Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:30:00

The neon sign alone cost 85,000 dollars to resurrect - the beacon of a Route 66 movie palace that sat dark for nearly thirty years before Oklahoma City brought it back. The Tower Theatre at 425 NW 23rd Street anchors the Uptown 23rd district. Architect W. Scott Dunne designed the Art Deco house, which opened July 15, 1937 as one of the city's first suburban theaters - an ornate auditorium with a working stage, a Robert Morton pipe organ in the pit and scarlet waterfall curtains. Renovations in 1953 and 1968 carried it through the movie decades, but the theater closed in 1989 after a final stretch as an adult cinema, and apart from a brief 1990s music interlude the building sat vacant. The Pivot Project - Ben Sellers, David Wanzer and Jonathan Dodson - bought the property in 2014 and spent 6.5 million dollars on a historic tax-credit restoration: the facade, terrazzo, marble and ticket booth rebuilt to historic profiles, the ceiling laser-scanned and reconstructed, and the 1937 balcony seats restored. The venue reopened in February 2017 under Levelland Productions as a roughly 1,000-capacity live music room, sharing the block with bars and restaurants that followed the marquee's light back to 23rd Street. The terraced main floor flexes between general-admission concerts, seated shows, film festivals and private events, with the original projectors preserved - one relocated to the lobby. The Tower's revival is the OKC formula in miniature: take the landmark the highway era left behind, relight the sign, and let the neighborhood reassemble around it. The project's financing became a local case study - roughly forty percent of the renovation costs were covered by historic tax credits - and the upstairs offices filled with lobbyists, artists and investors before the first show, proving the mixed-use math that has since revived a string of 23rd Street buildings.