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1959 · THE PALACE, SAVED AT A NOMINAL PRICE
The price: The best-documented rescue in this record cost one dollar. The Palace Theatre — the Orpheum-circuit palace of 1922 on North Main Street, a million-dollar house on hundred-thousand-dollar land — came to the end of its movie life in the 1950s, and Ella M. Morris bought it for an undisclosed sum and sold it to the city for one dollar. The city gave the room a $15,000 facelift and reopened it in the fall of 1959 as the Morris Civic Auditorium. The room closed in May 1998 for the restoration that defines its modern era — $17 million on the venue's own history and the Tribune's account, with one national listing carrying $16.5 million, both standing in the Theaters section — and reopened on 3 March 2000 as the Morris Performing Arts Center. The arithmetic is the oddity: a million-dollar palace, carried across its dead decade for the price of a cup of coffee, and working still.
Sources:
- The Theaters section of this history — Ella M. Morris's purchase at an undisclosed sum and the $1 sale to the city, the $15,000 facelift, the fall 1959 reopening as the Morris Civic Auditorium, the 1998 closing, the restoration figures as carried there, and the 3 March 2000 reopening; the Major Donations section — the $1 resale in the Morris gift record.