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Members from Platte Valley Companies and Friends of the Midwest Theater pose with the $100,000 check donation from PVC underneath the theater’s 60-foot-tall marquee, which will be the main subject of the restoration project toward which the donation is going.
The Midwest Theater is under renovation to upgrade the building’s marquee, terrazzo flooring and murals. The work is set to be complete by late October.
Bill Peters, who chairs the marquee committee, said the renovation required years of work to get to this point, but it is important for the theater’s future. He said the estimated cost is $775,000.
“We didn’t want it to fall into disrepair,” Peters told the Star-Herald.
The Midwest Theater building was constructed in 1946. Shining across downtown since the theater opened on May 3, 1946, the iconic marquee has been regularly showcased in photos and publications featuring Scottsbluff.
The theater’s sign and marquee were created using neon. Hail has damaged the marquee multiple times, and the cost of repairing the letters has increased to over $15,000, Peters said.
“Because of the number of hail claims that plague this area, everybody’s hail insurance has gone up.” He said, “Our deductible amount was $50,000, so obviously we have no insurance when the deductible is three times the cost of the job. You’re essentially self-insured.”
The letters are 6 feet tall. During the planning stage for this project, another storm came through and strong winds bent the “S” over backward and put holes through one of the spires and bent it back at a 45-degree angle.
“With all that damage — and we had a 1946-era transformer to run the lights and run the neon — we decided we would, in doing the best job we could for the Midwest to keep the historic nature of the building, replace the marquee with current construction techniques.”
It was time to upgrade the marquee, Peters said. A committee wanted to upgrade it and avoid going back to neon, deciding to have LED lighting installed.
“I won’t say it’s indestructible, but it takes a lot of the concern out compared to how fragile glass is, and that is what neon is,” he said. “Those wonderful colored lights are enclosed in glass tubes. Hail and glass don’t mix.”
The committee went out for bids and selected a company out of Ohio with a good track record for restoring and repairing old movie theaters. The bidders received images of the original drawings of the building to better recreate the look. They also got approval from the National Register of Historic Places for the plans.
The theater’s marquee projection was removed a few weeks ago — the LED sign panels that announce the upcoming shows and what was showing — to access the substructure so the lights that project down onto the entrance to the theater could be updated. Paul Reed Construction helped remove the apparatus with cranes.
“The whole apparatus was taken off, and if you go by the theater now, you’ll see four concrete projections, which is what held the marquee,” Peters said. “We anticipate having it all in place and replaced and restored and fired up for use by the end of October.”
The lights that illuminate the Midwest are being custom-made to maintain the script style of the original design. Aside from the change from neon to LED lighting, aesthetically, the marquee will look almost identical.
“The neon was very thin and it glowed brightly in the metal lettering,” Peters said. “These new things will fill the lettering and glow as well.”
Currently, there are no plans to upgrade the neon lights inside the theater, as the committee hopes there is no damage that affects the interior lighting.
Work is also being done on the stars that rise over the marquee. A contractor reapplied stucco on the building and the box office, so it matches. Additional signage will be installed by the box office.
Once the new LED letters are installed and properly wired, Peters said, the lights will be turned on.
Inside the theater, Peters said, the terrazzo flooring will be repaired to bring the building up to current standards while retaining its historic look.
Terrazzo looks like tile, but it isn’t, he said. Instead, chips are poured into a matrix or binding material, such as cement, and then that is ground smooth, Peters said. “There are metal strips in the door area of the original entrance to the building. You’ll see three or four colors and then a circular thing and there are metal strips that they use to limit where things go.”
Peters said he is fascinated by this part of the project because an Omaha company took a core sample of the floor to try to match that with newer materials.
The murals will also be refurbished by stripping layers of overpainting done throughout the years back to the original paint, Peters said. Touch-up and replacement painting of flaked-away parts of the mural will be done as needed.
The theater renovations and upgrades have been supported by many community organizations and supporters of the theater, including two $100,000 donations from Platte Valley Cos. and the Oregon Trail Community Foundation.
“People love that building and it really is a centerpiece of downtown Scottsbluff,” Peters said. “The community will see a welcoming face of the Midwest and see again the centerpiece of what is in downtown Scottsbluff and has been since 1946.”
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Lauren Brant is a digital editor with the Star-Herald. She can be reached at lauren.brant@starherald.com.
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Shining across downtown Scottsbluff since the Midwest Theater opened on May 3, 1946, the iconic marquee has been regularly showcased in photos…
Members from Platte Valley Companies and Friends of the Midwest Theater pose with the $100,000 check donation from PVC underneath the theater’s 60-foot-tall marquee, which will be the main subject of the restoration project toward which the donation is going.
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