Time Theater
132 S. Phillips Avenue,
Sioux Falls,
SD
57104
132 S. Phillips Avenue,
Sioux Falls,
SD
57104
1 person
favorited this theater
Additional Info
Previously operated by: Paramount Pictures Inc.
Previous Names: Olympia Theater, Royal Theater
Nearby Theaters
One of Sioux Falls' early vaudeville and movie houses was the Olympia Theater. It opened in 1909 and originally had 250 seats to fill. Manager Otis Adams made sure all films were accompanied by a five-piece orchestra made up of his children. It was still the Olympic Theater in 1915. In 1925 it was remodeled and renamed Royal Theater. By 1937 it had been renamed Time Theater and was operated by Paramount Pictures Inc. through their subsidiary John Friedl. The Time Theater was closed in May 1951. It went into retail use as a millinery shop and was gutted by a fire on December 28, 1954. Only the ground-floor was rebuilt and became a nightclub. In December 2016 a fire in an adjacent building damaged the Time Theater building and it was demolished.
Contributed by
Eric Renshaw
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Recent comments (view all 6 comments)
According to the website (which has a few exteriot shots), the building is now Skelly’s pub. No indication if any of the interior architecture survives.
I recall seeing a newspaper photo of the Time theater after it was gutted by fire. I do not know if it was reopened after the fire but I think not. The current building housing Skelly’s Pub does not match the hight and architecture of the photo of the Olympia theater on the Greetings from Sioux Falls website. I have been in Skelly’s and none of the theater architecture survives. According to a longtime projectionist I knew, the theater was “a shootin' gallery”, a very long and narrow storefront turned movie palace.
On December 2nd, a nearby building collapsed killing a construction worker, and injuring a woman in her apartment. The sudden collapse damaged what was possibly the former Time Theater building, now PAve Bar and Nightclub, which remains closed due to the damage.
http://www.argusleader.com/story/news/business-journal/2016/12/09/phillips-avenue-businesses-allowed-reopen/95203490/
http://pavebar.com/
This should be listed as demolished. It was probably demolished after the fire. The ugly little one story building on the site of the theater, which used a 130 address, has itself now been demolished. The remainder of the building has had the tacky and awful remodel stripped off, revealing the tile facade. There is a typo in the listing, saying it was the Olympic in 1915. That should be Olympia.
The fire was a lot earlier, and seems to have ‘closed’ the theater. This portion of the building was demolished afterward, and an ugly little one story storefront replaced it. The incident in 2016 was the collapse of the old building on the corner. The theater was never converted into a nightclub, it was demolished after the fire. The other 2/3 of the building was incorporated into the bar, and given a disgusting dryvit remodel.
A December 15, 2016 article in the Argus Leader newspaper reveals that the Time Theatre closed in May, 1951 when the Minnesota Amusement Co. lost its lease on the building. The lease then went to a Mrs. Cletus Nolte, who operated a millinery shop in the building until it was destroyed by the fire of December 28, 1954. Only the ground floor of the building was rebuilt, and that was demolished following the collapse of the adjacent building in 2016.
The article also says that the Olympia was remodeled and reopened under new management as the Royal Theatre in 1925, and that the Time Theater was in operation by 1937.
A notice that C. [sic] D. Adams planned to open a moving picture Theater in the Greeley Block on South Phillips Avenue was published in the May 22, 1909 issue of Moving Picture World. The Olympia was erroneously listed as the Olympic in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.