The Blackstone — The State Theatre

212 S. Michigan Street · opened January 29, 1921, as the Blackstone Theatre · the State from December 25, 1929 · movies ended November 3, 1977 · publicly owned and awaiting a developer in 2026

The first of the downtown palaces was not the Palace. The Blackstone Theatre at 212 South Michigan — today's State Theatre building, carried as a building in the architecture record — opened on January 29, 1921, billed as "The Pride of South Bend," with 2,500 seats. Its architect was Henry L. Newhouse of Chicago, a specialist in theatre design; the interior was beaux-arts, the seating arranged without a single traditional balcony — tiered rear seating and two small side balconies instead. The opening feature was the silent film Once to Every Woman, with Dorothy Phillips and, in an early role, Rudolph Valentino; the house had its own seventeen-piece Blackstone Symphony Orchestra under a twenty-one-year-old conductor, Angelo Vitale — an orchestra pit establishment of a size that states what a first-run house was expected to be in 1921.

The talkies broke its first regime. When the Colfax and the Granada opened wired for sound, in 1927 and 1928, the Blackstone dropped films and turned to burlesque — on the account the theatre-history record carries, Mayor Chester P. Montgomery ordered the house closed in early October 1929, the shows having been seen as offensive. Publix, Paramount's theatre arm, then took the house over, repainted and reupholstered it, and reopened it on Christmas Day 1929 as the State Theatre. Listed closed in the worst Depression years, 1932 and 1933, it was back open by 1934 under Paramount's operation through its John Balaban subsidiary, and it ran as a first-run downtown house for the next four decades — the room a generation of the city used for everything from first features to graduations, closed-circuit telecasts and pageants. Plitt Theatres closed it as a movie house on November 3, 1977 (the National Register nomination carries the closing year as 1978; the theatre record's day and date govern here, the nomination's year standing as the variant), with Sidney Poitier in A Piece of the Action as the last feature.

Its afterlife has been a thirty-year argument about what a palace is for. The Watseka Theatre Corporation bought it for $20,000, spent $500,000 on repairs, and reopened it as a second-run movie house on March 25, 1993; films ran until 1997. A nightclub conversion followed in 1999, the orchestra floor levelled for dancing. In the spring of 2013 the Banko Capitol group reopened it as a performing-arts and cultural center — the theatre record carries the reopening year as 2012; both stand here — and it closed again in September 2016, after a county tax auction. The city's Redevelopment Commission bought the building in 2025, made improvements, and put it out for proposals; four were received in April 2026, and in August 2026 the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County put forward a plan for a new movie theatre inside the building, backed by a $4 million READI 2.0 award. As of the autumn of 2026 the State is publicly owned, stabilized, and waiting — the last of downtown's four movie palaces in near-original form, on the architecture record's description, and the only one whose next act is unwritten.

Sources

1. After the Final Curtain, "State Theatre, South Bend" — the Blackstone opening, the Newhouse design, the Vitale orchestra, the burlesque interlude and the mayoral closure, the Publix reopening, the Watseka purchase and 1993 reopening, the Banko Capitol chapter.
2. Cinema Treasures, State Theatre — the January 29, 1921 opening and opening feature, the Kimball organ, the December 25, 1929 renaming, the closed listings of 1932–33, the reopening by 1934, the November 3, 1977 closing under Plitt with A Piece of the Action.
3. Architecture record, this document — the nomination record (closing carried as 1978), the 2025 Redevelopment Commission purchase, the April 2026 proposals, the August 2026 Community Foundation plan and READI 2.0 award.