The palace a woman bought for a dollar: the Morris, 1922

1922 - 2000

The Palace: On 2 November 1922 the Palace Theatre opened on Colfax Avenue, built by the Palace Theatre Corporation of Chicago for a million dollars on a lot that cost a hundred thousand, designed by J. S. Aroner for the Orpheum vaudeville circuit. Houdini played it; Burns and Allen played it; Sinatra sang in it. Its ballroom, the Palais Royale, opened the same year and held the big bands. The Palace was the grandest room in northern Indiana, and for a generation it was where South Bend went to see the world arrive in person. The theatre's fabric and stage history stand in the theatres material; the cultural events of its life are two rescues, thirty-nine years apart in spirit and forty-one in fact.

The dollar: By 1959 television had emptied the house and the board voted to demolish it. Ella Morris, the city's great cultural philanthropist, bought the building for an undisclosed sum and sold it to the City of South Bend for one dollar. Renamed the Morris Civic Auditorium, it reopened on 15 October 1959. The price is the point and this section prints it at size: where Fort Wayne in 1972 had to raise a quarter of a million dollars in a public campaign to save its palace, South Bend's palace was saved in 1959 by one woman's chequebook and a dollar bill. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. It closed in May 1998 for a $17 million restoration and reopened on 3 March 2000 as the Morris Performing Arts Center, 2,564 seats, home of the South Bend Symphony Orchestra and the Broadway Theatre League; the Palais Royale, restored, reopened on New Year's Eve 2002. At its centennial in 2022 the Morris 100 campaign set a goal of $30 million. A room the city nearly lost for a parking lot's worth of indifference is now, a century on, the anchor of its downtown, and it carries the name of the woman who bought it for a dollar.

Sources:

1. Cinema Treasures, Palace Theatre and Morris Performing Arts Center record (the opening of 2 November 1922; the million-dollar cost and the $100,000 lot; architect J. S. Aroner; the Orpheum circuit; Houdini, Burns and Allen and Sinatra; the 1959 demolition vote; Ella Morris's purchase and the one-dollar sale to the city; the reopening of 15 October 1959 as the Morris Civic Auditorium).
2. Morris Performing Arts Center and South Bend Tribune accounts (the National Register listing of 1985; the May 1998 closing and the $17 million restoration; the reopening of 3 March 2000; 2,564 seats; the Symphony and the Broadway Theatre League; the Palais Royale reopened New Year's Eve 2002; the centennial of 2022 and the Morris 100 campaign's $30 million goal, Tribune, February 2022).