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BOUGHT 2012 · REBORN 2018
The price: The Clyde Theatre opened on 19 April 1951 at 1808 Bluffton Road — the Quimby family's second great Fort Wayne room, designed by A. M. Strauss, with 1,782 seats, the region's premier movie house. It changed names, closed, reopened briefly as a house of worship, and by the early 1990s stood vacant, its interior stripped to a shell. In 2012 Rick Kinney bought the vacant theatre at a tax sale for five hundred dollars. He found his partners in Chuck and Lisa Surack of Sweetwater: ground was broken in July 2017 on a renovation of more than $7.5 million — the venue's own history says $9 million, and both figures stand in the Music History section — and the Clyde reopened in May 2018 as a 2,150-capacity concert hall, its art-deco shell restored, reopening weekend bringing a free concert by the Pink Floyd tribute Pink Droyd on 6 May 2018. The arithmetic is the oddity: a five-hundred-dollar building, carrying a seven-and-a-half-million-dollar second life — the cheapest famous building purchase in the city's record, and one of its best-documented.
Sources: the Music History section of this history — Sweetwater Sound press releases, May 2018 (the 1951 opening, 1,782 seats, the 2012 tax-sale purchase for $500, the July 2017 groundbreaking, the $7.5 million-plus renovation, the 2,150 capacity); the Clyde Theatre, "Our History" (the $9 million variant); Front of House magazine, May 2018 (the 6 May 2018 Pink Droyd concert).