Bradley Symphony Center

I was in the Grand Cinema just before they closed it, to take pictures. It is a spectacular theater as you described. As a collector and admirer of Art Deco, I was in awe. The theater is in excellent condition and I couldn’t believe that it closed. With alot of people moving downtown in recent years, especially the lofts in the 3rd ward, and the talk about trying to revive the Grand Avenue mall, reopening the Grand Cinema would be great! People who live downtown wouldn’t have to drive way out to Waukesha to see a movie. Look at the Oriental theater. It has done well for many years. Opening the space below the lobby as a restaurant would be great too. Recently I read that the Avalon theater is closed and the owner wants to turn it into office space. The Avalon is another spectacular historic theater. If the Symphony doesn’t buy the Grand Cinema, I think I will go on a personal crusade to find someone that will! Also the Grand should be on the National Register for historic buildings. Then Marcus couldn’t tear it down.
David L. Williamson

It is a little known fact that the area under the GRAND’S lobby is reachable only from the office building’s lobby, and that basement area is fitted out as a 100-some seat viewing room used by local film distributors as a preview venue for them and selected guests, thus an area exists for a new owner to use as he wishes, and not necessarily as the restaurant space it was intended for on the 1931 original blueprints by Rapp & Rapp.

Had a memorable experience here in the 70s when the projectionist invited me into the lower cinema’s projection room carved out of the last rows of seats on the main floor. While watching him start the film on the platters, an alarm went off in the room signaling trouble with the show in the upper cinema in the old balcony. So, up six flights of stairs and the balcony and then three flights up to the old projection room we raced, all out of breath. We came in to find the film piled in heaps on the floor, but the computer had stopped the platters before too much damage was done. The audience was all black for a black exploitation film and they were hollering something fierce and pounding on the projection room’s locked door. The projectionist said that he head better get the film fixed quick or the audience would start demolishing the theater (they had actually ripped seat frames from the floor bolts the last time, he said). He managed to splice the film and rethread it and pushed the ‘start’ button and the computer then dimmed the house lights, started the platters spinning and then the xenon light of the projector, and then opened the curtains. It ran for about ten seconds when an alarm sounded, the film stopped, the house lights came on slowly, and the curtains closed. The crowd shouted louder than before. He saw something wrong and adjusted the film and again pushed the start button, and the platters started spinning, the house lights dimmed, and the curtains started opening again. This time it ran well for about ten minutes when an alarm sounded from the lower booth and we raced downstairs while the upper audience glowered at us. It was the same thing there, but there were only about a dozen people in there for this matinee, so we didn’t panic as much. Then the alarm sounded for the upper theater again, and he cursed and started to SLOWLY go upstairs again. I decided that I didn’t want to see the spectacle again, and wished him good luck and left. He stayed on there for a while, so I guess he got it all fixed, without getting himself ‘fixed’.