Theater Building in Kansas City prior to its 2008 Restoration

Mainstreet Theatre, Kansas City Missouri

Date added: May 03, 2024 Categories:

The Mainstreet was designed in 1920-1921 by the prestigious Chicago architectural firm of C. W. and Geo. L. Rapp, who were responsible for the designs of some of the most important theaters across the United States during the 1920s and the 1930s. The Mainstreet Theatre stands today as one of Rapp and Rapp's most significant architectural expressions developed in the early years of their practice, displaying a unique type of exterior design that has become one of Kansas City's most visible historic landmarks. It appears that its Beaux Arts scheme, which incorporates a dynamic Byzantine-styled dome at the main entrance is the only one of its kind by Rapp and Rapp. Developed by actor-turned-promoter Martin Beck, the Mainstreet was designed as a Junior Orpheum Theatre, one of the first theaters of its type in the country to cater to the working class. The 3,250-seat theater presented vaudeville acts, first-run movies and traveling shows from 1921-1949. For this reason, the Mainstreet represents an important, nascent phase of what became America's most popular form of entertainment during the early years of the 20^th century. In Kansas City, the Mainstreet Theatre is also important as the first theater designed to handle the transitional period in theater history when staged variety shows began competing with the moving picture. Additionally, its stretch of storefronts sited along Mainstreet augmented revenue for the theater venture, while adding visual interest to the adjacent storefronts along one of Kansas City's most fashionable commercial thoroughfares.

In May 1920, a building permit was issued for the razing of a brick building located at 1400-1416 Main Street, Kansas City. Although the lot remained undeveloped for several months, on September 29^th, 1920, an announcement for the construction of a new theater on the corner of 14^th Street and Main was listed in local Kansas City construction news. The owner was listed as Martin Beck, president of the Orpheum Theatre Circuit located in San Francisco, California. A well-known theater design firm with over 400 theaters during their prolific career, Rapp and Rapp of Chicago, was awarded the design contract.

The firm of Lieberman, Klein and Hein, also of Chicago, was chosen as construction engineer. Plans for the theater called for brick, stone, granite and terra cotta work for a two-story reinforced concrete building 146 ft. by 198 ft. with a basement and balconies. Although the closing date on bids was September 28^th, action on the final contract bids was delayed and it was not until October 27^th, 1920, that Thompson and Starrett Company of Chicago was named general contractor. The steel work was awarded to Kansas City Structural Steel Company on November 10^th, and on November 24^th the contract for reinforced steel was awarded to Corrugated Bar Company, also of Kansas City, Missouri.

A building permit was purchased on January 1^st, 1921, for the construction of a four-story building with a $15,000 bond filed. The total cost of the theatre, built by the Junior Orpheum Company, a division of the Orpheum Theatre Circuit, was estimated at $900,000. The permit also included the construction for the areaway, canopy and a musician roost.

The Mainstreet Theatre, as a Junior Orpheum, featured lesser known vaudeville and variety performers while providing these entertainers with a training ground before moving into the more expensive venues. Although the theater catered primarily to the lower income level of theater-goers by offering lower or "popularly priced" tickets, it provided a luxurious environment as experienced in the higher priced theaters.

Theatrical Entertainment in the United States

In 1792 the first variety show to perform in America appeared before an audience in New York's St. John Street Theatre. George Washington was in attendance while a tight rope dance was performed by a professional ballet troop that had fled Paris during the French Revolution. Themed shows and individual entertainers became increasingly popular and began traveling across the United States to present their talents. At the opening of the 800-seat Lafayette Theatre in New York in July 1825, an acrobatic troupe from China was the entire evening's featured entertainment. As the variety show became more sophisticated it became known as vaudeville.

Early vaudeville shows, symphonic productions and legitimate theater presentations were affordable to the wealthy and upper middle classes. However, as America became more industrialized, the lower classes began to have more free time as well as a desire to be entertained. Agents and theatrical managers began to shift their attention to accommodate the growing interest in entertainment by expanding programs and offering more variety in ticket price, venue and forms of entertainment. Many smaller neighborhood theaters were being opened on the outskirts of main business districts.

