To Know the Future of the Fox, Look to Past
City-Times Special Report
“The Stevens Point Opera House”.
“The Majestic”.
“The Fox Theatre”.
Whatever name you associate with the Romanesque Revival- style building on Main Street, most people’s thoughts go to one place when they see it: When are they going to reopen?
The grandchildren of the building’s original owner, G.F. Andrae, say they hope that day comes soon, and despite communication marred by politics over the past 30 years, the family has said the building will still stay in the family.
“Someday we’ll get somebody to run it as a theatre, because the city is so interested,” Jeannette Sanders, granddaughter of Andrae, said in an interview with City Pages in 2005.
“The property is not for sale. Not for sale. It never has been and it never will be. My grandfather built it,” she added.
Originally designed in 1894 and steeped with history, politics came into the mix in 1979 with the creation of the Downtown Action Committee- a group charged with securing and promoting a new downtown mall.
The Sanders Family petitioned the building be added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 in an effort to protect the structure from demolition during the mall construction.
But soon the city would declare eminent domain and mall construction removed 40-50 feet off the rear of the theatre, taking with it the furnace, a dressing room and 25 house seats.
City records indicate officials tried to replace the furnace room with a payment of $74,525 to the family, but the newer heating system wasn’t compatible with the outdated systems of the building, and the Fox’s doors were closed by the theatre’s management company in 1985.
“It’s an amount of money that doesn’t adequately compensate the Sanders people,” said Larry Hanson, then- vice president Essaness Theatres of Chicago, told the Stevens Point Journal in a 1985 interview. Essaness had been hired by the Sanders Family to oversee daily management of the theatre, and argued the compensation wouldn’t cover replacing the entire heating system.
Since then, The Sanders Family say they’ve been approached by dozens of groups with just as many renovation ideas with offers to purchase the building, so the Fox Feasibility Committee (FCC) was created to act as an independent stopgap between the Sanders Family and the city.
Former UW-SP College of Fine Arts Dean Gerard McKenna currently chairs the committee, charged with studying possible future uses of the Fox.
“We understand the family’s concerns,” McKenna said.
“We are respectful of the family. We think there’s potential,” he added.
But FCC work couldn’t begin without funding.
“There is one and only one way to bring the Fox back to life,” Ada Sanders said during a public press conference held in front of the theatre in late January, 2011.
“And that is to vote ‘yes’ and pass the referendum,” she said.
Ada Sanders said she was enlisted by Mayor Andrew Halverson to help encourage voters to pass the $5.9 million referendum. But once the referendum was approved by voters, funding did not go directly to the Fox.
Instead, $22,000 was raised by the FCC, including donations from some committee members and a matching grant from the Jeffris Foundation, and the committee compiled its findings for the Sanders Family to review.
The FCC study includes potential business models and future revenue the business could generate.
During a brief phone conversation, Ada Sanders told the City-Times her family has been considering the FCC findings for several months, and could make a decision on the future of Fox once the mall demolition is complete.
She also added her family would decline a full interview until their decision had been made.
City Councilman Logan Beveridge, whose district surrounds the Fox, said he has a personal connection with the theatre and hopes to see it restored, calling it “the crown jewel in the downtown redevelopment project”.
Beveridge said his uncle worked as a projectionist there, and the alderman himself saw E.T.: The Extraterrestrial when he was three years old.
He added the city currently holds the title for the property.
“The Fox is going to need to get that 50 feet back that they lost when the mall was created- then that real estate would be transferred back to the Fox,” he said.