Orpheum Theater
A Beaux-Arts theater faced in gray terra cotta, its three-bay front dominated by tall arched windows set between coupled Corinthian columns and pilasters, each arch filled with a fan-shell tympanum wreathed in foliate carving. "ORPHEUM THEATER" is cut into the entablature below a modillioned cornice and a frieze of female mascarons. Flanking the marquee, large sculptural groups of straining nude atlantes bear the weight of the wall above beside snake-haired Medusa masks. The tall attic stage-house behind carries the name ORPHEUM in a recessed panel under a lion-mask cornice.
The Orpheum opened on Labor Day 1917 as a vaudeville house on the Orpheum Circuit, to the design of the theater architect G. Albert Lansburgh. As vaudeville faded it was sold to Warner Brothers in 1930 and run as a movie theater until it closed in the 1960s. Restored in the 1970s, it reopened as the American Theater — the name under which it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985 — and later, under Michael and Steven Roberts, became the Roberts Orpheum Theater. The Jubilee Group bought the building in 2017.
