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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 Photograph Collection
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Historic Inventory of Columbia, Missouri, P0052. Item 72751-05.
The Hall Theatre was once Columbia's own movie palace, where talkies played thanks to a carefully designed orchestra pit.

Hall Theatre, a state-of-the-art movie palace built in 1916, used to stand where The Shot Bar is today on Ninth Street, though the main interior is gone. During the era of segregation, it was one of a few spaces where Columbia's Black community could watch films.

KBIA's Nora Crutcher McGowan shares Hall Theatre's history as part of Reverberations, a new project at KBIA that is uncovering the wealth of historical information housed within the State Historical Society of Missouri's archives.

This episode of Reverberations features the voices of:

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

Reverberations was produced using archival interviews from SHSMO's Haskell Monroe Oral History Collection. This series is a project from KBIA and The School of Visual Studies with support from Missouri Humanities.

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