For a short period of time, c.1880-1894, the dime museum became popular with the lower class residents of large cities. The price of a ticket was only a dime. These museums offered sensationalized yet unknown acts and human curiosities. Performers were from a wide range; dwarfs and giants, magicians and opera singers, bearded ladies and tattooed men. The term "freak show" is firmly linked to this era of carnivalesque showmanship. A popular show at the New York Dime Museum was the "Three Headed Songstress," who was actually an optical illusion appearing as three heads on one body. Eventually, the desire for theatrical quality replaced these sensationalized curiosities.

In 1896 the moving picture made its debut when the Vitascope premiered the short silent film, Rough Sea at Dover, in New York City's New Music Hall on Thirty-Fourth Street. The effect on the audience was reported as "simply marvelous" when those in the front row thought they would be soaked by ocean waves. A similar projection system called the Biograph Company was used in the Orpheum Theatre Circuit. The Biograph proved to be highly successful when introduced at the Orpheum in San Francisco in 1898 and was later brought to Kansas City, along with vaudeville.

Although theater owners discovered the importance of the early moving pictures (which were only fifteen to twenty minutes in length), these shorts were considered chasers leading up to the performances of live entertainers of the vaudeville circuit well into the second decade of the 20^th Century. It was not until 1915, with the debut of D. W. Griffith's three-hour silent film, "The Birth of a Nation", produced by Biograph, that the moving picture grabbed the imaginations and the attention of middle class theatre patrons.

The Orpheum Theatres of Walter Gustav

In 1880 San Francisco was the seventh largest city in the United States with a population over 200,000. Entertainment in the western states could not match San Francisco: grand and light opera; ballet; circuses; Shakespearean plays and plays performed in French, German and Italian. Theaters had seating for over two-thousand audience members. There was also a dark side to San Francisco's theaters where entertainment was offered in the bawdy houses and saloons. The variety acts performed by minstrel shows and comedy farces in these venues were considered vulgar, prurient and immodest, but they were cheap, free with the purchase of a drink.

In 1882 a German immigrant named Walter Gustav was operating the Vienna Gardens in San Francisco. Gustav had been exposed to all forms of entertainment while in his native Germany before coming to the United States. He was very familiar with the German Beer Gardens which prohibited vulgarity and opted to attract families instead. The Vienna Gardens offered oompah bands and Sunday picnics, dancing, concerts, folk music and singing along with gymnastic societies that performed staged shows. By 1884, Walter opened another venue, the Telegraph Hill Observatory and Concert Hall. In 1885 he opened the Wigwam Garden as a ventilated concert hall with 2,000 seats. In 1887, after a trip to Europe, Walter opened his San Francisco Orpheum Opera House with 3,500 seats, as designed and named for the opera houses of Europe.

Gustav's Orpheum went through a brief period of success until failure came in the form of financial problems in 1891. He eventually had to lease out the San Francisco Orpheum to another vaudeville circuit which, after only two years, also failed. To Gustav's fortune, Morris Meyerfeld, Jr. became a major investor and partner. As the financial wizard, Meyerfeld managed the company's bookkeeping while Walter managed the house. Having saved the Orpheum, Meyerfeld became known as "the Rockfeller of vaudeville."

Gustav, with Meyerfeld, reopened the Orpheum on October 23^rd, 1893. Among the headliners were the Four Cohans, with George M., his sister Josephine and their parents. The successful partnership allowed the Orpheum to expand to Los Angeles (1894) then opened a booking office in New York (1897). Before the end of 1897, they had made their decision to open a theater in Kansas City. The Cohans' were frequent headliners on the Orpheum Theatre stages.

Meyerfeld believed that performers needed to have more engagements before reaching California. With this in mind, the idea of establishing theaters between the Pacific Coast and the Midwest appealed to his business sense. He called it the "eastern march." Deciding where to open the theaters became a crucial decision as the distance between cities west of the Mississippi was problematic. Trains were often delayed, while communications between theaters was slow, and the worst of winter weather had the potential of stranding performers in the middle of Kansas or Colorado.

In 1890 Kansas City had a population of 132,716 and a thriving economy. Railroad lines reached out in every direction from its ideal centralized location. As an industrialized city with stockyards, meat packinghouses, and other large business interests, Meyerfeld and Gustav envisioned that bringing quality entertainment to Kansas City would become a successful venture for the Orpheum Theatres.

