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1960 — 1991
The palace's second life began in 1960, after two years vacant: a reopening under Gloanna Enterprises, Inc., with a combination bill no 1925 stockholder would have recognized — live wrestling and movies — and a major remodeling of the exterior and interior. The projecting marquee, the facade's signature, came down; a new lower-story front went up in its place, of sea-green porcelain-enamel panels under an aluminum flat awning, with aluminum doors — planned, the nomination records, to span the entire facade, and built across the entrance. The 1960 front is the honest emblem of the house's middle age: the palace was still the biggest room in the city, and its owners now dressed it as a storefront. By 1968 the Tivoli was open only on Friday and Saturday nights.
Then the last working incarnation. Several years after 1968 — the nomination's dating — the house was operated by the Amer-Amusement Corporation of Durland, Michigan (the name as the nomination prints it), renamed, and given over to X-rated films. The name of that incarnation is a printed conflict of one letter and real consequence: the nomination calls the house the Cinema Arts theater; the South Bend Tribune's account, carried in Cinema Treasures' report of the demolition, calls it the Cinema Art; and the city's commissioned history and the city's marker account both use Cinema Art, as do the culture and controversies records of this history. The file prints Cinema Arts as the nomination's form and Cinema Art as the press's and the city's, and adopts neither silently. The dating of the adult era is a second conflict, and it too prints whole, in its three forms: the city's marker account dates the conversion to the early 1970s; the commissioned history puts the adult era across the theater's last decades, its glory days having ended in the 1960s; and the Tribune's demolition report carries the stronger version, that the house had been in decline since the 1960s, when, as the Cinema Art, it began showing adult movies. The three accounts agree on the substance — the palace ended its working life as an adult theater — and disagree on whether that life began in the 1960s or the early 1970s; the nomination's own sequence (weekend-only by 1968; the renaming “several years later”) stands in the file beside them, unaveraged.
The alterations of those years are the nomination's melancholy inventory: a remodeled lobby with dropped ceiling and faux rock walls and an enclosed staircase; the auditorium's walls and ceiling painted black over all the original murals; a platform with booths built in one area over the seats. And yet the nomination, written in 1997 of a house closed six years, records the paradox on which the preservation years would turn: although in deteriorated condition, nearly all of the original interior elements — the orchestra pit with its balustrade among them — remained intact beneath the paint. The adult era ended in 1991 on the nomination's and the Tribune's dating — the Cinema Arts closed that year — which the city's accounts give as the early 1990s; the closing year is printed in both forms, 1991 where the formal record gives it and the early 1990s where the city's does.
Sources:
- National Register nomination, Tivoli Theater (1997) — the 1960 Gloanna Enterprises reopening with live wrestling and movies; the remodeling, marquee removal and sea-green porcelain-enamel front; Friday-and-Saturday-only operation by 1968; the Amer-Amusement Corporation operation and the renaming as the Cinema Arts theater for X-rated films; the lobby and auditorium alterations, the black paint over the murals; the survival of the original interior elements; the Cinema Arts closing in 1991.
- South Bend Tribune, as reported in Cinema Treasures (February 2005) — the house in decline since the 1960s, when, as the Cinema Art, it began showing adult movies until it was shuttered in 1991.
- Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History, and the City of Mishawaka's marker account — the Cinema Art name; glory days ended in the 1960s (the history); the adult conversion dated to the early 1970s (the city).