The Lost Movie Theaters of Rockford, Illinois

When we think about Rockford's old movie theaters, three names tend to dominate the conversation: the Coronado Theatre, the Midway Theatre, and the Times Theatre.

There is a pretty good reason for that.

They're still here.

The Coronado remains one of Rockford's great architectural treasures. The Midway still stands on East State Street, its tower and marquee surviving despite decades of uncertainty. And the Times Theatre on North Main Street has been the subject of a long-running restoration effort.

But these weren't the only places Rockford residents went to the movies.

Not even close.

For much of the twentieth century, Rockford had a surprisingly large collection of movie houses scattered around downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods. Most have disappeared so completely that it's difficult today to imagine a time when going to the movies in Rockford didn't mean driving out to a multiplex.

The Midway Theatre

The Midway is the oldest of Rockford's three most recognizable surviving movie houses.

It opened on August 3, 1918, at 721 East State Street. Architect J.E.O. Pridmore designed the Spanish Renaissance-style building, which included much more than a movie theater. The complex also contained storefronts, apartments and even a bowling alley in the basement.

The Midway was reportedly the largest theater in Illinois outside Chicago when it opened.

Its location also explains its name. At the time it was built, the theater stood roughly midway between Rockford's city limits.

For generations of Rockford residents, the Midway was simply part of the landscape of East State Street.

A devastating fire gutted much of the building in 1980, although the distinctive façade, marquee and tower survived. The building was restored and later became home to the Rockford Symphony Orchestra before the orchestra moved to the Coronado.

Today the Midway remains one of those Rockford buildings almost everyone recognizes, even if fewer and fewer people remember actually seeing a movie there.

The Coronado Theatre

If the Midway was impressive, the Coronado Theatre was designed to overwhelm you.

The Coronado opened on October 9, 1927, at 314 North Main Street. It cost approximately $1.5 million to build and seated about 2,400 people.

It wasn't merely a room containing a movie screen.

The Coronado was an atmospheric theater, designed to make audiences feel as though they had entered another world. Spanish castles, Italian villas, dragons and a ceiling resembling a star-filled night sky surrounded moviegoers. There was even a massive Barton pipe organ.

It quickly became known as "Rockford's Wonder Theatre."

Movies were only part of the attraction. Over the decades the Coronado hosted performers including Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Bob Hope, Sammy Davis Jr., the Marx Brothers and George Gershwin.

Unlike so many of America's great movie palaces, the Coronado survived.

After an enormous community restoration effort around the turn of the twenty-first century, it emerged as the Coronado Performing Arts Center and remains one of the most spectacular buildings in Rockford.

The Times Theatre

The Times came slightly later.

Located at 226 North Main Street, the Times Theatre opened on March 30, 1938, with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Thoroughbreds Don't Cry.

Architecturally, it belonged to a different generation than the elaborate Coronado. The Times embraced the sleek curves and horizontal lines of Streamline Moderne, giving downtown Rockford a thoroughly modern movie theater for the late 1930s.

The theater had roughly 1,000 seats and remained a movie house for decades.

Its final film was The Entity, starring Barbara Hershey, when the Times closed in February 1983.

The building later became a restaurant, nightclub and entertainment venue before sitting vacant for years. More recently, preservation efforts have attempted to bring the Times back to life as an entertainment venue.

But even these three theaters tell only part of the story.

The State Theatre

One of the most significant Rockford theaters to disappear completely was the State Theatre at 105 West State Street.

Its history actually began as the Palm Theatre, which opened in 1913. After remodeling and a period of closure, it reopened as the State Theatre in September 1931.

The State wasn't trying to compete with the Coronado by being another gigantic fantasy palace. Its business model included showing major movies on their second runs at affordable prices.

Its slogan said it nicely:

"Good Shows at Reasonable Prices."

The State survived the Depression, World War II and the arrival of television, but it didn't survive downtown redevelopment.

It closed in September 1976 and was demolished later that year. The Luther Center apartment building eventually occupied the site.

Today there is virtually nothing there to suggest generations of Rockford residents once lined up at that location to see movies.

The Capitol Theatre

The Capitol Theatre, at 1122 South Main Street, was another substantial Rockford movie house.

Built in 1928 by Anthony Domino and Theodore Ingrassia, the approximately 1,000-seat Capitol was designed by Rockford architect Wybe J. van der Meer.

Like the Coronado, the Capitol was an atmospheric theater, although on a smaller scale. Its auditorium had a Spanish garden theme and a ceiling where artificial stars twinkled overhead. The building's Spanish Colonial exterior included a red tile roof and terra-cotta medallions depicting famous cultural figures.

The Capitol showed movies, hosted vaudeville performers and later became a venue for live music. Performers associated with the theater included Aretha Franklin and James Brown.

Eventually the movies stopped. The building subsequently served other purposes, including a billiard hall and restaurant, before falling vacant and deteriorating.

The auditorium was finally demolished in December 2025, although the historic South Main Street façade remained standing.

For nearly a century, however, the Capitol was another reminder that Rockford's movie theater history extended well beyond downtown.

And There Were More

This is where Rockford's theater history becomes wonderfully murky.

Old theater directories and historical records contain a remarkable collection of additional Rockford movie-house names: the Rex Theatre, Royal Theatre, Strand, Roxy, Auburn Theatre, Capri Theatre, Crest Theatre, Dreamland Theatre, Liberty Theatre, Lyric Theatre, Majestic Theater, Orpheum Theatre and Palace Theatre, among others.

Some of these names represented the same building at different times. Some operated relatively briefly. For others, fragments of information survive but not enough to reconstruct their stories without considerably more digging through old newspapers, city directories and theater-industry publications.

There were also later neighborhood and shopping-center theaters, including the Colonial Village Cinema, North Towne Cinemas and Northridge theaters, followed by the multiplex era familiar to more recent generations.

And Rockford had drive-ins, including the Belford, Robin and Sunset, which deserve their own place in the city's moviegoing memory.

The point isn't really to compile every theater that ever projected a movie in Rockford.

It's to remember how thoroughly movies were once woven into the physical fabric of the city.

People didn't necessarily travel across town to a giant complex containing twelve or twenty screens. There were theaters downtown. There were theaters in neighborhoods. There were grand movie palaces and modest second-run houses. There were places where you could spend an afternoon watching cartoons and places where simply walking through the lobby must have felt like entering another country.

Most of them disappeared.

The State is gone. The Capitol auditorium is gone. Many of the smaller theaters disappeared so thoroughly that their names now sound almost imaginary.

Dreamland. The Palace. The Majestic. The Lyric.

But the Coronado survived.

The Midway survived.

The Times survived.

And if you stand in front of any one of them long enough, it's worth remembering that these buildings aren't the remnants of three unusual theaters Rockford happened to have.

They're the survivors of an entire moviegoing city that has mostly vanished.