In 1897 they decided to lease the 2,084-seat Ninth Street Theatre in Kansas City and renamed it the Orpheum. On opening night, February 8^th, 1898, the seats were sold out and people had to be turned away. Just three months after the Orpheum opened in Kansas City, May 9^th, 1898, Walter Gustav died.

Meyerfeld found himself in the position of president. He quickly began expanding the Orpheum Theatres in the Midwest, beginning by leasing the 3,000-seat Creighton Theatre in Omaha, Nebraska. The same philosophy in opening the Kansas City Orpheum Theatre applied to Omaha; industrialized, prominent railway hub of the Union-Pacific line, and a growing population from the 1890s census of 140,000. Opening night of the Omaha Orpheum Theatre was another sold out event.

In 1897 Meyerfeld linked his Orpheum Theatres to the Western Circuit of Vaudeville Theatres (WCVT), an association of theater owners in Chicago. This group coordinated the bookings of vaudeville acts throughout the Midwest. Joining the group, as an independent theater, was a critical move for Meyerfeld. He could then offer a guarantee of multiple bookings to the performers between Chicago and the Pacific Coast.

Meyerfeld noted that the performers still had a full week's travel time between Missouri and the West Coast. He decided that Denver would be the home of the next Orpheum Theatre. The Denver Orpheum opened in September 1899. Denver was the fifth theater and with it came success as well. The Orpheum Theatres were able to hire veteran performers as well as up and coming vaudeville performers. W. C. Fields was just one of many who toured the five theatres in the spring of 1900.

Martin Beck (1867-1940) and the Orpheum Circuit

After the Orpheum joined the WCVT in 1897, Meyerfeld decided to open a booking office in Chicago in 1898. Martin Beck was hired to manage the Chicago office and played a crucial role in the Orpheum's history. Beck was a visionary who viewed vaudeville as a growing entertainment form that had the potential to become a high culture art form in presenting drama, music, dance and comedy. His objective was to make the Orpheum circuit bring the highest forms of art within the reach of the people with the slimmest purses.

Like Meyerfeld, Beck was a German-speaking immigrant of Jewish descent. Beck was born in Liptovsky Svaty Mikulas, then Slovakia, located within the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Beck was working as an actor when he left his country to come to the United States with the hope of finding work. He eventually landed a job managing a vaudeville troupe out of Oregon. He took them to the San Francisco Orpheum where only part of the group was hired by Gustav Walter in 1895. Beck was not one of them.

Distraught over not being hired, Beck became interested in starting his own German stock company and went to Meyerfeld for advice. Meyerfeld took an immediate liking to Beck and hired him as a booking agent which led to his promotion as general manager. Beck became a quick asset to the circuit as well as a close friend to Meyerfeld. In July 1899, Beck married Meyerfeld's niece, Sarah Sonnenberg.

Martin Beck was very talented at recognizing excellent performers. In 1899, Beck discovered twenty-five year old Harry Houdini performing in a dime museum in Minneapolis. Beck told Houdini he was a rotten showman and suggested that he quit performing "the little magical stuff...and just give a couple of big thrillers, like handcuffs and the trunk trick? You have two big stunts at which nobody else can touch you." Beck then offered Houdini a contract at sixty-dollars a week on the Orpheum circuit with a raise if he "made good." In short time, Houdini was being paid $150 a week and was given headliner billing.

After Walter Gustav's death, Beck's importance became more pronounced in the business. The New York offices of Keith and Albee (K-A), who operated a similar East Coast vaudeville circuit to the Orpheum Theatres West Coast operation, began to push for a national association of vaudeville theater owners in order to regulate the salary of performers. This resulted in the founding of the Association of Vaudeville Managers of the United States (AVM).

In 1901, under Beck's urging, the Orpheum Vaudeville Circuit was founded in order to form a stronger corporation. The Orpheum Circuit included 60 theaters and had a vaudeville monopoly west of Chicago while the Keith-Albee (K-A) circuit covered the east. Beck and Meyerfeld had signed an agreement with K-A that the Orpheum Circuit would continue to develop theaters west of the Mississippi while the territory east, up to but not including Chicago, was to remain K-A territory.

