Tampa Theatre Celebrates 100 Years of Cinema, Community and Starry Nights
It's hard to imagine now, but Tampa almost lost its iconic Tampa Theatre. As cities across the country demolished their aging atmospheric theaters, the Tampa community decided to save it in the 1970s. And we are so glad they did.
But that was many decades ago, and after a century of making memories, the bits and pieces were starting to fall…literally.
Not anymore. The first phase of the $24.5 million Second Century restoration and expansion project that has touched nearly every surface is wrapping up just in time for the theatre's 100th birthday.
And this month, as Tampa Theatre celebrates 100 years, the doors will reopen to welcome guests once again for what the team hopes will be another 100 years of connection, learning, and escape through cinema.
Tampa Theatre’s Jill Witecki recently gave us a hard-hat tour as the last restorations were completed, giving us insight into the monumental amount of work that was done here and what’s to come in the second century of our beloved city landmark.
Did you know? Tampa Theatre was the first public building to get air conditioning in Tampa, or as they called it back then, “man-made air.”
TBPM: The reopening is just in time for back-to-back holiday seasons!
Jill Witecki: We are reopening just in time for the Halloween season, which personally is my very favorite time of year. And those Ghost Tours are my very favorite tour to give. So, starting Oct. 19, that's the beginning of Halloween season for us this year. And we're going to pack in as many Ghosts of Tampa Theater tours as we possibly can through the end of the month.
That's a tour that we spend about two hours walking through the building, all the way up into the balcony, all the way down into the basement, and along the way telling the stories of six different entities that we have captured and recorded and know a little bit about over the years.
Related:
- We went on a Ghosts of Tampa Theatre Tour. Here's what to expect!
- Explore the full lineup of Tampa Theatre's 14th Annual “A Nightmare on Franklin Street” film screenings and tours.
TBPM: Ok, we have to ask since it's almost Halloween … any new ghost stories to report?
JW: One of the questions that we've gotten several times during all of this restoration work is how the Tampa Theatre ghosts feel about it. And I will tell you that it's been very quiet. We have not gotten a lot of stories from the crews about experiences, which I tend to think means that they approve — that the ghosts are happy about what's going on.
TBPM: Let’s talk about the importance of introducing this historic space to the next generation of young kids.
JW: This generation of kids that went to school during COVID, that grew up in the digital age, that has spent their entire life buried in a device, all of a sudden they're starting to look up, and they're starting to realize that there are community gathering places out there that you can go and have an experience with other human beings.
All of a sudden, we're seeing these articles talking about this new upcoming generation of young people rediscovering cinema and rediscovering the notion of a shared experience in a room with a thousand of your friends and neighbors. And we're here for it.
We've been here for it for 100 years, and we are so proud to be one of the places where this new generation is rediscovering the thing that their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents have all known for the past century.
TBPM: Thanks to the renovation and expansion, you’ll also be able to introduce kids and even adults to the magic of filmmaking and storytelling with the new education space!
JW: Over two floors, we're going to have about 3,000 square feet of dedicated space. This room right here will be the office for our new director of education. We've never had one before. It's a brand-new position for us.
We can take the little education program we've always done with our Summer Film Camp, our tours and our film talks and explode that into a year-round program for learners of all ages — from kids, adults, seniors and everything in between.
We're lucky to have some colleagues around the country who have built really incredible film education programs, so we're not reinventing the wheel.
TBPM: One of our favorite things about Tampa Theatre is the starry sky, a highlight of Eberson’s signature atmospheric design. We see it got a big upgrade, too!
JW: A big element of this project was addressing the iconic starry night sky. Over the years, plaster in the sky had started to fail. Literally, sometimes the sky was falling on our patrons if we had a particularly loud, booming concert –you would get some little flecks of plaster start to come down.
So that was a big deal. That needed some attention, so when this room was filled with scaffolding that went all the way up and then ended in what they call a dance floor, so there was a solid floor built up at the ceiling so that the workers could address all of that paint and plaster.
And they spent weeks scraping the old paint and plaster, doing a new skim coat of plaster over all of that, and then layers and layers of primer and paint to get back to that really deep color that the Tampa Theater sky is known for.
And then what you don't see yet, but you will, are the lights that then shine into that ceiling. There's a ring of ultraviolet light around the room that illuminates that sky and gets you to that really deep, inky color. So those stars really pop.
And the stars, too, got a little bit of attention.
Over the last hundred years, those stars have all been little individual light bulbs. Which meant that anytime a star went out, somebody had to crawl out on their belly over these catwalks and replace that individual light bulb.
We kept up with it pretty well, but it did mean that very rarely were all of the stars in the sky lit, and the stars that originally twinkled weren't necessarily twinkling anymore.
So, as part of this project, one of the goals was to kind of simplify the star field, and we did that with fiber optics. So now instead of individual light bulbs, there are two drivers up in the middle of the ceiling.
One is a solid star driver, one is a twinkle star driver, and from those spread all of the little fiber optic filaments coming down through the original holes for all the stars, and finally all of them are lit.
