Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:29:00

Mary Pickford suggested the name, Carole Lombard attended the opening, and the marquee has anchored Broad Ripple ever since. The Vogue at 6259 North College Avenue in Indianapolis opened on June 18, 1938 as an 800-seat Art Moderne movie house built by showman Carl Niesse, screening College Swing with Bob Hope for a quarter a ticket. The theater was among the first anywhere with air conditioning and advertised the largest free parking lot of any motion picture house - 400 cars - running as one of the Midwest's premier neighborhood cinemas through the 1940s and 50s. Television killed the first act: Niesse sold in 1954, and after decades of decline the building bottomed out screening adult films in the mid-1970s before investors spent 500,000 dollars converting it - tiered seating, oak floors, a balcony, a larger stage, three bars - into a nightclub that opened New Year's Eve 1977 to a sold-out house. The second act made the legend: Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Frank Zappa, the Ramones, Blondie, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and John Mellencamp have all played the room, which mixes national tours with DJ and retro dance nights. Ownership passed in 2019 to the Forty5 venue group, which also programs the Tobias Theater at Newfields and Bloomington's Bluebird, keeping the 900-odd-capacity room central to the Indiana touring circuit. The Indianapolis Monthly and NUVO reader polls have named it best in the city repeatedly, and the neon marquee remains the reference point by which directions in Broad Ripple are given. Nearly ninety years from opening night, the Vogue has survived every threat a neighborhood theater can face by the same method each time: changing what plays while keeping the room. The room's retro dance nights deserve their own line in the ledger: The Vogue's themed parties have run long enough to become generational hand-me-downs, with parents who met on the floor in the 1980s now standing in line with their adult children for the same DJ formats.