Garde Arts Center
Coordinates: 41°21′19″N 72°05′57″W / 41.355273°N 72.099115°W
The Garde Arts Center is a non-profit performing arts and cinema center serving primarily Southeastern Connecticut that owns and operates the Garde Theatre, a historic movie palace located at 325 State Street at the corner of Huntington Street in New London, Connecticut.
History
The theater, built in 1926, was designed by architect Arland W. Johnson with a Moroccan-style interior featuring mid eastern-themed wall murals by Vera Leeper as a vaudeville house and cinema.[1] The Garde Arts Center now includes the Garde Office Building, the Oasis Room, a 120-seat music performance space, the Mercer Building, where the Center's offices are located, and the Meridian Building, a service facility. All three buildings are located on the site of the mansion of whaling merchant William Williams.[1][2]
The theatre was built under the direction of Arthur S. Friend, a New York movie studio attorney, who was a partner in Famous Players-Lasky, a movie distribution company that became Paramount Pictures Corporation. Named after Walter Garde, a Hartford and New London businessman, the Garde Theatre opened on September 22, 1926, with the silent film The Marriage Clause starring matinee idols Francis X. Bushman (1883-1966) and Billie Dove (1903-1997). The Garde was hailed by the press of that time "one of the finest theatres in New England." Typical of the era, the theatre was a stage for Vaudeville as well as film. Variety acts of music, comedy, acrobats and magic, were interspersed between the showing of feature films, comedy shorts, and newsreels.
In September 1929, the theater and the four-story Garde office building was purchased by Warner Bros. for $1,000,000 as one of 18 theaters in New England that the studio was purchasing to introduce its new "talking pictures" technology. Under the eventual ownership of RKO-Stanley-Warner, the Garde was closed in 1977 and sold to a local business family. It was in danger of being demolished until 1985 when the Garde Arts Center was founded to save and reuse the theatre.[1]
In 1988, the Garde hired its first executive director, Steve Sigel. In 1990, the Garde developed a facility master plan, funded in part by the State of Connecticut, and acquired three adjacent office buildings. By 1999, the expansion of lobbies and the restoration of the original Moroccan-style 1450-seat theater was completed.
Recent times
In 2014, the Garde completed a successful campaign to install a state-of-the-art Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) compliant projection and surround sound system to increase movie programming. That same year, the Garde premiered the movie version of novelist Wally Lamb's novella Wishin' and Hopin' for two sold-out screenings. Lamb's novel I'll Take You There, released in 2016 by Harper Collins and as a digital application (Metabook), is largely set in the Garde Theater and includes characters from the Garde's first film The Marriage Clause: director Lois Weber and film star Billie Dove.
On television
In October 2016, Syfy television's Ghost Hunters released Episode 11.11, "Haunting of the Garde", filmed at the Garde Arts Center, where they investigated possible paranormal claims of full-bodied apparitions.
Notable performances
Bob Dylan performed at the Garde Arts Center during his Never Ending Tour 1998, on January 13, 1998.[1]
References
Notes
External links
Media related to Garde Arts Center at Wikimedia Commons