 Exterior view of the Fox TheatrePhoto courtesy of Ken Fletcher
Ground was broken on February 17, 1907, and the theater opened on March 16, 1908. Originally, the Fox was a venue for opera and stage performances.
In 1911, silent movies were introduced in conjunction with vaudeville. In September 1925, a Wurlitzer-Hope Jones theatre organ was installed.
The theatre's first talking picture "The Voice of the City" opened on Apr. 30, 1929.
The theater's foundation extends more than 40 feet below Main Street. Total height of the stage wall is more than 115 feet. More than two million bricks were used in construction along with twelve carloads of Portland cement.
The general design throughout is renaissance, the interior being treated in the Rococo Style of French Renaissance. The main entrance to the theater proper is through a lobby sixteen feet wide and forty feet deep.
The auditorium is sixty-three feet wide, while the length from curtain to rear wall is sixty-eight feet. The proscenium arch is thirty-four feet wide and the same in height. The arch is eliptical in form and blends back in this form to the front of the boxes where it meets the pendentive, filling the angle between the boxes and sides of the auditorium.
The pendentive is carried to the ceiling, increasing in size and finishing with a cove forming a large, semi-circle or ceiling sweeping back to the rear wall; not unlike the bell of a horn.
The floor of the auditorium is of a saucer form. Total seating capacity was originally 1,200: orchestra floor 600, balcony 250 and gallery 350. There is a height of seventy-one feet from the stage floor to the floor of the loft, above which supports the scenery. Depth from curtain to rear wall is thirty-four feet.
In 1959 the Fox - the name changed in 1942 - was purchased by John, Marie and Sally Sawaya.
Today, the old Fox is still going strong and is the only known extant theatre in Colorado with two balconies.
The box office opens, seven days a week, at 7:00 PM and the show begins at 7:30 PM. A second show on Friday and Saturday begins, depending on length of movie, a half hour after the first feature is finished.
Contributed by Ken Fletcher
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