Urban Air and The Little Gym holds groundbreaking ceremony

Michael Bauer, Odessa American, Texas
·2 min read

May 13—Soon, the old Regal Cinemas movie theater at Music City Mall will be replaced with a new attraction.

Urban Air and The Little Gym will replace the former entertainment place by the end of the year.

A groundbreaking ceremony took place at the former movie theater on Monday.

"We are groundbreaking for the Urban Air Odessa and the Little Gym Odessa," owner Ginamarie Soto said after the ceremony. "We're so excited to bring this to our community. We're going to be proud sponsors of supporting kids and our area and to bring all the fun with go karts, bumper cars and the sky rider at Urban Air Odessa. Also, the Little Gym will be the first time ever where Urban Air and the Little Gym will be in the same place in the same town in all of the United States. It's huge. We're doing everything here in Odessa."

Soto is also the owner of Urban Air in Midland.

Its Midland location opened back in January of 2023.

Urban Air is an indoor adventure park with bumper cars, go karts, trampolines and climbing walls.

The project is expected to cost around $8 million.

"I think being locally raised here, you can make anything of yourself here," Soto said. "You can try hard and work hard. It's a small-business opportunity city. The mayor and all the city officials have supported us from the beginning when we started talking about this two years ago. This town is opened for business and we love it. We have an eight-year old kid and we thought, we brought it to the children in Midland, why not bring it to Odessa. We had the chance and this is the best space for us to put this here."

Currently, the movie theater is in the process of being cleared out with walls being torn down to make way for the new attraction.

Soto said they hope to have everything cleared out of the theater complex by August.

The goal is to have the place open by December of this year.

"We want to say thank you to everyone for the support and everything," Soto said. "It's so exciting. By August, you're going to see all the attractions go in. we have a bunch of dump trucks already here that are going to fill these holes in the movie theaters. We're removing a lot of seats. It's amazing. ... hopefully, we'll be open in December."