The Fargo Theatre

At three-fourteen Broadway North in downtown Fargo, there is a theater that has been on this block since March fifteenth, nineteen twenty-six. The Fargo Theatre opened that day with a film called "The Man on the Box," starring Syd Chaplin, and it has been in nearly continuous operation ever since. It is the only remaining vintage movie palace in the Fargo-Moorhead area that still has a vaudeville stage.

The building was designed by the architects Buechner and Orth with Liebenberg and Kaplan in the Art Deco style, and when it opened it was billed as a palace of dreams. That phrase was not unusual for movie theaters of that era, the nineteen twenties was the decade when American cities were being fitted with picture palaces, rococo temples to the moving image, but the Fargo Theatre was built well and seriously. It seats eight hundred seventy people. It came equipped with a Wurlitzer organ, the kind that was played live during silent films to supply the drama the actors' voices could not yet provide.

The theater survived the arrival of sound, the Depression, the war, the suburb, and the multiplex. It went through periods of decline and then revival. In nineteen ninety-nine it was restored to its historic appearance and became a center for arts programming in the region, independent films, concerts, festivals. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Standing on Broadway outside the Fargo Theatre, you are looking at one of the few things in downtown Fargo that connects directly to the city as it was in the nineteen twenties, the same marquee, the same Art Deco lines, the same building that was showing pictures when the silent era ended and sound began. That continuity is rarer than it looks.