There is a dome over the auditorium at 2 East Avenue with 150 lights in it. Old gold, the color is called. It has been lit over audiences in Lockport since the summer of 1925, went dark for three years, was nearly knocked down for a parking lot, and is currently owned by the town that refused to let that happen.
Opening night, July 18, 1925
The Palace opened on July 18, 1925, built for the Lock City Theater Company and designed by Leon H. Lempert & Son of Rochester, a firm that put theatres up all over the Northeast. It seated about 1,725 across three levels. There was a $25,000 Wurlitzer organ, a proscenium roughly forty feet by twenty-five, and enough plaster and gilt to make the point.
The company's president, A. Edmund Lee, said the thing on opening night that the theatre has been quoting ever since. The Palace, he said, was built:
not for the aristocracy, but for all the people
He also claimed they had "extended Broadway into Lockport and to the people of Niagara," which is the kind of sentence a man says at his own grand opening. The first half of it, though, turned out to be a promise the building actually kept, and eventually the only reason it survived.
Eberson, out of character
In 1936 the interior was redesigned by John Eberson, and if you know anything about movie palaces that name is a small surprise. Eberson invented the atmospheric theatre: auditoriums done up as Spanish courtyards or Italian gardens, with a plaster sky overhead, twinkling stars, and projected clouds drifting across the ceiling. He built dozens of them. It was his whole signature.
At Lockport he did none of that. The 1936 Palace interior is neo-classical: restrained, ordered, deliberately not a fantasy. It is Eberson working against type in a small canal city, and the room you sit in today is largely his.
Literature enthroned, with Music and Tragedy
What Eberson left alone, mostly, was the art. The central mural shows Literature enthroned, flanked by Music on one side and Tragedy on the other. Other panels are titled "Spring Song" and "Playtime." Above all of it is the dome, old gold, ringed with those 150 lights.
This is a great deal of allegory for a town of twenty-odd thousand people, and that is exactly the tell. Nobody puts Literature on a throne in a building meant to be temporary. Lee's line about all the people was not modesty. It was a claim that ordinary Lockport deserved the same ceiling as anybody in Manhattan, and then somebody went ahead and painted it.
Closed 1969. Nearly gone 1972.
The Palace closed in 1969 and sat empty for the better part of three years. In 1972 a developer bought it intending to level the building and put in a parking lot.
What saved it was not sentiment. It was arithmetic. Demolishing a 1925 theatre turned out to cost more than the developer wanted to spend, so the plan was abandoned, and the Dipson chain reopened the place that same year. One of the finest interiors in Niagara County is still standing because tearing it down was inconvenient.
It ran films for another quarter century, showed its last one under that arrangement in 1999, and was leased by a local production company through 2003.
Bought by the town, more or less
In December 2003, a community-based nonprofit, Historic Palace Theatre Inc., bought the whole complex, theatre plus the attached retail and office space, for $250,000. It has been community-owned and community-run ever since, with the same executive director in place since the purchase.
A digital projector went in around 2013. A major restoration ran from 2018 into 2022: the ceiling murals conserved, the stencil work and plaster repaired, a counterweight rigging system installed, the orchestra pit widened and deepened with a hydraulic lift, the lobby redone. Preservation Buffalo Niagara gave the project a 2025 preservation award for it.
The building hit one hundred in 2025, still open, still booking films and live shows. Very few of the movie palaces that opened alongside it in 1925 can say any part of that sentence.
Wear it
Our Palace Theatre design is the marquee and the front elevation, the version of the building Lockport has been walking past for a century.
Three more blocks of the same downtown are in the collection. The Big Bridge is the widest thing you will ever cross without noticing, the Upside-Down Bridge carries its truss beneath the train, and the Flight of Five is the lock staircase that put a canal over a cliff and gave the town a reason to build a theatre in the first place.
Every other town we've drawn is in the full town-by-town guide, and the shirts are in the ALL America City collection.