Fort Theatre
2205 Central Avenue,
Kearney,
NE
68847
2205 Central Avenue,
Kearney,
NE
68847
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Closed on November 1st, 1984, as the mall cinemas opened the next day.
The Empress theatres burns down on January 19th, 1940 and rebuilt and reopened as Fort on August 1st, 1940.
Fort theatre reopening 01 Aug 1940, Thu The Kearney Daily Hub (Kearney, Nebraska) Newspapers.com
Grand opening ad posted.
The link to a nocturnal photo of the Empress Theatre in an earlier comment is dead, but it might have been the undated photo on this web page. Judging from the cars parked along Central Avenue I’d say the photo was taken within a couple of years of the theater’s opening.
Several interior photos of the Fort Theatre after its conversion to other uses can be found in the building’s NRHP Registration Form, currently available in the PDF format here. The house served as a bar and grill with live entertainment for a while before being converted into a dental office.
A few blocks from the World Theatre, the Fort Theatre occupies a prominent place on Central Avenue. It was originally built in 1914 in a Classical Revival style with decorative brickwork laid out in a Greek temple motif. After a fire gutted the building in 1940 it was gussied up with its current Art Moderne marquee. But the only film you’ll see there today is an X-Ray of your overbite since it is now the offices of Fort Theatre Dentistry. In lieu of an upcoming film the marquee states “New Patients Welcome.” The original lobby has been retained and converted into a waiting room complete with popcorn popper and red velvet ropes. As adaptive reuses go it’s pretty clever; better than tearing the old theater down as has happened in so many small towns across America.
A Photo I took back in Nov of 2007..
View link ..
RAC Photography
From 2010 a photo of the Fort Theatre building and an additional view in Kearney.
Here is a photo, circa 1979:
http://tinyurl.com/2vkc4q
More recent photo here:
View link
You may see a night time photo of the Fort Theatre with a brief description at the following website.
http://userweb.esu16.org/~cgodfrey/theater.html