However, Beck attempted to break through the K-A barrier in 1911 when he built the famous Palace Theater on New York Times Square, which became the mecca of the theater world. Unknown to Beck, Meyerfeld thought a working relation with K-A was more important to insure the Orpheum's success, so he sold 51 percent of his share of the Palace to K-A, leaving Beck with only 25 percent. Beck was devastated, but only for a short time.

Beck had an uncanny yet highly successful way of choosing site for new theaters. After examining the growth pattern of Kansas City's downtown area, he chose a site at the corner of 12^th and Baltimore for a new Orpheum Theatre. At the time, 12^th and Baltimore was on the undeveloped south-western fringe of the downtown business district. It was on a "side street, out of the way". Once the theater was constructed, it helped to develop the neighborhood south of 12^th Street.

After 1913, the Orpheum Theatre Circuit found itself facing strong competition from a theater group based in Seattle, Washington, owned by Alexander Pantages. His theaters appeared in nearly every city where an Orpheum Theatre was located. The shows were cheap, from ten to thirty cents, and Pantages required his performers to do three to four shows a day when most others did no more than two. The Orpheum responded by building new theaters that could offer both vaudeville and motion pictures at a popular price.

The first Junior Orpheum, as they became known, was the 2,766-seat State-Lake Theatre in Chicago and was designed by Gustave Albert Lansburgh. By 1922, five cities were home to Junior Orpheum Theatres; Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Kansas City, Missouri.

In 1920 Morris Meyerfeld retired from the Orpheum Circuit leaving Beck, who had been second in command, to be appointed as president of the company. Beck decided that the junior orpheums needed to be built in every city that had an Orpheum Circuit Theatre. With the success of the Orpheum Theatre at 12^th and Baltimore and using the same criteria, he again looked south of the city's downtown area and decided that 14^th and Main Street would be an excellent location for an Orpheum Junior theater. In September 1920 announcements about the new "popular priced theatre" appeared in the local news and bid requests appeared in the local building trade publications in Kansas City.

In 1921 the Mainstreet Theatre was hailed as the largest of the luxurious theaters in Kansas City, as well as having the greatest seating capacity of 3,250 seats. While the Orpheum Theatre closed during the height of the summer heat, the Mainstreet could remain open year-round. It was equipped with a cooling system that maintained a temperature of 70 degrees even in the hottest weather.

The Mainstreet Theatre opened on October 30^th, 1921. The Seven Foys, featuring Eddy Foy and his progeny of four sons and two daughters were the headliners. The show was titled "The Foy Fun Revue." The theater supported the Junior Orpheum policy of offering popular-priced, vaude-film shows. As a live theater enthusiast. Beck had hesitated to show feature films in the Circuit's big-time theaters. The Vaude-film combination was gaining popularity but Beck remained unmovable in his decision. The partners and investors in the Orpheum Theatre Circuit began planning to remove Beck from his position as president. The group regularly quarreled with Beck over theater building policy as well as general management issues.

In January 1923, the pressure from investors was too much; subsequently, Beck resigned. He had become frustrated with the industry and was still bitter about soured business with the Palace Theatre in New York. He saw the opportunity to make quick money by selling off his holdings in Orpheum shares. With the cash in his pocket and out from under the restrictive contracts with the K-A circuit, he was able to build a "legitimate" theater that he called The Martin Beck Theatre in New York City. It was designed by Beck's favorite architect G. Albert Lansburgh.

Beck managed Martin Beck Theatre (which continues to offer Broadway shows today), until he died in 1940. In 1968, the Martin Beck Estate sold the theatre to Jujamcyn, a New York based theater company that operates Broadway plays. In 2003, it was renamed in honor of caricaturist-cartoonist Al Hirschfeld who chronicled live theatre in New York for seventy-five years.

Kansas City's Mainstreet Theatre: 1922-present

The Mainstreet Theatre was the largest theatre in the downtown area until the Midland Theatre was built at 13^th and Main in 1927. The Mainstreet was the largest of all the Junior Orpheum theaters built by the circuit. The building included shops on the first floor along Main Street and office space on the second floor. A free nursery attended by a trained nurse and assistants was made available to parents with young children.

Rapp and Rapp's design for the Mainstreet Theatre, like that of the Tivoli and the Chicago theaters, are similar in that the buildings employ monumental arches at the main facade. These two Chicago theaters, opened to the public in 1921, just before Kansas City's Mainstreet, offer a contrast and comparison in style and function.

