Fountain Square Theatre
1105 Shelby Street,
Indianapolis,
IN
46203
1105 Shelby Street,
Indianapolis,
IN
46203
4 people
favorited this theater
Additional Info
Architects: Frank Baldwin Hunter, Bennett Kay
Functions: Banquet Hall
Styles: Atmospheric, Italian Renaissance
Nearby Theaters
The Fountain Square Theatre was opened on May 6, 1928 as a vaudeville and movie house seating 1,800. It was equipped with a Marr & Colton 3 manual 9 ranks organ. There was a ballroom in the basement. The Fountain Square Theatre was closed April 2, 1960, and then gutted.
The theatre was converted first into a Woolworth’s store then a thrift shop before its restoration and is now used for banquets and swing dancing.
“My father often went there when he was growing up in the late-1930’s to 1940 when he joined the Army and became a soldier in World War II. He returned there in the late-1940’s, and there was a popular soda-pop malt shop built next door to the theatre in the same building. He said he had a lot of fond memories there, including seeing the Hoosier Hot Shots Band perform live onstage there in 1939”.
Contributed by
Donald John Long, Cinema Treasures
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Recent comments (view all 11 comments)
The Fountain Square Theatre still stands. The website is: http://www.fountainsquareindy.com/theatre.html
Here are some photos from the late 40s or early 50s. The last photo shows a different theater, the Granada, in the same vicinity as the Fountain Square. If the Granada is listed under a different name, please let me know the listing:
http://tinyurl.com/puddq
http://tinyurl.com/nnf77
http://tinyurl.com/n57dr
http://tinyurl.com/mgb8z
http://tinyurl.com/pm6k2
http://tinyurl.com/s3ehd
Contrary to what was said above – it looks like the auditorium was not gutted in the 1950s. The current banquet hall shows a nicely renovated atmospheric auditorium with balcony and priscenium arch. Still have clouds painted on the ceiling. Their history article makes no mention about conversion to a Woolworth’s – they merely mention it going into decline in the 1960s. They renovated it into a banquet hall starting in 1993.
It looks to me like the entrance to the Fountain Square Theatre is at 1111 Prospect Street, not 1105 Shelby Street. The latter appears to be the address of the attached office building.
Here is the official web site. It says “[c]losed and gutted in the late 1950’s the former theatre space housed a Woolworth five and dime store, then years later a thrift shop.” The current interior is more a reinterpretation than a restoration, although the page also says that some original architectural features remain intact on the mezzanine level. The photo gallery includes one shot of the original interior, and it was quite different from what is there now.
Three Historic Indianapolis articles on the theatre:
http://historicindianapolis.com/room-with-a-view-fountain-square-theatre-building/
http://historicindianapolis.com/friday-favorite-fountain-square-theatre-building/
http://historicindianapolis.com/fountain-square/
I have to figure out how to do the links like Joe did above.
DavidAE: For those who don’t know HTML, Cinema Treasures now supports Markdown Code, for which you need only square brackets and parentheses to embed a link in your text. Scroll down to the LINKS section of the page to see the example code. All you will need at Cinema Treasures are inline-style links, so all you have to do is put the text you want to become the link in square brackets, and then paste your copied URL between parentheses immediately following the closing bracket.
Here is the Markdown code output for the three links you posted:
Link one
Link two
Link three
Joe, Thank You
We filmed our movie WALTER in part at the exterior of this theatre, beautiful place and a great “set-like” street atmosphere too!
May 6th, 1928 grand opening ad in photo section.
The theatre interior today looks exactly like the old photos. Google maps will allow the user to go inside and see it in color. I had heard there were twinkling stars in the ceiling, and those still show in the Google pictures. It could be some new work was done, but it looks great.