Our Story

A town fell in love with an old building.

The Coleman Theatre Beautiful opened on a Thursday evening in April 1929 and has never closed since. It survived the Depression, a world war, and six decades in which most of what made it beautiful was sold off or thrown away. What brought it back was not a grant or a developer. It was the people who live here.

— One hundred years on April 18, 2029 —

April 18, 1929

Nine hundred seats downstairs, seven hundred in the balcony, and every one of them reserved.

They came from fifty miles out — by automobile, by horse-drawn buggy, and on the Northeastern Oklahoma Trolley, which stopped at the door. Tickets were a dollar. The lobby was banked with flowers. The carpet carried the Coleman family’s pick-and-shovel coat of arms across three thousand square feet, and 2,500 yards of fabric hung as 117 separate drapes throughout the building.

Then the house lights dimmed, Owen James hit a chord on the Mighty Wurlitzer, and a sound nobody in Ottawa County had heard before came out of every direction at once.

In 1932, Motion Picture News named the Coleman one of the eleven most beautiful theatres in the country.

1929 – 1989

Sixty years is a long time to stay beautiful.

The Depression arrived the same year the theatre did. Admission dropped to a dime and a quarter. The mines that built the Coleman played out. In 1986 the B.F. Goodrich plant closed and took roughly two thousand jobs with it, and the business that had kept downtown alive moved north to the malls.

The building came apart slowly. The great chandelier came down in 1964 and was forgotten. The Mighty Wurlitzer was sold. The stained glass under the balcony went piece by piece. Water came through the roof and pigeons came through the window gaps. By the late eighties a visitor walked over rotting carpet, past a concession stand draining into a pit of grease, into an auditorium that was, in the plainest terms, uninhabitable.

It had been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1983 the whole time.

January 10, 1989

They handed out eight hundred tickets and there were only 675 seats.

The Miami Downtown Redevelopment Authority called it a Night of Nostalgia, and it was really a question: does anybody still care about this building? They put out folding chairs. The doors opened at seven and the Coleman was full by eight.

That December, Willie Osborn stood in front of the City Commission and proposed that the Coleman’s owners convey it to the City of Miami. “Because of the generosity of the Coleman family, the people will own the theatre,” he said. “When we say ‘the City of Miami,’ what we’re actually saying is the people who live and work here.”

It was approved on the spot. The city accepted the theatre on January 2, 1990.

1990

There was a fishbowl on the counter, and eleven dollars bought a can of paint.

The theatre the city inherited was bankrupt. There was no restoration budget to speak of. So a fishbowl sat on the concession stand counter, and every time it reached eleven dollars somebody went and bought a can of paint.

That is not a metaphor. That is how this building was restored — eleven dollars at a time, for years, by volunteers who did the work themselves. Schoolchildren collected aluminum cans and the money bought crystals for the smaller chandeliers. A Porsche club that came through for lunch helped pay for the big one.

It still works the same way. It is why the Fishbowl is still what we call monthly giving.

The things that came back

None of it was an accident.

The Wurlitzer — home in 1995

Built in 1928, sold off, and left fifteen years in pieces in a workshop in Burleson, Texas. It took a ten-year search to find and $68,000 to buy back, and its owner moved to Miami for six months to rebuild it. It is the only Wurlitzer built in 1928 still standing in the theatre it was built for.

The chandelier — raised in 2004

Two thousand pounds of it came down in 1964. It turned up years later buried in hay in the stables at the Coleman home, the crystal trampled. Volunteers spent six weeks polishing sixty brass pieces by hand, and the glass was remade in Missouri. It went back up for the theatre’s 75th birthday.

The Lady of the Lamp — restored in 1994

Found broken in an attic passage and boxed in a closet for want of repair money. A Route 66 tourist asked after her — he had ushered here in the 1930s — and paid for the work himself. When he came back the next summer, he patted her on the back.

The three stained-glass windows came back too — one from an Irish pub in Tulsa, one from a restaurant on Monkey Island, and one from a family who had bought it at a garage sale. The wall sconces went in in 2023.

The next hundred years

The Friends of the Coleman are volunteers. We restore, protect, preserve and promote the Coleman Theatre Beautiful, and we have been doing it a can of paint at a time since 1990.

The theatre turns one hundred on April 18, 2029.