The theatre’s iconic neon sign gets a well-deserved makeover ahead of even more upgrades at the facility

Once upon a time, Colfax Avenue was aglow with neon signs up and down what’s known as America’s longest continuous street. As times changed, many of those went the way of the rotary phone and full-service gas stations.

But there’s one in particularly that stands out as a survivor; one that anyone who’s ever driven Colfax will recognize: the huge vertical neon sign that hangs outside the Aurora Fox Arts Center in Aurora. For nearly 80 years, the iconic sign beckoned anyone looking to see a movie or, later, a live theatre performance. But like most 80-year-olds, time (and weather) has taken its toll, leading to a push to restore the sign to its former glory.

The work is now done, and the Aurora Fox will host a relighting event on Saturday, June 22 to mark the rejuvenated sign. Since sunset isn’t until 8:32, the festivities will begin after the current production of The Lightning Thief.

To get the lowdown on the whole project, I caught up with Chris Geddes, historic preservation specialist with the City of Aurora who oversaw the project. Here’s our conversation, edited for length and clarity:

OnStage Colorado: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your work?

Chris Geddes: I’m a historic preservation specialist with the city. I’ve been in historic preservation for 26 years now and I am just super passionate about trying to protect and preserve historic resources and the stories that go along with these resources.

OSC: Can you tell me about some of the other projects that you’ve worked on before this Fox sign.

CG: I used to be a survey coordinator for Historic Denver, so documenting historic buildings. I’ve worked in the National Register Program at the State Historic Preservation Office. And I’ve been with the City of Aurora for about a year now. And obviously this is the most prominent project I’ve had since I started.

OSC: So there are other historic buildings in Aurora that you’ll also be focusing on?

CG: Absolutely, we have 34 landmarks. We have 1890s Victorian houses. We have guard houses over at the former Fitzsimmons Army Hospital. We have a farm property with an 1868 house and a round barn. And I just worked on getting one of our rural school houses, some rotted siding repaired and new paint job.

OSC: OK, let’s talk about the Aurora Fox. What inspired this effort to redo or rejuvenate the sign?

CG: Well, the sign has been in poor shape for quite a few decades now. The colors have faded with the sun exposure. There’s been a lot of patching, quick fixes when something wasn’t working. We haven’t had the original colors up there over the past few decades. The neon was not working in places, so some days you might drive by and it looked like it was the “Ox Theatre.” And there was some poor visibility, like you really couldn’t see the sign based on the degradation that had occurred over the decades. And so we really wanted to preserve not only the sign, but the neon. Colfax was covered with hundreds of neon signs for restaurants and bars, gas stations, all kinds of shops and we’ve lost so many of them. And so it was really important for us to preserve the neon.

DaVinci Sign did all the work without taking down the sign. | Photo: Aurora Fox

OSC: Speaking of the colors, the picture that I saw looks like it’s pretty red now.

CG:  Yes. So when we started out with this, we had a 1962 picture that showed green, like a forest green and yellow. However, when we pulled off one of the panels, we could see there was an orangey kind of red on the back, which got us thinking that maybe we didn’t have the oldest photo to show what the historic colors were. And the designer at the sign company, DaVinci Sign, he started doing some research on Fox Theatres and so I jumped in with him and we just started looking at all kinds of Fox Theatres across the country. Because it was a nationwide chain started in the 1920s. And they had kind of this consistent theme for their movie theatres.

And it was this reddish orange, the yellow, and then a lot of them had green accents on them in addition to the neon colors. And when we went up there to scrape the paint, we found yellow in places we weren’t expecting it. We found red and then we found the green and so that ended up kind of delaying the project a little because there was just so many more paint layers that we had to account for and mask off. But it has really made it pop. It stands out now, like it did before to grab people’s attention coming down Colfax.

OSC: Alex: Now was all the work done while the sign was still on the building or was it taken down?

CG: No, the sign is still on the building. All the work was done in place. They did take down the neon tubes. Some of them were broken, some of them were missing. And so the neon company, working with the sign company, he traced patterns where the neon tubing was missing and recreated those.

The sign relighting ceremony is set for June 22 following the performance of ‘The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical’ | Photo: Gail Marie Bransteitter

Fox history

OSC: What is it about these neon signs that causes people to just really love them?

CG: Well, I think it takes you back to an earlier time. There’s just something about hearing the neon buzz when you’re near a neon sign. It has a different glow than LED. LED just doesn’t have that warm, fuzzy feeling. It’s more bright and glaring. And the Fox sign has been here since 1946. So it’s kind of that tangible link to an earlier time when we have lost so many businesses that people grew up with people were familiar with as well as a lot of those neon signs that were visual landmarks along Colfax.

