The Strand — The Avon — The Mall Theatre

319 S. Michigan Street · opened May 12, 1926, as the Strand · the Avon from 1949 · the Avon Art Theatre 1958 · the Mall Theatre 1975 · closed January 25, 1979 · demolished 2012–13

The smallest downtown house had the most names and the most second acts. It opened on May 12, 1926, as the Strand Theatre, with May McAvoy in The Road to Glory and a Kimball organ in the pit; it was wired for sound in 1929. On October 12, 1949, after a refurbishment, it was renamed the Avon Theatre, and under that name it played the postwar downtown's second features and serials. Its distinction came in 1958: closed on January 13 of that year, it reopened on April 17, 1958, as the Avon Art Theatre — South Bend's art house, showing foreign films in a room refitted with a Parisian sidewalk-café coffee bar, free coffee served at all performances. The art regime lasted fourteen years; the house dropped "Art" from its advertising in the middle of 1972. In 1975, for the River Bend Plaza pedestrian mall, it was extensively renovated, its 1949 marquee removed, and renamed the Mall Theatre — unveiled October 24, 1975 — and it closed for good on the evening of January 25, 1979, with a double feature of Up in Smoke and Superfly T.N.T.

The building then stood dormant for more than three decades — the Civic Theatre among the parties that considered taking it — until the St. Joseph County Public Library, assembling ground for its expansion, bought it in 2007. A landmark campaign sought to save it; designation was denied, the building found structurally unsound and its renovation costs prohibitive. Demolition began on December 16, 2012, and was completed in 2013; the terra-cotta façade was saved for reuse in another building. Of downtown's small houses it is the one whose whole biography — nickelodeon-era opening, sound conversion, art-house conversion, mall-era renaming, long vacancy, preservation fight — is recoverable in one telling, and it prints here at that completeness because the record allows it.

Sources

1. Cinema Treasures, Avon Theatre — the Strand opening of May 12, 1926, the sound conversion, the renamings of 1949, 1958 and 1975, the January 25, 1979 closing, the demolition and saved façade (commentary drawing on the South Bend Tribune).
2. After the Final Curtain, South Bend Civic Theatre history — the Avon's art-house chapter, the 1958 coffee bar, and the Civic Theatre's interest in the building.