Sun Theater

A three-story theater front in a Beaux-Arts classical mode, faced in cream terra-cotta and tapestry brick laid in basket-weave panels. Three tall round-arched windows dominate the upper facade, framed by fluted engaged Ionic columns and edged with blue-and-cream glazed archivolts; each arch is crowned by a keystone carved as a theatrical mask — the comic and tragic faces of drama. A deep bracketed cornice, its frieze modeled with lion's heads and garlands above a Greek-key band, runs beneath an attic story pierced by small square openings. A modern black-and-gold "SUN THEATER" marquee spans the entrance, and the plain brick stage house rises behind.

The theater opened on March 2, 1913, as the Victoria Theatre, a house of roughly 1,500 seats built for German-language opera and drama in a city with a large German population. After the United States entered the First World War, anti-German feeling closed it; it reopened in 1918 under William Fox as the Liberty Theatre. Over the following decades it passed through a long succession of names and uses — Liberty Music Hall, the World, the Lotus Club, the Hi-Hat Club, the 400 Club — becoming the Sun Theater in 1950. Faith Tabernacle Church occupied the building in the late 1960s and left it around 1972, after which it stood vacant for some four decades, its west wall partly collapsed. The Lawrence Group bought the building in 2010 and restored it in a roughly $11 million project aided by historic tax credits, reopening on May 10, 2014. It now serves as a performance venue for the Grand Center Arts Academy, a charter school sponsored by Saint Louis University.