Palace Theatre
224 W. South Street,
Benton,
AR
72015
224 W. South Street,
Benton,
AR
72015
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The Palace Theatre was opened March 5, 1920 with June Caprice in “In Walked Mary”. It was closed in 1929 and became the City Hall and by July 1930 it was the Municipal Auditorium but was unused until 1944 when it opened as a youth center named the Play Palace, which closed in 1953. In 1960 it reopened as another youth center named the Panther Den which closed in 1967. It became became home to the Saline County Library. The library has since moved to another location. In May 2019 it became home to two restaurants.
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The Palace Theater was built in 1919 but its opening was on March 5th, 1920.
The Palace Theatre is the oldest building of its kind in Saline County, erecting in 1919 and measuring 110x150ft by a cost of $60,000, and opening on March 5, 1920 with June Caprice in “In Walked Mary”, and originally housed 1,000 seats when it first opened, and was first owned by Charley Womack.
Both the Imp and the Palace theaters were bitter rivals in the early-1920s. Just a few months after the Palace Theatre opened, a fire broke out at the Imp on May 12, 1920. The Benton Courier reported that then-fire chief Louis Wolchansky’s men found out that the Imp had been set on fire intentionally, ruling it as arson. Womack was rumored to have been involved in the arson. The fire had a total loss of $3,000 in damages to the Imp, and on June 10, 1920, The Benton Courier reported that Womack had sold his Palace to the Hefley-Skinner Amusement Company of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
By the winter of 1920, the Palace’s new owners fell on hard times and leased the building to former Imp owner Alice Wooten. Wooten intended to show movies at the Imp when the Palace was hosting live theater while showing live theater at the IMP when the Palace was playing films. However, in 1921, both were temporarily closed due to financial troubles. The second Imp Theatre opened on January 14, 1922 at its current location that was renamed the Royal Theatre in February 1949.
The Palace never managed to recover and eventually shut its doors before being purchased by the City of Benton in 1929. The neighboring office building was then used as City Hall. By July 1930, the Sanborn Fire Insurance map of Benton listed the Palace Theatre building as the city’s “Municipal Auditorium.” The Palace Theatre was abandoned in the years of the Great Depression and into the first half of World War II. During the second half of the war in 1944, the Palace reopened as a recreational center for Benton’s youth and was renamed the Play Palace. Inside, it had ping-pong tables, pool tables, books, a jukebox, and a snack bar. The Palace’s opera-style seating was replaced by a large basketball, volleyball, and shuffleboard court, and the old stage was replaced by a dance floor.
The Play Palace closed in 1953 due to lack of interest, and in 1960, the building was renamed and reopened as a youth recreation center. The Panther Den, named after Benton High School’s mascot, became a more successful hangout spot for Benton’s teenagers. In 1964, the City of Benton remodeled the Palace’s entrance by adding an archway and filling in all windows with brick. A corrugated metal façade was added to mask the front of the building, with the façade lasted over forty years. In 1967, the Panther Den closed when the Saline County Library purchased the building, and the Palace Theatre building became the Saline County Library until 2003, when the library was moved from the building into then-recently completed new facilities. A millage increase had been approved on August 24, 1998, to build two new library facilities in Saline County.
In 2005, Benton’s then-Mayor Rick Holland had the Palace’s front façade removed. And after that, the building was used by the Royal Players to store props and costumes alongside by the city government for county food drives; around Christmas, as the Palace is used to store toys for needy children in Saline County. In 2012, the Historic Preservation Alliance of Arkansas listed the Palace Theatre as one of the state’s “Most Endangered Buildings” due to its years of neglect, resulting in—among other problems—water damage from a leaking roof. On August 6, 2014, the Palace was listed on the Arkansas Register of Historic Places due to its significance to the people of Saline County, marking one of a handful of movie theaters to be registered despite not making it to the talkies era. Because of its various renovations, the building was ineligible for entry on the National Register of Historic Places.
In August 2015, then-Mayor David Mattingly and the Benton City Council met to discuss the future of the Palace Theatre, among other issues. Mattingly and the City Council had been considering demolishing the Palace, but a resolution allowed six months for “review of the overall stability of the structure” before a decision was made about its fate. In response, a local group of citizens formed a nonprofit called Friends of the Palace Theatre, Inc., in 2015. On November 20, 2015, the Benton Courier wrote that the group planned to save and repurpose the Palace Theatre building as a center for history and the arts, including exhibits on Native American artifacts, the aluminum industry, Niloak pottery, and other facets of Saline County’s history. In May 2019, the city council approved the sale of the Palace Theatre to Shawn Hipskind, a local developer. By August 2020, the site was home to two restaurants.