The Coronado Theatre: Rockford's Wonder House
Near Rockford, Illinois
On October ninth, nineteen twenty-seven, Rockford opened a movie palace. Nearly nine thousand people attended the three opening-day showings of a silent film called Swim Girl Swim. The building that received them cost one and a half million dollars to build, which in nineteen twenty-seven was an extraordinary investment for a midwestern city of this size. The architect was Frederic J. Klein. The theater held twenty-four hundred seats.
What those nine thousand opening-day visitors saw when they walked in has never been described adequately in plain prose. The auditorium was designed in the atmospheric style, a now largely vanished approach to cinema architecture that tried to replicate the sensation of sitting outdoors under a night sky. The walls were lined with facades of gilded buildings in the Spanish and Italian style, painted and carved to look like the fronts of palaces in Seville or Verona. The ceiling was painted a deep blue, fitted with small electric lights to suggest stars, and equipped with a cloud machine that drifted shapes across the blue field. The total effect was of sitting in an open-air courtyard in southern Europe after dark.
In its first decades the Coronado hosted Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Bob Hope, Sammy Davis Jr., and Milton Berle. It moved pictures through the decades until nineteen eighty-four, when competition and revenue decline finally closed the screen. Rockford was left with an astonishing ruin.
The Kerasotes theater company donated the building to the city in nineteen ninety-seven. An eighteen and a half million dollar restoration followed. The Coronado reopened in two thousand one as a live performance venue. The cloud machine still works.
