Tampa Theatre

The Tampa Theatre and Office Building is a historic U.S. theater and city landmark in the Uptown District of downtown Tampa, Florida. On January 3, 1978, it was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

The Theatre features a wide range of independent, foreign, and documentary films on a daily basis. It is Tampa's only non-profit movie palace, and operating costs are supported by its members, donors and corporate sponsors, as well as by ticket and concessions sales. It has often been used as a backdrop for movies, music videos and local programming.

History

Designed as an atmospheric theatre style movie palace by architect John Eberson, the Tampa Theatre opened on October 15, 1926. The theatre was the first commercial building in Tampa to offer air conditioning, which gave the theater appeal during Florida's sweltering summer months. Inside the Tampa, audiences are transported to a lavish, romantic Mediterranean courtyard replete with old world statuary, flowers, and gargoyles. Over it all is a nighttime sky with twinkling stars and floating clouds.

Tampa, Florida

Tampa /ˈtæmpə/ is a city in and the county seat of Hillsborough County, Florida, United States. It is located on the west coast of Florida on Tampa Bay, near the Gulf of Mexico, and is part of the Tampa Bay Metropolitan Area. The city had a population of 346,037 in 2011.

The current location of Tampa was once inhabited by indigenous peoples of the Safety Harbor culture most notably the Tocobaga and the Pohoy, who lived along the shores of Tampa Bay. The area was explored by Spanish explorers in the 16th century, resulting in violent conflicts and the introduction of European diseases, which wiped out the original native cultures. Although Spain claimed Florida as part of New Spain, it did not found a colony in the Tampa area, and there were no permanent American or European settlements within today's city limits until after the United States acquired Florida from Spain in 1819.

In 1824, the United States Army established a frontier outpost called Fort Brooke at the mouth of the Hillsborough River, near the site of today's Tampa Convention Center. The first civilian residents were pioneers who settled near the fort for protection from the nearby Seminole population, and the small village was first incorporated as "Tampa" in 1849. The town grew slowly until the 1880s, when railroad links, the discovery of phosphate, and the arrival of the cigar industry jump-started its development, helping it to grow from a quiet village of less than 800 residents in 1880 to a bustling city of over 30,000 by the early 1900s.

Theatre

Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. Elements of art and stagecraft are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. The specific place of the performance is also named by the word "theatre" as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, "a place for viewing"), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, "to see", "to watch", "to observe").

Modern Western theatre comes, in large measure, from ancient Greek drama, from which it borrows technical terminology, classification into genres, and many of its themes, stock characters, and plot elements. Theatre artist Patrice Pavis defines theatricality, theatrical language, stage writing, and the specificity of theatre as synonymous expressions that differentiate theatre from the other performing arts, literature, and the arts in general.

Theatre organ

A theatre organ (also known as a theater organ, or [especially in the U.K.] a cinema organ) is a distinct type of pipe organ originally developed to provide music and sound effects to accompany silent films during the first 3 decades of the 20th century.

Theatre organs are usually identified by the distinctive horseshoe-shaped arrangement of stop tabs (tongue-shaped switches) above and around the instrument's keyboards on their consoles. Given their prominent placement in houses of popular entertainment, theatre organ consoles were typically decorated in gaudy ways, with brightly colored stop tabs, and painted bright red and black, or solid gold, or ivory with gold trim, with built-in console lighting. In organs installed in the UK, a common feature was large translucent surrounds extending from both sides of the console, with internal colored lighting. A spectacular original example is the so-called Rhinestone Barton, installed in 1928 in the former RKO Iowa Theatre (now home to Theatre Cedar Rapids in Cedar Rapids, Iowa). The console of this 3 manual 14 rank Wangerin-built Barton is completely covered in black felt fabric embedded with glass glitter in swirling patterns, with all edges trimmed with bands of rhinestones. Another original example is the 3/13 Barton from Ann Arbor's historic Michigan Theatre. The organ was installed in 1927 and is currently played five nights during a week before most film screenings. As the concept of the theatre organ was embraced, theatre organs began to be installed in other types of venues, such as civic auditoriums, sports arenas, private residences, and even churches. One of the largest theatre organs ever built (and certainly boasting the largest console ever built for a theatre organ) was the 6 manual 52 rank Barton installed in the massive Chicago Stadium.