CBID approves plans for historic theater renovation

The Central Business Improvement District (CBID) okayed color and design schemes for restoration of the Sparks Theater exterior in downtown Fort Smith on 10th Street and Garrison Avenue Thursday (Dec. 13).

Commissioners approved the request from Jason Parker of Griffin Construction during the board’s meeting at First National Bank of Fort Smith. The colors will call for “natural tones” and will attempt to emulate two original photographs Fort Smith historian Joe Wasson was able to procure from a private collection.

Commissioner Richard Griffin recused himself from voting since it is his charitable foundation, which upkeeps the abandoned theater.

The Sparks Theater was built in 1911 as a vaudevillian theater and once featured legendary illusionist Harry Houdini as well as child starlet Shirley Temple. It held a capacity of 800 people and contained an 18-piece orchestra pit and two balconies. Today, it’s “pretty well gutted,” Griffin said, but that hasn’t stopped him from wanting to “restore it to its original splendor.”

“You could restore it in all kinds of ways,” Griffin said. “You could barely restore it and just make it functional, or you could bring it back to its original glory. … My vision for the building is that it can be restored to its original splendor, and that it could be a showplace for this community.”

Griffin continued: “It’s one of these buildings with exquisite interior and gilded moldings, just a beautiful building.”

The “original vision” for bringing the Sparks Theater back to prominence was a collaboration, Griffin added, with Joel Stubblefield, a former chancellor at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith (UAFS).

“We had conversations. In fact, they (UAFS) had invested some money in trying to restore that theater in its original splendor. It would have been part of the drama department and the music department. … Well, it was determined, to really put it back in real splendor, (to be) probably a $10 million project. We had some really good preliminary drawings and we actually acquired some property to the north of it so it would have green rooms, actors dressing rooms, classrooms because it was going to be part of the curriculum utilized in a satellite campus downtown. Joel died unexpectedly, and that vision didn’t come to fruition.”

Griffin said it was his goal to “keep it maintained,” but that the UAFS vision “is still out there. It’s just there are a lot of good projects in town, and they all take money.”

“What will ever come of this, I don’t know. But we’re going to make the outside of it look better, like it used to, and that’s at no cost to the community,” Griffin said, adding that he intends for the project to be completed “during the first six months of 2013.”

Also Thursday the CBID set Jan. 24, 2013, as the date of its yearly retreat to outline goals for the downtown Fort Smith area in the coming year.