You’ll feel it, even before you take your seat.
At the Landmark Theater, Victoria Bingham and Jamie Williams are both confident about that. Central New Yorkers long familiar with downtown’s grand old theater will experience its central auditorium in a different and more soulful way once it reopens in September, after months of restoration.
For the first time in almost a century, the audience will see that great hall in its true colors.
Bingham and Andre Kouznetsov are longtime artists and business partners from Fayetteville, where they restored and operate a bed and breakfast, the Iron Lion Inn. Joined by their son Nikolai, they are part of a skilled crew working for John Tiedemann, an architectural conservation specialist from New Jersey. The goal is restoring the original color scheme for much of the walls, ceiling and wildly elaborate ornamentation that dominate the great theater hall, first opened as a Loew’s movie house.
Williams, the project architect from Holmes King Kallquist & Associates, said this is the first time professional artists have restored the auditorium itself since the theater opened, in 1928. Landmark officials went into the $1.5 million project with dreams based on research, but impossible to verify by observation: Like the lobbies, they knew the central colors in the theater were supposed to be gold, red and a shade of green.
Not that they could tell. In large part, those shades had faded and meshed into a kind of brooding brown. Decades of tarnish, tobacco fumes from smokers and soot from a long-ago coal furnace had “deadened” the colors in the theater space, Williams said.
To bring them back essentially meant starting over. Tiedemann’s restoration crew stripped off layers of soot, dust and residue on the main walls and ceiling of the 3,000-seat theater. What they discovered and reemphasized is, well … soon enough, you can gauge the impact for yourself.
Bingham, colorist on the job, said she has identified 30 different colors originally used within the hall and its magnificent proscenium arch around the stage. Each restored shade helps give distinction to a prominent array of “grotesques” — a line of roaring, beast-like heads — as well as detailed grillwork, profiles of mythological figures and animals and an eye-catching valance portraying Eastern god-like figures, restored in detail by Andre Kouznetsov.
All of it is being brought back by artists with a goal of making everything stand out. That grim and sooty brown is now replaced by what Bingham calls a kind of “brassy gold and red.” Last week — despite plastic covering across all the seats, and towering scaffolding throughout the hall — those colors, illuminated by new LED lighting, were already striking enough to subtly transform the space.
For the community, the first chance to see the changes will be when the theater formally reopens on Sept. 9 for a 12-day run of the touring show of “Hamilton,” followed on Sept. 23 by a concert by David Byrne.
“When people walk in,” Bingham said, “they will be stunned.”
Williams shares that feeling, his reaction only sharpened by his intimacy with the theater’s long history. He never forgets its longshot, against-the-wall road to survival. In 1978, at 25, Williams was one of the earliest people hired by SALT — the “Syracuse Area Landmark Theatre” — a nonprofit created expressly to save the place.
Only a few years earlier, many wistful Central New Yorkers believed the old Loew’s State Theatre was surely doomed. The Loew’s chain wanted out. Other grand downtown theaters of its era — like the RKO Keith’s — had already been leveled in that shortsighted, demolish-first-and-worry-later phase of city history.
Go through the old files at the Onondaga Historical Association, and you learn quickly that by early 1975 — when a passionate community rally to save the place finally ignited — many journalists and observers were already describing the theater as a lost cause.
That it survived — much less that it could ascend into the kind of detailed, back-to-the-beginning beauty that we’re about to see — “is really a kind of a miracle,” said Dennis Connors, curator of history emeritus at the OHA.
In 1975, Connors was the young executive director of what is now the Preservation Association of Central New York. Many irreeplaceable landmarks, such as the old county courthouse by Clinton Square, had already fallen to the wrecking ball. A half-century ago, Connors recalls, the fledgling preservation group turned its attention to the theater after achieving last-ditch success in an effort to stop the gutting of Hanover Square.
A year later, Malcolm Sutton — whom Williams remembers as the true savior of the building — bought the theater and commercial space above it it from Loew’s, his longtime employer. Williams thinks Sutton always wanted to save the theater itself, but the local papers reported on how he soon asked a demolition specialist for an estimate, thus forcing a one-way-or-another resolution:
To save the theater would demand a serious offer — and someone with the chops to take it over.
“That was hanging over everyone’s head,” Connors said, though Sutton’s threat had a result. In 1977, he agreed to split off the office space above the Landmark, and to sell the theater itself for $65,000 to SALT — providing the group came up with the money. The emotional apex, Williams recalled, was a Harry Chapin benefit concert that raised $9,000.
By 1979, the deal was done and the place seemed safe from being razed. Williams described it as a breakthrough victory for the entire Syracuse preservation movement. But it also demanded a sober assessment of the theater’s condition. Decorative plaster casts were badly deteriorated. Wall fabrics, carpets and the original seats were often worn and tattered.
Williams’ role was to “help plan the eventual restoration,” which at the time seemed like a long and distant climb. You can imagine, then, how it felt for Williams last week — almost 50 years later — to stand in the balcony alongside Landmark executive director Mike Intaglietta, watching brilliant artists, atop scaffolding, put their brushes to the ceiling.
After so many years, Williams was keenly aware of the full magnitude, how despair about the theater in the early 1970s flipped into the beauty and success of what’s happening right now. The core financing is a $500,000 state grant, obtained through Assemblyman Bill Magnarelli, with the rest provided by a tapestry of many donors.
Intaglietta and Williams — always conscious of more work needing to be done — don’t see this as the biggest moment in the long, phase-by-phase restoration of the theater. They both agree the key pivot was the $16 million construction job in 2011 that expanded the stage enough to host Broadway shows, while Williams said the addition of a striking marquee four years ago also had lasting impact.
Still, they understand the power of what people will see and feel from their seats, in September. As Dennis Connors says, generations of Central New Yorkers forged lifetime memories in that theater, whether at movies or great concerts or public gatherings.
But you’d have to be more than 100 years old to remember the sheer beauty of the auditorium, when it opened.
In a few weeks, once “Hamilton” starts up, an entirely new generation will finally get that chance.
“This will be a moment,” said Williams, reflecting with pleasure on how the timing of the effort amplifies an already memorable summer for preservation in downtown Syracuse — especially with the simultaneous restoration of the art deco Chimes Building and the old Central High School, a project Williams describes as a particularly “big win.”
Thomas W. Lamb, the original Landmark architect, was a theater visionary who also designed a version of Madison Square Garden, built in 1925. The Loew’s theater in Syracuse, Williams said, was a jewel of Lamb’s Indo-Persian sequence of design, an inspired phase of brilliant, even over-the-top ornamentation.
“Something like this,” Intaglietta said, “will never be built again.”
That feeling was reflected in the everyday reverence of Bingham, Andre Kouznetsov and their son Nikolai, who paused from their duties last Wednesday for a brief conversation. Andre — a painter and muralist — said there’s lasting satisfaction “to work in a public place, because you’re doing the work for the people, not just you.”
As for Bingham, the challenge was recreating an elaborate 97-year-old color scheme in a vivid way that she hopes honors what Lamb intended, in 1928.
Beneath the faraway ripple of many voices in the vast hall, she stood with Kouznetsov and their son, near the towering scaffolding. Bingham explained the detailed importance of matching the right colors to every piece of ornamentation on the walls, as well as the painstaking necessity of recreating elaborate stencils on the ceiling, high above.
Of Kouznetsov, whose subtle touch will be a major part of the restoration, she said simply:
“He’s great at making something come to life.”
Her praise was fitting not only for his work, but for the whole back-from-the-brink triumph of the Landmark.
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