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The winding history of Columbia's Hall Theatre – from movie palace to Panera

Hall Theatre in 1978.
Courtesy of The State Historical Society of Missouri
The Hall Theatre was built as a state-of-the-art movie palace in 1916.

The Hall Theatre is a state-of-the-art movie palace built in 1916 that sits, unused, at the center of Columbia's downtown. The theater building stands where The Shot Bar is today on Ninth Street, though now the main interior is gone.

As part of our series Reverberations, KBIA's Nora Crutcher McGowan has been exploring the building's past, including its segregation history, through voices from the Haskell Monroe oral history collection, housed at the State Historical Society of Missouri.

This edition of the Reverberations series features the voices of:

  • Sehon Williams
  • Lorene Emmerson
  • Dianna Borsi O’Brien
  • Phil Gottschalk

Reverberations is a grant-funded, collaborative project from KBIA, the Missouri School of Journalism, and The School of Visual Studies, with support from Missouri Humanities. Special thanks to the State Historical Society of Missouri for partnering with this project to digitize and explore the Haskell Monroe Oral History Collection.

Nora is a senior studying cross-platform editing and producing at the Missouri School of Journalism.