Florida Theatre in Jacksonville, Florida

The Florida Theatre is a seven-story 1927 movie palace on East Forsyth Street in Downtown Jacksonville that still works as a live performance hall.

The theatre's own history page gives its address as 128 East Forsyth Street and says it opened on the night of April 8, 1927 as the largest theatre in the State of Florida. The National Park Service National Register record lists it as the Florida Theater at 128-134 E. Forsyth St. in Duval County, National Register Information System ID 82001034, with architects Hall and Benjamin and a period of significance of 1925 to 1949.

The 1982 National Register nomination describes a rectangular building of seven stories located in downtown Jacksonville two blocks north of the St. Johns River, taking up the greater portion of a city block along Forsyth Street. Offices fill the second through sixth stories across the front, the theater lobby sits behind the second, third and fourth bays of the main facade, and the auditorium takes up the rest of the building.

Publix Theatres, the Paramount Pictures arm that built and ran theatres, opened the Florida Theatre about nine and a half months after ground was broken, according to the theatre's history.

That history says building permit #1345 let Southern Enterprises, Inc. construct a seven-story concrete, fireproof theatre and commercial building with a roof garden on the corner of Forsyth and Newnan Streets, with R.E. Hall & Co., Inc. of New York as architects, Roy A. Benjamin of Jacksonville as associate architect, the George A. Fuller Company of New York as general contractor and an estimated value of $1.5 million.

The nomination and the theatre history date the start differently. The theatre history cites the Jacksonville Journal for foundation work beginning around June 20, 1926, while the National Register nomination says the building was begun on August 31, 1926, the date its footnotes give for city building permit 1345. Both agree on the opening date of April 8, 1927.

The pace on Forsyth Street came from method. The nomination says it was the first instance in the South where ready mix concrete was used, and that as a result it took only twenty-one days to lay the one million bricks used in the building; the theatre history describes the same feat as the first job anywhere in the South to use ready-mixed mortar to lay the bricks. The theatre history adds that 1,200 tons of steel arrived by rail in over 40 rail cars and that one balcony girder alone weighed 65 tons.

The Jacksonville structure is unusual for its long spans. According to the nomination, approximately two-thirds of the balcony is supported by two steel trusses, each of which spans ninety feet and is about eight and one-half feet deep, carrying roughly 4,500 square feet with no columns in the orchestra seats. Four more steel trusses about eleven feet deep span ninety feet over the auditorium ceiling and also hold up the seventh floor office space. Before the theatre, the corner held a police station and city jail, the theatre history records.

The National Register nomination calls the Jacksonville landmark a fine example of Mediterranean Revival style architecture adapted to meet the needs of a movie theater.

On the Forsyth Street side, it describes buff color brick highlighted with marble, terra-cotta and limestone details, a main facade marked by twin towers, a red tile roof and a baroque parapet, and an unusual brick bond in which the headers advance from the facade to make a raised pattern.

Inside the Jacksonville house, the nomination credits Michael Angello of Chicago with decor that combines French, Spanish and Italian motifs. The proscenium wall rises a full six stories, an orchestra pit for twenty-four musicians can be raised to stage level, the ceilings are deeply coffered and beamed, and the ceiling above the mezzanine is painted to simulate the sky. The theatre history spells the firm Michel Angelo Studios and says the same studio designed the interiors of the Tampa Theatre, which explains the resemblance between the two rooms. The Tampa Theatre says of itself that it opened on Oct. 15, 1926, designed by John Eberson.

The building was modern for its day. Both the nomination and the theatre history list central heating, air conditioning, a central vacuuming system, a roof top garden and a nursery for children of theatregoers; the theatre history calls it the first theatre in the city with central air conditioning and says the nursery did not close until 1952. The seventh story roof garden, with its dance floor overlooking the St. Johns River, was enclosed in 1938 to provide additional office space, the nomination states. The theatre history says the $100,000 Wurlitzer pipe organ was described by The Wurlitzer Co. as the second-largest unit of its kind it had manufactured.

For more than five decades the Florida Theatre ran as a commercial movie house with stage shows, then declined and closed on May 8, 1980, according to the theatre's history.

When it opened, that history says, admission was 25 and 50 cents for matinees and 25 and 60 cents at night, and the house was open 12 hours a day, from 11:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. It closed several times during the lean 1930s and kept going on promotions such as Screeno, a bingo game played on the movie screen, and Bank Night on Mondays with a $100 prize. WJAX, the City-owned radio station, often broadcast from the building.

The stage drew national names. The National Register nomination lists Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Sally Rand, Bob Hope and Elvis Presley among the stars who appeared there. The theatre history dates the Presley shows to August 10 and 11, 1956, six performances, all sold out, seen by over 10,000 people. The two sources disagree on their significance: the 1982 nomination says Presley's appearance here marked his first on a theater stage, while the theatre history calls the first indoor and first theatre claims pure mythology, noting that the Jacksonville dates closed a 25-show tour that had already played the Olympia Theatre in Miami and the Polk Theatre in Lakeland.

The Florida Theatre was a white only building under segregation, its history states, while Black audiences went to the Strand, the Center and the Ritz. Integration of its audience began in the mid to late 1960s. By 1970 the theatre was rundown, and the history says only 803 of its more than 1,900 seats were still functional before it closed.

The Arts Assembly of Jacksonville, a nonprofit corporation, bought the theatre from Plitt Southern Theatres, Inc. for $1 million on October 31, 1981 and reopened it as a performing arts center in October 1983.

The theatre history says the purchase used a $500,000 State of Florida grant, a $350,000 City of Jacksonville Community Development Block Grant and $150,000 in fundraised and borrowed funds, and that Mayor Jake Godbold backed the rescue as economic development for downtown.

The state handled the historic designation. The National Register nomination was prepared by the Florida Division of Archives, History and Records Management and dated May 4, 1982; it lists the Arts Assembly of Jacksonville as owner, rates the building's significance as local, and notes that restoration was expected to begin shortly. At the time it counted only three theaters of this type left in the entire State of Florida: the Tampa Theater, the Olympia in Miami and the Florida Theater. The theatre history says the building was officially accepted onto the National Register of Historic Places on December 28, 1982.

The restoration closed a loop with 1927. KBJ Architects, which steered the work with Herschel Shepard, had grown out of Roy Benjamin's firm, the theatre history says. The box office reopened on September 7, 1983, the Grand Re-Opening on October 1 featured the London Symphony Orchestra String Quartet and fiddler Vassar Clements, and between October 1, 1983 and March 4, 1984, 69,593 people attended 73 performances of 53 different events. On September 5, 2002 the Arcade Theatre collapsed, which the history says left the Florida Theatre the last historic theatre standing of the old downtown Jacksonville houses.

The main dates for the Jacksonville theatre run from the 1926 building permit to the 1983 reopening, as the official record and the theatre's own history set them out.

The City of Jacksonville has paid for repairs to the Forsyth Street building through a dedicated trust fund created by a 2014 ordinance.

Ordinance 2014-92-E appropriated $101,840 from Property Appraiser Capital Projects to the Florida Theatre Maintenance Trust Fund for repairs to the building's 4th and 6th floors so they could be rented to a third party, created section 111.550 of the Ordinance Code for that trust fund, and set standard lease agreements for office space in the building.

The building keeps changing in small ways. The theatre history says that in the summer of 2020 it replaced all of its seats with historically appropriate ones, and it lists the Jacksonville Historic Preservation Commission and the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation among the bodies that have honored the restoration. The theatre's centennial falls on April 8, 2027.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the Florida Theatre's own history page, the National Park Service record and 1982 nomination, and Ordinance 2014-92-E.