My friend the architecture aficionada couldn't go to the Uptown Theatre NDC's tour of the building this afternoon, so I went, thinking I would take some cool pictures. A couple of things kept me from doing that. First, my camera battery had completely run down (took a couple of poor shots with my cell phone though).

Second, the building is in a pretty sorry state. I was all enthused about seeing the interior after looking at pix posted from a previous tour a couple of years back. But the elements have really gotten to this site now. The big problem is that the roof leaks all over. There seems to be some issue with public funds for a roof (wonder what that's about), so the NDC is looking for private funding sources for this.

It's bad inside the theatre. The ceiling plaster has fallen all over the seats and aisles, and a couple of the big murals downstairs and their metal frames have fallen off the walls onto the seats. There is plaster and other debris everywhere that will have to be carted out to even find room to work. But until the roof gets fixed, this will just continue to get worse.

Some of the building, like the clubs in front, are not so bad and might even be fixed in some way to generate some income for repairs for the rest of the building. The NDC people insist that the structure is sound: Now you can actually walk around inside on intact stairs and stairwells and floors. But I think this will no longer be the case after another winter if something doesn't happen.

A couple of people on the tour were from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, so maybe there is still some hope. But this building seems to have really decayed for the past couple of years.

I am new to this project and its history and politics. All I really know is what I saw today, and it seems like the funding and the urgency needed to preserve this building aren't there.

Years ago someone bought the theater and reopened it, but it didn't work out financially. I remember there being a major pipe bursting inside and I can still remember water cascading out of the building. I think that was the final nail in the coffin for the theater's rebirth back in the 80's.

I believe the NDC people said it was also used by a church group for some time although I'm not sure when that was--likely sometime after the commercial reprise in the '80s.

Here are some pix by Rob Bender from (I think) 2006 with the interior still looking pretty decent. They were linked to an earlier post in a PB thread on this subject so I assume it's OK to link to them here:

http://www.robbender.com/gallery/uptown/P4223556

I was on that Uptown tour too. The place has a long way to go. One of the people there was involved with other theater rehab projects. He said the Uptown people's estimate of $8 million to fix the place was way too low, and that it would probably be more like $25 million.

I do hope they find a way to make this happen. The people behind this seem like a good group, and it would be such a great step forward for that neighborhood.

Both of those amounts seem huge compared to anything else that's going on around there. I think they have to get a roof this year. Other than that, there's a lot of hard slogging with hauling the trash out of the building before anything else can happen.