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105 W. Colfax Avenue · opened with the Palace, 1922 · the ballroom above the Morris block
The ballroom half of the Palace enterprise was the Palais Royale, opened with the theatre in 1922 as its dance hall and reception room — a separate business above and beside the auditorium since 1935, and carried as a building in the architecture record. Its playing life is the big-band era's: the Morris's own 2015 account of the ballroom names the orchestras that played it — Duke Ellington, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Guy Lombardo and Cab Calloway — which is to say the whole first rank of the touring dance bands stopped in this room on the same routing that brought the stage acts to the theatre below. During the Second World War the room served as a Service Men's Center. It survives in use as an event and wedding hall under its own name, in separate ownership from the theatre — the one room of the 1922 enterprise whose bill never changed kind, only fashion.
Sources
- Morris Performing Arts Center, "Iconic Palais Royale Ballroom for Sale," 2015 — the named big bands, the wartime Service Men's Center, separate ownership since 1935.
- Architecture record, this document — the Palais Royale as a building.