The New Theatre is a historic theatre building at 11 North 10th Street in

Fort Smith, Arkansas Fort Smith is the third-largest city in Arkansas and one of the two county seats of Sebastian County. As of the 2020 Census, the population was 89,142. It is the principal city of the Fort Smith, Arkansas–Oklahoma Metropolitan Statistical Are ...

. The Beaux Arts building was built in 1911, and was supposedly modeled on the New Amsterdam Theatre in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. The building's facade features a rich variety of decoration, including

terra cotta Terracotta, terra cotta, or terra-cotta (; ; ), in its material sense as an earthenware substrate, is a clay-based unglazed or glazed ceramic where the fired body is porous. In applied art, craft, construction, and architecture, terracotta ...

glazed tile, terra cotta brick work, and elaborate border

cartouches In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche is an oval with a line at one end tangent to it, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name. The first examples of the cartouche are associated with pharaohs at the end of the Third Dynasty, but the fea ...

. The theatre began as a performing arts venue, but was converted to nearly exclusive use as a film house in the 1940s. It was closed in the 1970s, and restoration efforts have been taking place sporadically since the 1990s. The building was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

in 1999. It is vacant. New Theatre Historic Marker.JPG, Historic marker New Theatre, Glazed Brick Detail.JPG, Glazed brick on facade New Theatre, Detail over Entrance.JPG, Detail over entrance

References

Theatres on the National Register of Historic Places in Arkansas Beaux-Arts architecture in Arkansas Buildings and structures completed in 1911 Buildings and structures in Fort Smith, Arkansas National Register of Historic Places in Sebastian County, Arkansas Culture of Fort Smith, Arkansas {{SebastianCountyAR-NRHP-stub

See also

References