Out in the lobby, the atmospheric ceiling out there, those stars are going to get the same treatment.
That is the capstone of the atmospheric design, that feeling of being outside. And still to this day, we will send photos around the world to reporters who ask for them. And the comment that we sometimes get back is, “Oh, I thought you all were inside.” We are. It's a very convincing effect.
TBPM: And we hear you all are bringing back the “clouds!”
JW: When we opened in 1926, we opened with a cloud projector that would project these thin, wispy little clouds across the sky that would move across as you are watching your film. It's been decades since that cloud projector worked, and so that was something that we wanted to restore as part of this project.
We started talking to other theaters that had cloud machines, trying to find a new lighting instrument that would get the same effect. Turns out there's really only one company that builds them, and we got a sample in, and we shot it up in the ceiling, and it just didn't look right. It wasn't our wispy little clouds. These were big, fat, puffy clouds, and that didn't look right.
Our technical director, Lloyd, got up there and got the cloud machine. Now, it wasn't the original. This one we figured had been installed probably in the ‘50s but hadn't worked in decades. He got it working again … and now he is trying to “relamp” it so that it will run off an LED light source instead of an incandescent light source, giving it a little more life.
TBPM: In addition to being the first building in Tampa to have air conditioning, this theatre was well ahead of its time when it came to technology. These small but mighty technical details are pretty incredible.
JW: The level of detail that John Eberson incorporated into these buildings, and the fact that even though it was meant to look old, it was meant to look like it had always been here, even on day one, they were very technologically advanced.
I guess it's no surprise because John Eberson started his career as a lighting engineer. So that was his background, that kind of electrical circuitry and what you could do with light. The layers of magic that you could create with lighting effects were his background, and so he incorporated those into his buildings.
Ever wonder what inspired Eberson’s atmospheric theatre design style? Here’s what he told the Tampa Tribune on Oct. 15, 1926: “I have been wintering in Florida for the past several years, and it is from this state that I got the atmospheric idea. I was impressed with the colorful scenes that greeted me at Miami, Palm Beach and Tampa. Visions of Italian gardens, Spanish patios, Persian shrines and French formal gardens flashed through my mind, and at once I directed my energies to carrying out these ideas.”
TBPM: The renovation team also discovered lots of old trash … or really treasures now.
JW: When they started cutting holes in the ceiling, this treasure trove of artifacts fell out of the ceiling. Truly, the embodiment of one man's trash is another man’s treasure, because what we were finding was garbage from 100 years ago.
There's a spot in one of the bathrooms upstairs that has kind of a shoulder-height wall. And what we realized is that employees, over the years, taking their breaks up there, were chucking their soda bottles and their candy wrappers and their newspapers over the wall.
And all of it was landing in the ceiling, so when we opened it up, out it all came. Our archive got a whole influx of new things — all of them little snapshots of Tampa Theatre history.
And that's the neatest part to me about building this collection and doing the historic research: how all of those dots start to connect, and how we start to learn more about the employees who worked here back in the day — the manager who was here in 1930, who is one of our ghosts … every little bit of history that we learn about Tampa Theatre starts to shine a light on the other parts of history.
And even though we don't have any new ghost stories per se from this project, we have a whole new batch of history that is overlaying all of those stories that we tell.
Tampa Theatre's Grand Reopening Schedule
Sunday, Oct. 11: Public Open House from 1-5 p.m.
The public will have their first opportunity to tour the restoration of the historic Duncan Auditorium and be among the first to experience the new Digital Archives. At 3 p.m., retired CEO John Bell will join George Levesque onstage for a conversation about the restoration and to answer audience questions.
Monday-Wednesday, Oct. 12-14: Special Screenings at 7 p.m.
Tampa Theatre is showing two of the most requested, highest-attended classic films in its programmatic history as the first two films in the newly restored auditorium, along with a third film. Tickets are $13.
- Monday, Oct. 12: “Casablanca” (1942, 1h 42m, PG)
- Tuesday, Oct. 13: “The Wizard of Oz” (1939, 1h 42m, PG)
- Wednesday, Oct. 14: “A Night at the Opera” (1935, 1h 36m, Not Rated)
Thursday, Oct. 15: Tampa Theatre Turns 100 | Centennial Celebration at 6 p.m.
The historic night will include dancing, professional portraits in front of the historic marquee, and a screening of the 1924 silent comedy “Sherlock Jr.,” starring Buster Keaton, with music by the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra and Tampa Theatre’s own Mighty Wurlitzer Theatre Organ. Admission is $26.
14th Annual “A Nightmare on Franklin Street” returns Oct. 19-31, 2026
There's something spooky for everyone in the family, whether it's a Ghosts of Tampa Theatre Tour, a screening of classic horror movies like “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” or something not-so-scary for the kiddos during the “Mummy and Me” screenings with films like “Hocus Pocus” and “K-Pop Demon Hunters.” Explore more and book your tickets here.
*Originally published in the October 2026 issue of Tampa Bay Parenting Magazine.