The Palace Theatre and the Palais Royale (1922)

1922 – present

The pair: On the corner of Michigan and Colfax, the Palace Theatre Corporation — a partnership of Chicago and Indianapolis businessmen headed by the Chicago promoter Jacob Handelsman — built South Bend's grandest entertainment address in a single campaign: the Palace Theatre at 211 North Michigan and, beside it and structurally independent of it, the Palais Royale Building at 201–209 North Michigan and 105–113 West Colfax. Both were designed by J. S. Aroner of Chicago and built by Ralph Sollitt & Sons, through a construction season plagued by labor strikes; the theatre cost $1 million on land that had cost $100,000. Aroner called his theatre "a little palace," dressed in Spanish Renaissance Revival terra cotta with Baroque, Greco-Roman and early Art Deco touches in the period descriptions; the Palais Royale, in the Register's classification likewise Spanish Renaissance Revival, held the ballroom — 8,800 square feet under a 35-foot ceiling, with a musicians' balcony — over ground-floor commercial space. The Palace opened on 2 November 1922 as a house of the Orpheum vaudeville chain. The two buildings have been under separate ownership since 1935, and the Palais Royale's ballroom spent the Second World War as a Service Men's Center, funded by a United War Chest grant.

The rescue and the restorations: The Palace ran as a movie house until 1959, when its board voted for demolition. Mrs. E. M. Morris bought the theatre and sold it to the city for one dollar; after a $15,000 facelift it reopened that fall as the Morris Civic Auditorium, renamed in her honor. The Palais Royale Building was listed on the National Register on 21 July 1983 and the theatre in the downtown batch of 5 June 1985. From 1998 to 2000 the theatre underwent a large-scale restoration to its 1920s splendor, and on 3 March 2000 it held its grand reopening under its present name, the Morris Performing Arts Center — a house of about 2,500 seats, carried at 2,564 in the reference counts. The adjoining ballroom was fully restored alongside it and works today as an events venue. The pair’s newest chapter is the Morris’s centennial Project 100: a 20,000-square-foot addition, the Raclin Murphy Encore Center, beside the theatre, opened in February 2026.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Palais Royale Building (Leslie Capek, Childs & Associates, 29 September 1982; listed 21 July 1983) — the Aroner design, the Handelsman development, the Sollitt contracting, the separate ownership since 1935, the different functions of the two buildings, and the Service Men's Center years.
2. Morris Performing Arts Center, "History" (morris100.org), and Discover Indiana — the $1 million cost and $100,000 land, the Orpheum chain, the 1959 demolition vote, the Morris purchase and one-dollar sale to the city, and the reopening of 3 March 2000.
3. Cinema Treasures, Morris Performing Arts Center record — the opening date of 2 November 1922, the closing of the movie era in 1959 and the Project 100 addition of 20,000 square feet.
4. Building South Bend, "Palais Royale" (ND-SB-04874) — the 1921 dating in the survey record, the strikes of the construction season, and the ballroom's community life.