Mark Bennett: Sign of the times, Indiana Theatre marquee going digital

When snow or sleet fell, a perilous adventure awaited Rob Lundstrom.

Anytime a special event was impending at the Indiana Theatre, Lundstrom had to update the sign atop the historic venue’s marquee. The task seems simple, but it wasn’t.

MET 052024 INDIANA LUNDSTROM WINDOW

Indiana Theatre volunteer caretaker Rob Lundstrom steps through a window in the rotunda of the theater to reach the roof of the marquee on Monday on Ohio Street. The two metal platforms in front of the marquee are what Lundstrom would stand on to change the letters on the front of the marquee throughout the years.

His periodic journeys to the marquee sign overlooking the corner of Ohio and Seventh streets would fit perfectly in an action-movie escape scene.

Lundstrom would first enter a closet-size room within a wall inside the 102-year-old theater’s ornate rotunda. That room housed an iron ladder, which Lundstrom climbed to its top. Then he’d step carefully onto a narrow walkway encircling the rotunda. The walkway led to a small door accessing the marquee’s roof.

Once there, Lundstrom walked outside to the roof’s edge and stepped onto a small platform, before tiptoeing along a 9-inch-wide metal ledge as he reworded the sign. Below him, cars and trucks sped by on Ohio and Seventh.

James Bond would be proud.

“I’d have people honking at me, and saying, ‘Don’t fall,’” Lundstrom said. “Great idea.”

The marquee’s brittle, metal letters had to be hung on wires running horizontally across the sign. Those letters weighed too much to be hoisted and securely positioned with a wand from street level. “If you didn’t get them on there correctly, they would fall to the sidewalk and smash [to pieces],” Lundstrom said. And those letters for the World War II-era sign are no longer manufactured.

So the climb was necessary.

“Imagine doing that on a rainy day,” Lundstrom said. “I’ve been up there in snow and ice.”

Lundstrom owned and operated the Indiana from 2013 to 2021, and today serves as its volunteer caretaker and advocate. Thus, he continued to do the tricky, antiquated sign updates himself. He didn’t feel comfortable leaving that task to others.

1930 marquee.jpg

The Indiana Theatre marquee sign is shown in its original form in this 1930 photograph.

“It truly wasn’t a safe, sustainable approach to [keeping the sign current],” Lundstrom said Monday.

That’s a major reason the Indiana is getting a new digital, LED marquee sign, with a look nearly identical to the classic one recognized by generations of Hauteans and visitors.

“You can sit from your desktop [computer] in the office and program it anyway you want to,” said Chris Switzer, a Vigo County commissioner and member of the county’s Capital Improvement Board. The CIB now owns the 1922-era theater and is preparing to renovate it as a multipurpose facility, a costly but culturally important venture that ideally will attract private developers.

The new marquee sign is being designed and produced by Green Sign of Greensburg at a cost of $185,098, Switzer said. Its cost will be paid from Terre Haute Convention and Visitors Bureau funds generated by the local innkeepers tax, Switzer explained.

The old sign, still functional but fragile, graced the front of the Indiana since at least 1947. Green Sign employees, joined by Lundstrom and Switzer, gently removed the old sign with a hoist on Monday morning and guided it into a storage space on the theater’s stage.

If all goes as planned, the old marquee sign will become an outdoor exhibit at the Vigo County History Center on Wabash Avenue, where it will be permanently situated atop the west facade of that three-story building later this year, said Marla Flowers, the center’s executive director.

1933 marquee.jpg

Through its first two decades, the Indiana Theatre marquee’s signage changed several times. This is how it appeared in 1933.

Meanwhile back at the Indiana, the new digital marquee sign should be in place by autumn, Switzer said.

An outpouring of sentimental nostalgia for the theater’s classic marquee sign has come, and that’s understandable. Residents of a certain age remember seeing favorite movie titles emblazoned on the marquee sparkling overhead as they walked into the venue for a first date or a family night out with mom and dad. But folks of an even older vintage may recall the marquee sign that just came down wasn’t the theater’s original. The latest sign had a handful of predecessors.

Crews began constructing the Indiana in early 1921, bringing to life the renowned theater architect John Eberson’s “atmospheric theater” design, which was meant to blend imagery and sensory aspects in a “larger than life” style. The Indiana was Eberson’s first of that genre, and its rooms are designed to take visitors through a life-cycle of a day. The Spanish Revival structure opened to great community fanfare on Jan. 28, 1922. It cost $750,000 to build, the equivalent of $13.9 million today.

The earliest photographs and artist renderings of the theater show a glowing marquee. It featured a large, lighted “Indiana” arched across the top of its facade, topped by a 12-foot-tall peacock formed with 3,000 lights. Its main sign had movie information beneath a smaller “Indiana” and faced the intersection. A separate movie-info sign was lofted so it could be read by travelers on Ohio and Seventh streets.

1941 marquee.jpg

The Indiana Theatre marquee sign took on a more minimalist look in 1941.

The dazzling peacock didn’t last long. It was removed late in 1922, because vaudeville performers considered the bird to be bad luck, according to a 2004 Tribune-Star report.

The marquee’s look evolved through the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, as its main signs changed. Multi-panel, movie-based marquee signs were used in the mid-1930s, without the smaller “Indiana” label. The marquee sign took on a slightly minimalist style in the early ‘40s, with the word “Indiana” returned to its center. After World War II, the marquee sign that would hang for more than 70 years went up. Eventually, the glowing, arched “Indiana” came down.

Hauteans already miss the classic marquee. Lundstrom understands. He has his own fond remembrances of trips from his boyhood home near Collett Park with his mom to watch John Wayne movies at the Indiana. He calls the theater “a vault of memories.”

Still, Lundstrom also reminds the public of the cherished old marquee sign’s “limited utility.”

“There really wasn’t a choice but to change it,” he said. “But [the new sign] is going to have all the same look and capability, and more.”

Its intended new home, the History Center on Wabash Avenue, is preparing for its arrival. A structural engineer must first inspect the 1895-era building to see if its west exterior wall can hold the marquee sign’s weight, Flowers said.

1949 marquee.jpg

By 1949, the Indiana Theatre marquee’s main sign became the one that would be seen through 2024, but at the time was flanked by additional signs promoting the latest films.

“I just want to make sure it’s not going to hurt our building,” Flowers said. “That’s the next step. Then, we’ve got to get some electrical hooked up [to power the sign’s lights].”

Flowers envisions the History Center’s west wall becoming an outdoor exhibit of bygone Terre Haute signs, a smaller version of the Neon Museum in Las Vegas. The old Indiana Theatre marquee sign will hang at its top, three stores above Wabash Avenue.

“I think it would be really cool to be driving east and see it all lit up, up there,” Flowers said.

The History Center will have to choose a timeless message for the theater sign. After all, it’ll hang three stories high. Changing its wording will be even more daunting than in its days above the Indiana. So, the letters will be more permanently affixed, Flowers said.

Sorry to spoil the fun, Agent 007.