Renovations Slated for One of the City’s Most Famous Historic Buildings – the City Auditorium.
Anyone who has lived in the Springs for a decent length of time has probably been to an event at the historic Colorado Springs City Auditorium. From high school graduations to roller derby bouts, Snoop Dogg concerts to cat shows, the venue has offered something for everyone since it was built 100 years ago.
The building was constructed in the 1920s to be a hub for events of all types in the city’s downtown. Through the years, the building has probably hosted the most diverse selection of concerts and events than anywhere else in the city.
However, over the last several years the building’s business model has changed as the building has not aged gracefully and it does not work for some types of events.
What is the City Auditorium Being Used for Now?
Even though renovations are planned for the building, it still serves as a place to hold a variety of events. The auditorium remains a hub for downtown events as it still gets used almost every day. In the month of February alone, the building hosted events like a Chinese New Year Celebration, communication workshops, performances from live improvisational comedy groups, and education conferences/seminars.
The building is now operating under a Memorandum of Understanding with the City of Colorado Springs and the Colorado Springs Community Cultural Collective (CSCCC). According to the organization’s president, Linda Weise, the agreement allows the group to be the sole occupants and users of the building.
“Our mission is to create a true community cultural hub for the use of the people and the glory of the city,” Weise said. “It is very intentional that it is the same mission that was in place when the building was built 100 years ago. We are activating the building by hosting community events and hosting our own events there. We think that is very important so that there is a new sense of what is possible in there.”
She said that while they host and produce events they work toward raising money to complete major renovations of the building. She said that the renovation plan that is in the works should start in the next 12 to 14 months and it is slated to take three to four years to be completed.
Plans for the City Auditorium
Since the building was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995, remodeling it while keeping key parts of the historic structure will take time and money. “It’s like building a ship inside a bottle,” Weise explained. “She (the auditorium) will effectively go from a 30,000 square foot sort of a usable ‘cafetorium,’ if you will, a gym with a stage to a 100,000 plus square foot cultural hub. It will host a myriad of resident organizations. It will host numerous conferences. It will become a draw for Colorado because nothing like this exists in our state. Imagine five years from now that place will be humming from 6 a.m. until after the speakeasy closes, which will be 2 a.m.”
According to the non-profit organization’s website, the proposed renovation plan includes a rehabilitation of the exterior of the building and a redesign of the interior of the facility. They plan to build an addition to the south side of the building and add two-floor levels that will replace the current arena seating area on the inside. The partial basement will have an orchestra pit, an event/theater venue, and commercial food and beverage partners.
CSCCC has partnered with Chris Wineman of the Semple Brown architect and design firm out of Denver to work on the project. Wineman and the firm have helped with several other projects in the state including the remodel of the former Denver Auditorium.
Wineman said that the new venue will have three spaces for performances by getting rid of the sloped seating. “So inside the historic shell, we can still have the stairs, the hallway, and the things that people remember as historic features,” Wineman said. “And then the space surrounding it will pretty much be new. That takes the place of the sloped seating. This allows us to have the opportunity to solve the ADA issues and the safety issues that are so much a problem with the current seating configuration.”
The project will entail removing the roof and dropping materials into the building from above in order to keep the historic shell. “The ceiling that you see in the building now sits below the primary roof structure,” Wineman explained. “And so we want to actually use the space up above that ceiling. In order to build these new second and third floors we are going to have to get big chunks of steel inside the building and we don’t want to blow a hole in the historic exterior to do that. So the least sensitive surface of the building is actually the roof. So the plan is to put a hole in the roof and utilize a crane to drop the steel structure through the roof and assemble it on the inside.”
Wineman said that the construction start date has not yet been set. He said that the city isn’t going to allow the construction to start until a predetermined amount of the money has been raised.
According to Weise, the organization is waiting to see what happens in the election and they are not sure exactly how much money they need to raise. “We don’t know what the exact amount is,” Weise said. “The city and the organization want to make this work, but there are a lot of moving pieces, especially in an election year. We don’t know what needs to be raised or what needs to be pledged, we just know that there needs to be a level of assuredness that the funds are there and that the community is working together to move it forward.”
History of the City Auditorium
This year the city auditorium celebrates its 100th birthday. The city approved the project in 1922, the construction was complete and the building opened up to the public in 1923. The total construction cost was said to be just over $424,000, which according to an online inflation calculator would be about $7.4 million today.
According to Leah Witherow, the Curator of History of the Colorado Springs Pioneer Museum, the building has a fascinating story. She explained that the roots of the City Auditorium can be traced back to the Progressive Era in 1909 when a group of about 75 women formed the Colorado Springs Civic League.
The Civic League’s purpose was to hold the government accountable, improve transparency, and clean up the city. And even though it would take 13 years to get it done, the group started advocating for a public auditorium shortly after they formed.
“They advocated for a public space to be used by and for the public,” Witherow explained. “The motto of the City Auditorium is really a perfect reflection of their ethos, which is ‘for the use of the people and the glory of the city.’ And they believed (and they were right) that this public building that was accessible to all would have a commercial value, a political value, a social value, and it even actually had a religious value because there were revivals and Evangelicals that toured the country and came and spoke there. It was a multi-purpose building for a growing city and they wanted it to be beautiful.”
Several Purposes Through the Years
Witherow said that the building served several purposes through the years because it had to have a commercial aspect to keep it afloat. It hosted conventions for several organizations and things like stock shows, horticulture shows, and new product shows. In the 1940s, it served as a service center for local troops stationed at Camp Carson.
After World War II, the building changed to more of an entertainment hub hosting things like wrestling matches and rock concerts. “One of the most powerful uses of that building was shortly after President Kennedy was assassinated, there was a public memorial for him held at the City Auditorium,” Witherow said. “So it has the capacity for these profound uses and then also for these pop culture uses as well. It served as a shelter for flood victims in the flood in 1965.”
She said that over the last hundred years, the building has been used for political speeches, graduations, church services, and the La Fiesta Bonita pageants and dances, which was the state’s largest celebration of Mexican culture in the 1950s.
“It has been celebratory, it has been a place of mourning and it has been a place for shock entertainment,” Witherow continued. “There have been rock concerts and the list of acts that have played there is really impressive. And at one point in the ‘80s they actually decided that they were going to ban all rock concerts. But you can see that the ban only lasted a short period of time.”
In October 1981, the city banned rock ‘n’ roll concerts at the auditorium because of the wear and tear on the building. But in February 1982, they were hosting rock bands again.
The building did close for a year (1975-76) for renovations, but for the most part ever since the building opened 100 years ago, it has always been place that held a diverse selection of entertainment. “It has really always been a space where there was room for everyone with every background and interest,” Witherow said. “It has always been a multi-purpose space from political, social, cultural, commercial, and religious, it has run the gamut.”