The Tivoli, which opened February 21^st, 1921 (demolished in 1963), limited by a narrow city lot, was Rapp and Rapp's first large, free-standing movie palace built for Balaban and Katz's Orpheum circuit. The Tivoli, like the Mainstreet, employed a monumental arch at the entrance. Of this element, George Rapp wrote:

The entrance gives an alluring view of the loft colonnade and beautiful light fixtures of the grand lobby through a large arched window and being brilliantly lighted contrasts splendidly with the severe lined commercial buildings in the neighborhood.

At the Tivoli, the arch capped by an arched pediment was the big attraction of the exterior; Rapp and Rapp minimized the decor of the rest of the facade. Unlike the Mainstreet, there was no exterior dome or commercial space. Also, contrasting the L-shaped interior of the Mainstreet, the outer foyer and lobby were placed parallel to the auditorium.

Opened just four days before the Mainstreet Theatre, the Chicago Theater, another design for Balaban and Katz, also employs a prominent arch at its main entrance. Instead of leaping further into the realm of fantasy with a dome, the Chicago Theater terminates in two stories of office space enriched with an operatic display of classical motifs between the two attic floors. However, it is the interior design that is similar to the Mainstreet, in that it moves the patron through a lobby and grand staircase into an auditorium at the turn of the "L". Since the Chicago Theater was designed in 1919, the scheme for this configuration may have been the first time it was employed.

It appears that the Mainstreet Theatre was characterized by two unique elements: the Byzantine dome at the entrance: bay and storefronts that line the east facade. Furthermore, the Mainstreet was not a part of a high-rise building scheme, like so many theaters that Rapp and Rapp designed throughout the country during the mid to late 1920s. These three-part commercial block buildings, often designed in the Chicago Style, were planned where land was expensive and developers hedged their bets on revenues from the theater as well as the commercial office space. Examples of this combination of theater/high rise space include the Oriental Theater (Chicago, 1926; now the For Center for the Performing Arts); the Orpheum Theatre (Omaha, 1927); the Michigan Theatre (Detroit, 1926; closed); the Piccadilly Theatre (Chicago, 1927); the Paramount (New York, 1926; razed); and the Ambassador (St. Louis, 1926; razed).

According to Joseph Duci-Bella, theater historian, Rapp and Rapp kept proof books of buildings on their drafting tables. From these, clients often chose their type and style of theater. It became more common for an investor to choose a larger commercial portion constructed above the theater portion, as there was "an economy in add-ons." Duci-Bella also stated that the Rapps were unquestionably influenced by Louis Sullivan's designs for commercial buildings in Chicago. Sadly, Duci-Bella commented on the state of Rapp and Rapp's theaters: "Most are gone and the best are gone."

After a successful run, the Mainstreet Theatre went through several transitional periods prior to its permanent closure in the 1980s. In 1924 the Keith-Albee circuit consolidated with the Orpheum Theatre circuit resulting in combined earnings of $3.9 million for that year. In 1927 an agreement to complete a merger was reached and a new holding company, the Keith-Albee and Orpheum (KAO), was incorporated on January 28^th, 1928.

At this point in the Mainstreet Theatre's history, the fluctuations of corporate takeovers within the theater industry became highly complex. After much maneuvering, the old K-A and Orpheum circuit became part of the Radio Keith Orpheum (RKO) Corporation in which a young Joseph P. Kennedy played an instrumental part by transforming the Keith-Albee and Orpheum circuits into one of the top film-producing companies in the country.

In 1929 moving pictures were no longer silent and sound systems were being installed in theaters throughout the country. RKO theaters were featuring movies as the prime attraction and vaudeville became the sideshow. The Great Depression took a heavy toll on vaudeville. As one vaudeville star stated, "vaudeville was the lost world on the map of show business. The depression had all but stamped it out of existence....Vaudevillians became taxi drivers, waiters and car salesmen, or took any job they could find." Many vaudeville performers simply disappeared into obscurity.

The Mainstreet continued to operate throughout the depression years. Tickets were dropped to ten cents during this time and special themed nights were held to attract audiences. The local theaters competed for audience share with giveaways of dishes, groceries and cash. In 1938 the Mainstreet Theatre officially closed and was only open for special events through 1941. It remained closed during World War II and until 1949.

