In 1935, when the Texas Theater replaced a furniture store in what is now downtown Denton, the city’s town square consisted of a two-story brick courthouse, a row of storefronts, and little else. The theater’s building predates the city’s existing courthouse by five years, and eventually rebranded as the Fine Arts Theatre in 1957.
Since its closure in 1981—and a fire the following year—the structure has essentially sat empty as Denton’s downtown square has grown up around it with shops and restaurants and bars. Used only sporadically for church services or meetings, a critical piece of the city’s history has sat derelict for over four decades. Earlier this month, the Denton City Council approved $1.6 million in tax breaks to help turn the lights back on, bringing back a redevelopment effort from 2018 that cratered under the immense amount of money it would take to fix up the space.
“If you Google Denton, the Fine Arts Theater is going to come up. It’s a kind of cultural, iconic building,” says Assistant City Manager Christine Taylor. “It’s sitting with a low tax base for the city. It’s not activated.”
One of the partners involved in reopening the theater has been in this situation before, just 40 miles south in Dallas. Jason Reimer was a founding partner with Aviation Cinemas, the entity that turned the similarly-derelict Texas Theatre—built by the same architect, W. Scott Dunne—on Jefferson Boulevard in Oak Cliff into a cultural institution. Denton-based NorthBridge Realty Holdings bought the Fine Arts property in 2018 and engaged Reimer to handle its programming and operations. The building is in rough shape, and the money didn’t pencil until the City Council came to the table with tax incentives.
“Whenever it was raining outside, it was raining inside,” says Brad Andrus, a principal at NorthBridge. Post-COVID, the costs of the repairs soared even higher, says Reimer, which made the challenge “insurmountable” for a time.