Warner Bros. commissioned a 2,250-seat movie palace for Erie in 1931. Forty-five years later the city bought it to keep it from being demolished, and the marquee that made it famous went dark for four decades — until a faithful rebuild, not the untouched original, went back on in December 2021.
Rapp & Rapp, the Chicago firm behind dozens of Warner and Paramount houses, built it for $1.5 million and let New York’s Rambusch Studios loose on the inside: Persian marble archways, gold-backed French mirrors, silver-leaf gilding under ruby curtains, a French Renaissance interior wrapped in an Art Deco shell. It opened April 10, 1931, with the film The Millionaire, and still seats 2,250 between orchestra and balcony.
It stopped showing films in 1976, when the chain running it, Cinemette, looked ready to sell and Erie’s mayor, Louis Tullio, bought the building with state help rather than watch it come down. The hall wasn’t as dark as that makes it sound — the Erie Philharmonic had already played its first concert there in 1974 — and the formal conversion to a performing-arts center followed in the early 1980s, backed by decades of further restoration.
The marquee is the detail worth getting precisely right. The 1931 original — ten tons, more than 8,000 colored bulbs — had deteriorated past saving; its structural steel was failing by the time a $27 million restoration phase reached it in 2020. What went up in its place preserves the original’s Tiffany-style corner glass and milk-glass reader board, but trades the incandescent bulbs for 6,910 LEDs and adds digital displays alongside the manual lettering. Thomas Hagen, chairman of Erie Insurance, threw the switch on December 3, 2021, running the original 1931 opening-night lighting sequence for a crowd that hadn’t seen it lit in over forty years.
What it hosts now is concrete rather than abstract. The Philharmonic’s Pops series brings The Music of Elton John Starring Michael Cavanaugh through on September 26–27, 2026; Broadway in Erie’s current season has Mystic Pizza in October and Mrs. Doubtfire in December. Lake Erie Ballet performs there as well.
One honest limit: there’s no standing public-tour program. The building belongs to the Erie County Convention Center Authority and runs on its event calendar — tours happen “depending on the theatre’s schedule,” arranged ahead through the operations manager. Short of that, a ticket to a show is the way in.