After extensive renovations the theater formally reopened, in July 1949, as the R-K-O Missouri Theatre. Lawrence Lehman, manager of the theater, stated that the theater's interior was undergoing a major renovation with wall-to-wall carpeting in the lobby, woodwork and walls completely renovated, while the nursery was retained in the basement. A new air conditioning plant was installed along with new heating facilities. The exterior was also altered with a new marquee and sign. Seating was refurbished but reduced to only 2,600 from the previous 3,200 plus. In the early 1950s, the Missouri showed the first 3-D movie in Kansas City.

During the mid-1950s, the Missouri Theatre installed Cinerama, a technique of projecting movies with three projectors at the rear of the main floor and a wide screen. The front of the balcony was raised to accommodate the projector throw from below. The three opera boxes on each side of the proscenium were removed to accommodate the huge curved screen.

Eventually, the novelty of Cinerama wore off. The theater again closed and did not reopen until the 1960s when it was renamed the Empire Theatre. The seating capacity was again reduced to 1,200. The theater ran big budget Hollywood blockbuster films during the 1960s.

In the early 1960s, the Durwood Theatre Company, now American Multi Cinema (AMC) bought the theater and renamed it the Empire. In 1967, Durwood split the Empire into two theaters, by adding steel girders to the front of the balcony and extending a deck from the balcony to the proscenium. This made a large theater upstairs with 1,005 seats. It was first called the Royal, and later the Empire I. The Empire II (first floor) continued as a Cinerama Theatre. In 1980, the upstairs was further split in two with a wall down the middle. Each theater seated about 400. A small lobby under the balcony had been converted earlier to a narrow theatre with a small screen seating about 100. It was called the Academy then later known simply as the Empire 1, 2, 3, and 4. After Cinerama films were no longer made, the middle portion of the curved screen was removed and a flat screen was added at the front of the stage housing.

In 1985, the theater closed again while owned and operated by the AMC Theatre Corporation. It was deemed "no longer viable as a film theatre," according to Ron D. Leslie of the AMC chain. While under AMC's ownership, the Empire became a multi-plex theater with four small theaters each showing a different film. The theater featured first-run comedy as well as action and horror films until it closed in October 1985. Subsequently, the building was sold to Executive Hills, Inc., which announced plans in 1986 to build several office buildings in the area and demolish the Empire, leaving only the tower and the dome section intact.

In September 2008, work began to convert the theatre into a six-screen movie theatre. It reopened in April 2009 and reverted back to its original name Mainstreet Theatre. The two largest theatres have 300 seats each, and the smaller theatres have 50 to 100 seats. On November 15^th, 2012, it became the Alamo Drafthouse Mainstreet. It was closed on March 16^th, 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas declared bankruptcy on March 3^rd, 2021, and the Alamo Drafthouse Mainstreet would be closed permanently.

In April 2021 it was announced that B&B Theatres chain would reopen the movie theatre in the fall of 2021. It reopened on October 1^st, 2021.

Building Description

The Mainstreet Theatre, located at 1400 Main Street, Jackson County, Missouri, was designed by the noted Chicago architectural firm of C. W. and Geo. L. Rapp in 1920-1921 and built by Thompson-Starrett Construction Company (Chicago) in 1921. Today, the Mainstreet Theatre, sited on the southwest corner of 14^th and Main Streets, stands as a prominent reminder of the golden age of grand movie palaces. Rising four stories at the theater and entrance portions, the Beaux Arts Mainstreet Theatre still displays its rich, classically adorned running ornament in bas relief, rusticated terra cotta and buff brick exterior, prominent Byzantine-styled dome embellished with golden tiles and storefront openings at the primary (east and north) facades. The focal point of the theatre is the elaborate corner entrance crowned by a dome covered with golden tile. Storefronts line the Main Street facade, while there are few extant Chicago-style window units at the second story Main Street and 14^th Street facades. A third floor is set back, veneered with buff brick and carries a pent roof of green tile.

