Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 01:11:00

Chandeliers shaped like war drums, air vents disguised as Navajo rugs, garlanded buffalo skulls with glowing amber eyes - and a resident ghost appeased with doughnuts. The KiMo Theatre, at 423 Central Avenue NW on old Route 66 in downtown Albuquerque, opened on 19 September 1927 as the first theatre ever built in the Pueblo Deco style. Italian immigrant Oreste Bachechi - who arrived in 1885 and built a fortune from a tent by the railroad tracks - commissioned the Boller Brothers to fuse Art Deco with Pueblo, Navajo and Apache design, at a time when movie palaces defaulted to Chinese and Egyptian fantasy. The 150,000-dollar interior evokes a ceremonial kiva, with Carl Von Hassler's seven oil murals of the Seven Cities of Cibola; Isleta Pueblo's Pablo Abeita won 50 dollars for naming it KiMo - liberally, "king of its kind." The opening night mixed Native dancers and singers, an 18,000-dollar Wurlitzer and a silent comedy, with congratulatory telegrams from Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Cecil B. DeMille. Decline followed mid-century: a 1961 fire destroyed the stage, the theatre closed in 1968, and demolition loomed until Albuquerque's citizens voted in 1977 for the city to buy and restore it. The ghost story is civic canon: six-year-old Bobby Darnall died when the lobby water heater exploded in August 1951, and theatre lore holds that productions failing to leave him gifts suffer mysterious mishaps - so a backstage pipe permanently hosts doughnuts, toys and candy, and the shows run smoother for it. A bonneted woman is also said to stroll the halls, disturbing no one. Practical notes: the city-owned, 650-seat KiMo programs films, concerts, theatre and community events year-round; it anchors Central Avenue's downtown strip with the rest of Route 66's neon a walkable line east and west, and the building itself - listed and lovingly restored - justifies a visit between shows.