The ceiling of the Tampa Theatre has always been its most famous trick. Above the seats of the historic auditorium, a deep blue canopy glitters with backlit stars, twinkling against a sky that never quite looks like a roof. It was an illusion built in 1926 by the architect John Eberson, who wanted audiences to feel as though they were sitting in a Mediterranean courtyard under a clear night, and it has survived nearly everything the century since has thrown at it.
On Sunday, Oct. 11, the public gets its first chance to see that ceiling — and everything beneath it — after the theater's main auditorium was closed in March for the final phase of a restoration that has stretched across ten years. The open house runs from 1 to 5 p.m. and is free, with mini-tours of the restored space. It is the centerpiece of a week of centennial events that also includes a run of classic films, beginning Monday with "Casablanca." The theater's official 100th birthday party, set for Thursday, Oct. 15, is sold out.
For Jill Witecki, the theater's vice president and director of marketing and community, the week is personal. She first walked into the building on a junior high field trip and never got over it. "I fell in love with the building the first time I walked into it," she told Bay News 9. She can only make that claim because, half a century ago, the city of Tampa stepped in to save the place from the wrecking ball.
The Tampa Theatre opened on Oct. 15, 1926, in the middle of Florida's land boom, when the state was growing faster than almost anywhere else in the country. It was the city's first commercial building with air conditioning, a genuine luxury in the Florida heat, and a quarter bought a ticket that offered a cool escape as much as a movie. Sound pictures had not yet arrived; the theater's earliest films were silent, accompanied by a live orchestra and by the Mighty Wurlitzer organ that still sits in the building today.
Eberson, an Austrian-American architect who designed more than a hundred theaters and became the leading promoter of the "atmospheric" style, built the Tampa house as a deliberate exercise in elsewhere. The auditorium's embellishments — plasterwork and architectural flourishes drawn from a dozen countries — were meant to place a viewer in an undefined, dreamlike time and place, somewhere that was nowhere in particular. From floor to ceiling, the interior was designed to make everyday life dissolve at the door.
That the building still exists at all is a piece of civic luck. By the early 1970s, downtown movie palaces across America were being demolished or carved into multiplexes, and the Tampa Theatre was on the same path. In 1973, the city of Tampa rescued it from demolition. The theater was later listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and it now operates as a nonprofit — a rare case of a municipality deciding that a fantasy courtyard was worth keeping.
The restoration that culminates this month has been a long, expensive act of faith. The current phase alone represents more than $20 million invested, and it closed the main auditorium for months. What has emerged is the original splendor paired with modern machinery: backstage, vintage equipment now sits beside contemporary rigging, and an elevator has been installed to make the upper floors reachable. The theater's third floor, which Witecki showed off to Bay News 9 in 2023, had been old office space and a small apartment used for storage. It is now the theater's education wing.
"It's amazing. It's emotional because the city loves this building," Witecki said. "They rescued it 50 years ago, and now they are supporting this amazing transitional period in time."
The centennial week is structured as a series of thresholds. Members get the first look at the restored auditorium on Saturday, Oct. 10, at a party that includes a screening of "Clue." The general public follows on Sunday afternoon with the open house and its mini-tours. Then the movies begin in earnest: "Casablanca" on Monday, Oct. 12, at 7 p.m., with more classic films through the week. Thursday's sold-out birthday celebration will spill onto the sidewalk outside and include a ceremony inside, where the Wurlitzer will provide live accompaniment to Buster Keaton's 1924 silent comedy "Sherlock Jr." — a 102-year-old film scored on a nearly 100-year-old organ, in a room built to make both feel timeless.
The theater is not finished. Its next projects include restoring the Wurlitzer itself and converting unused office space into a lounge. But for one afternoon, the doors are open and the ceiling is lit, and anyone can walk in and look up.
A book about the theater's hundred-year history, written by the late Tampa historian, author and librarian Andy Huse, is also part of the centennial moment. The building has now outlasted the silent era, the studio system, the multiplex, and the wrecking ball — saved once by a city that decided it was worth the trouble, and restored by the same city a half-century later. On Sunday, the reward for that decision is simply a free tour, a dark blue sky, and a few hundred stars that never go out.