DURHAM -- In the Carolina Theatre lobby, you can see a poster for Katharine Hepburn in "The Philadelphia Story" on its early-'40s post-Broadway tour. You can see 1960s demonstrators at the box office, and the 1920s neighborhood when the theater was new. Look close, and you can pick out the horse-drawn buggy in a street that no longer exists.
"It's a little bit of time travel," said Tim Alwran chairman of the Carolina's board.
That time travel is result of an exhibit on the theater's history, just installed on the main-lobby walls. It will grow over the next two years, to the second-floor ballroom and third-floor lobby, said Carolina CEO Bob Nocek. Those phases display and describe, respectively, the building's history, the volunteer drives of the 1970s and '80s to preserve and restore it, and the civil-rights era in which the theater was an early focal point.
The exhibit, Nocek said, "will enable everyone who visits here to understand what the Carolina Theatre has meant to Durham."
Entering the lobby, you are greeted by a mural of the theater's exterior circa 1930: a vintage photograph blown up and printed on wallpaper, with an explanatory title: "A Century of Downtown Durham: The History of the Carolina Theatre." To the left are more pictures - wall size, collages of images of shows and stars and times gone by, even some of the original blueprints.
"It's really neat to be able to see the sections of the building as well as the floor plans," said Chuck Samuels, whose Design Dimension is creating the exhibition.
"I'm frequently asked how old the theater is, has it always been a movie theater, has it been a home for live events, and the fact we're asked so often about the history of the building, it was really clear we needed to tell the story," Nocek said.
Today's Carolina opened, as the city-owned Durham Auditorium, with the "Kiwanis Jollies of 1926." It was built for live entertainment, such as vaudeville shows and touring orchestras, but it wasn't long before the City Council realized public taste was changing toward the movies.
Within five years of opening, the auditorium was renovated to make cinema its primary fare and the name "Carolina Theatre" reflected the change.
Still, some of the era's major stars graced the auditorium's stage, such as Hepburn, Lillian Gish in "Life With Father" and Tallulah Bankhead in "The Little Foxes."
Tenor Roland Hayes, being black, created an anomaly in the Jim Crow era - when he performed at the Carolina in 1932, the house's best seats were reserved for black patrons and whites were restricted to a roped-off section in the back.
The Carolina was home for trade shows, more local "follies," recitals and Saturday matinees, along with first-run picture shows and habitués of Broadway.
"It's fair to say it was the DPAC of its day," said Preservation Durham director Bob Ashley, referring to the Durham Performing Arts Center.
With downtown's decline as a commercial center, the Carolina became the last movie theater in the city center and in the mid-1970s demolition was a real possibility.
But a grassroots movement, led by preservation-minded foreign-movie fans Connie and Monte Moses, intervened to save and restore the theater and operate it as a nonprofit art cinema.
With city backing, the Carolina got a makeover and expansion in the late '80s and early '90s, and the new nonprofit Carolina Theatre of Durham Inc. became its manager.
Earlier this year, the Carolina closed $1.8 million worth of repairs and long-deferred maintenance by the city.
That completes an eight-year program of renovation, said former Carolina CEO Connie Campanaro, with a historical element envisioned as part of it early on.
"It is exciting to see this longtime project come to fruition," she said. "The grand finale, the history exhibit, will serve to strengthen the Carolina Theatre's position as a historic and treasured downtown theater."
The historical exhibit, though, is not part of the city's renovations. The exhibit's estimated cost of $75,000 is to be fully covered by private donors, said theater spokesman Aaron Bare.
"We're doing the best we can to tell the story and tell it objectively, and try to cover all our bases," Bare said.
"This is creating a permanent legacy in the building," Nocek said. "This was a story that needed to be told, that needed to be preserved."
