Airdome Theatre

There is little doubt that the Airdome Theatre in tiny downtown Battle Creek was the longest-running airdome in Nebraska history. Though airdomes were quite popular in the silent film era prior to the advent of air conditioning - especially in the 1910’s and early-1920’s, they largely disappeared when sound film, then air conditioning and, finally, early drive-in theatres made them more or less obsolete. This was not the case in Battle Creek, Nebraska.

The town was served by a merchant-run theater in its community hall for many years. In the summer months dating back to the silent era, the downtown Airdome Theatre was where residents watched movies. Billed as the venue where you could “See the Stars on the Screen and the Stars in the Sky”, the Battle Creek Airdome Theatre lasted years and then decades longer than other similar theaters.

A part of the success of the theatre was its long-standing neighbor across the street, Doering’s Drugs. Doering’s was where Airdome goers got concessions prior to the show and/or got ice cream and sodas after the show. The Airdome even outlasted the hardtop theater in town which the local merchants had closed at the end of 1948.

The Airdome almost miraculously survived all the way into the television era where the new medium put a major dent in the theater’s crowd size. Final advertisements exclaimed, “Don’t forget about the Airdome”. But times had changed much as they had decades earlier in other communities and the final screening for the Airdome Theatre was August 29, 1956 with Gary Cooper in “Blowing Wild”.

The Airdome was razed in 1957 and replaced by a building containing the local ASC office in 1958.

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