it is listed as project #900. Pillsbury designed ten projects in LeRoy from 1905 to 1921.How the building came to be attributed to W. W. Van Atta I don’t know. No architect of that name appears in any of the construction or design journals of the period, and every instance of his name on the Internet is connected with this theater. The Pillsbury collection inventory list gives the names of Pillsbury’s associates and successors, and no Van Atta is among them.
The source of the attribution appears to be the history page of the theater’s web site, but that history provides no original source or documentation for the claim. It does say that the manager of the theater in 1928 was a Harry W. Vanatta, so it sounds as though there could have been some conflation going on somewhere along the line.
In any case, until somebody can come up with sound documentation that a W. W. Van Atta did design this house, the presence of the actual 1916 blueprints in the Arthur L. Pillsbury collection provide a pretty good argument that we should attribute the design of the Princess Theatre to Pillsbury.