Pella Opera House Theatre Center
611 Franklin,
Pella,
IA
50219
611 Franklin,
Pella,
IA
50219
1 person
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Opened its doors with the performance of a play, “What Happened to Jones”, on November 16, 1900.
The Pella Opera House Theatre Center was used for musical and theatrical performances until they were replaced by motion pictures due to popular demand. Eventually, the movies closed, and the once-grand Pella Opera House Theatre Center was altered to house businesses including a skating rink, bowling alley, and hardware store.
After a complete restoration in 1990, the Opera House is again host to a variety of performing arts. It is listed on the National Register of Historic sites.
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Recent comments (view all 2 comments)
Were movies ever shown here? The following comes from the Pella Opera House website:
“Although the Pella Opera House served as a cultural community center at the turn of the century, it was soon surpassed by a great technological marvel of that time, the “talkies.†It didn’t take long for motion pictures to overshadow live performances and take the place of small theaters, like the Pella Opera House. Subsequently, the once grand Pella Opera House was forced to close its doors in 1917 and was transformed for many uses throughout the twentieth century including a youth center, food market, roller rink, bowling alley and in the 1980s, a hardware store”.
Julius Cahn’s guides list this as a second floor house. While many such theaters did run movies for a while during the first two decades of the 20th century, most of them didn’t operate as movie houses for very long. Patrons preferred the newer theaters that had their auditoriums on the ground floor.
I’ve been unable to discover the original architect of the Pella Opera house, but the plans for the renovation begun in 1988 were by Wetherell Ericsson Architects, the successor firm to Wetherell & Harrison, designers of many of the classic movie theaters in Iowa.