The Tampa Theatre and the Sky That Never Gets Dark

A Movie Palace Where the Ceiling Is a Permanent Twilight

The Tampa Theatre at 711 North Franklin Street downtown is one of the most elaborately decorated movie palaces in America, and it was designed to make you forget, completely and immediately, that you are inside a building. The architect, John Eberson, specialized in what he called "atmospheric" theaters - auditoriums designed to resemble outdoor spaces, with ceilings painted to look like night skies and walls disguised as the facades of Mediterranean villages. Eberson built dozens of these theaters across the country in the 1920s. The Tampa Theatre, which opened in 1926, is his masterpiece, and walking into it is like stepping into a courtyard in Seville at permanent twilight.

I went on a Wednesday evening to see a film - some revival screening, I have honestly forgotten what - because the film is secondary. The building is the event. You enter through a lobby of Moorish arches and twisted columns, past a ticket booth that looks like a shrine, and into the auditorium, which opens above you in a barrel-vaulted ceiling painted to look like a dark blue sky with small lights embedded to simulate stars. The walls on either side are designed as building facades - balconies with wrought-iron railings, turrets with tiled roofs, windows with shutters that appear to be half-open, all of it lit in warm amber to suggest a Mediterranean evening that has been going on for roughly a century and shows no signs of ending.

The detail is astonishing. Gargoyles and cherubs perch on the walls. Plaster vines climb the columns. A stuffed bird - a parrot, I think - sits in a niche near the balcony, and I spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to determine whether it was real, which is exactly the kind of confusion Eberson was aiming for. The organ - a Mighty Wurlitzer, installed when the theater opened - still rises from the orchestra pit before certain screenings, playing show tunes and popular songs with the full-throated grandeur that only a theater organ can produce, which is to say a grandeur that is simultaneously magnificent and slightly ridiculous.

The theater nearly died. By the 1970s, it was a discount house showing second-run films to dwindling audiences, and the owner announced plans to demolish it. The citizens of Tampa organized, raised money, and convinced the city to buy the building. It has been a nonprofit performing arts venue since 1978, showing films, hosting concerts, and serving as a community anchor for downtown, which needed one badly during the decades when downtown Tampa was a place people left at five o'clock.

Here is the detail most visitors miss: before the film starts, look at the ceiling. The star lights are not static - they twinkle. A mechanism behind the ceiling surface creates a slow, irregular flicker that simulates the scintillation of real stars, and if you lean back in your seat and unfocus your eyes, the illusion is complete. You are sitting in a courtyard. The sky is above you. The air smells of popcorn and old velvet. The film starts, and the ceiling goes dark, and for two hours you are somewhere that is neither Tampa nor Seville nor any real place at all, but somewhere Eberson invented and the citizens of Tampa refused to let die. Screenings and events are listed on the theater's website. Go for anything. The building is the show.