OSC: The Aurora Fox sign is really iconic. While I have you here, can I ask you to just give a little brief rundown of the history of the theatre itself? It’s got kind of an interesting background.

CG: Right, so it was constructed in 1946 at the request of Colonel Preston out at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital. The theatre that they had at Fitzsimmons and the theatre that they also had at Lowry Air Force Base, they were both kind of overwhelmed and didn’t really have enough room to house all the people who wanted to see movies there. And so he petitioned to get another theatre in Aurora.

And with that, he managed to secure Charles Strong, who was a prominent Denver architect. And he designed the theatre lobby in this streamlined modern style, which was really prominent in the 1930s and ’40s. And it took its cues from industrial design and the ship industry. So like on ocean liners, you see a lot of speed lines, ramps, you’ll see a lot of smooth surfaces. And so like on the edge of the canopy around the building, you’ll see vitro -like glass, which was made for a very short period in time. We have ramps on the inside of the theatre, ramps where the seating is for what are now stage productions.

OSC: Interesting. Yeah, you can really see that in the lobby especially.

CG: And then Charles Strong secured a surplus World War II Quonset hut and used that for the theatre part. And then, you know, the streamlined Moderna section was the lobby. And he did this in other places as well.

He also designed a movie theatre with a Quonset hut in Sydney, Nebraska. And that seems to be his thing. But these Quonset huts were available by the thousands, so a lot of farmers took them and used them on their farm properties for storage of equipment and storage of crops. And then some people used them for auto businesses. They were so cheap to purchase from the government.

So they built the lobby and there was a snack stand as well in bathrooms. And it was a movie theatre from its start in 1946 till the 1970s. By the 1970s, you start having people move more south and east of Aurora, so kind of more to the suburbs and away from kind of this downtown Colfax area. And so the theatre kind of falls on hard times. Then there’s a fire that occurs in November of 1981 and does a lot of damage between the fire and the water. And it’s shuttered for a while and folks in the neighborhood decide, we really want to see this building come back. And a group of artists and activists and neighborhood folks band together and get the city to purchase the building.

So they rearranged the lobby a little bit and there’s less seating because it’s now it does stage performances, comedy, music programs, dance, the Nutcracker is here every, every Christmas. And so, they lost some of the seats. It used to have 670 seats. Now it has 230. And we’re getting ready to start a new project to update the seating.

New seats!

OSC: I was going to ask about that. Those seats suck. They’re so old.

CG:  Well they came from the Aladdin Theatre when it was demolished in 1984, I believe. And so they brought the seats over here. So those seats had a life before they even came here. Now they’ve been here 40 years so they’re probably close to 70 years old now. So we’re going to be getting new seats, new carpet, an upgraded HVAC system. It’s going to look amazing when it’s all completed.

OSC: Hooray! That’s wonderful! And what’s the timeline for that?

CG: The seats are next summer. We were hoping to get it done this summer and things just didn’t align. So we’re doing some prep work this fall in advance of it. And then next July, we will be doing the install. We’ll be looking at possibly auctioning off some of the seats from the Aladdin because people were very attached to the Aladdin and very attached to the Fox. They’ve had a long life here too.

OSC: So going forward, what kind of things does the theatre need to do to keep the sign like this in good shape?

CG: So the paint …  we did four to five coats of automotive paint. And then we did four to five coats of a clear coat. So the hope is that this paint job with its exposure in the Colorado sun will last a long time, longer than normal paint job would last. And there will be regular maintenance. There’s going to be a qualified person who understands neon to come in and make a repair instead of just trying to bandage it for a little bit longer. And I think that’s the big thing is, you know, there are not many people who understand or know how to do neon or do it well. And so finding those folks will be key to maintaining the sign so that it’s around for another 75 years.

The relighting ceremony

OSC: So tell us about the event on the 22^nd.

CG: It’ll be after the show, The Lightning Thief, so about 9 or 9:15, we’ll start. The mayor is supposed to be here. We’re going to have folks from the State Historical Fund. They gave us a grant to do a lot of the work. And so they’ll kind of be presenting the customary big check and we’ll have some city council folks here and the sign company and all the folks who have been involved in it, as well as the general public and folks who went to the show.

OSC: Wonderful. So, what was the price tag on redoing the sign at this point?

CG: So we originally started out at about $122,000. But then when we found the green, we kind of had to regroup. It added a little bit more time, obviously another set of paint that we needed to purchase, and more clear coating, and time to do all of that. And so final price tag is at about $144,000, right around there.

OSC: Okay. Well, it doesn’t sound too bad in this day and age, but worth it.

CG: It’s worth it. Absolutely.