Measuring ten bays on the east and five bays on the north, the Mainstreet Theatre is generally rectangular in plan and is comprised of a tripartite scheme, where an exuberantly composed four-story curved entry bay is flanked by two-story wingwalls. For reasons of security, all fenestration and entrances are boarded up. While extant openings are original, the majority of the windows have been removed. The canted entry is characterized by a two-story arched window set in a molded surround, and flanked by two pairs of narrow fenestration. The spandrel at each of these windows is articulated with urns and foliated rinceau in relief. In addition, there is a pair of dolphins in high relief at the spandrel of the arched window. Set directly below the arched window is a frieze decorated with a triumvirate of cupids nesting between foliated rinceau. The original entrance to the theater, set below a non-original canopy, has been boarded.

Crowning the main entrance bay is a Byzantine inspired dome, the surface of which is covered with gold, terra cotta imbricated tiles. Circling the dome are eight oculi or oeil-de-boeuf, each set in a molded terra cotta surround and punctuated with a modified modillion keystone embellished with leaf garlands at the top of the recess and flanked with festoons of fruit at the base. Where each arch springs to the next around each oculus from the skew blocks, an intricately carved finial with swags of garlands set atop battered pedestals rests above paired Ionic ancons with acanthus leaves and floriated medallions at the curve of the scroll. The whole of the dome is supported by brick setbacks with stone coping.

A prominent Ionic styled entablature separates the fenestration of the entry bay from the dome. This highly decorative element retains the banderol molding, floriated and oundy patterned running mold and Ionic denticulation at the cornice (which stretches the full width of the entry block), and a frieze embellished with encarpas in high relief. The frieze, which is set at the curved portion of the entrance, also features deeply carved emblems of trumpets and harps. Where the frieze turns to the flat wall plane, the vocabulary changes to decorative pateraes.

The two-story wingwalls at the north and east facades are divided into bays by Ionic pilasters with carved, foliated design above the dentils at the capitals. At the east facade, display windows and entrances at the first story and the Chicago style windows at the second story have been boarded up, with two exceptions. At the far south and north ends of the east facade, second story, the framing of the original windows is extant. Terra cotta panels above the second story fenestration reveal pateraes at the center. A molded stringcourse separates the first and second stories, while a denticulated stringcourse is located below the cornice line. The wingwall of the north facgade is similarly articulated. Varying from the design of the east facade is the stringcourse located above the entrances (now boarded up), which is embellished with small pateraes. A single Chicago Style window frame located at the far west end is exposed. The north facade terminates at the far west bay (housing the grand staircase of the interior) with a stark, rusticated wall, adorned with an urn, marked by swags and consoles, placed within a deep, centered niche. Above the niche is a blank frieze placed below a continuous stringcourse with banderol molding, floriated and scrolled running mold and Ionic denticulation. At the cornice line is a centered, carved balustrade.

Set back from the theater entrance and storefront facades, is the main auditorium block. Rising four stories, it features common buff brick, terra cotta belt coursing (which repeats the classical vocabulary found on the terra cotta coursing and cornice) and green tiled mansard roofs, each with a drip course decorated with Greek fretwork, at the east and north facades. A pedimented bay (the location of the stage house) with tripartite blind windows, terra cotta coursing and paterae mark the far south bay of the east facade, while a similarly schemed unit, with a centered cartouche, is placed at the center bay of the north facade.

The south and west facades remain unadorned. The south is constructed of common brick. The west facade is generally read as a masonry wall with scattered two/over/two double-hung, sash windows at the far south bay and north of center. A concrete ramp leads to a door and a metal fire escape runs from the second story to the roof. Two overhead doors, one at the south end bay and one toward the center to the north have been boarded up. A metal fire door and platform is located at the top story of the south bay.

At the vaulted roof of the auditorium block are several vents and flues. Paired brick smoke vents for the stage are located at the south end, a pair of heating system boiler flues at the center of the roof and at the north end are metal roof vents.

Each floor of the interior of the Mainstreet features exposed concrete structural elements. Due to water damage over the years that the building sat vacant, the decorative features were severely damaged and deteriorated. However, the main stairs and the character-defining interior spaces such as the lobby, mezzanine, stage, proscenium arch, main auditorium and balcony remain intact. The entry lobby is located at the north end of the building. To the west, at the end of the lobby is the grand staircase. The structure that housed the main auditorium, split in two levels during the 1966 renovation, is intact. In addition, the stage structure remains, however, the wood floor has been removed. The storefront framework and openings at the east end of the building are extant. The remaining interior reveals structural components of the mezzanine and upper floors.