Columnist Susan Snyder: Huntridge is finally history

Friday, Jan. 4, 2002 | 8:42 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@vegas.com or 259-4082.

On New Year's Day David Lee walked into the old Huntridge Theatre with two other men and started tearing out the lights.

Lee and his co-workers aren't vandals. They were hired to help clean out the 58-year-old historic building that has been sold to a furniture store next door.

The Huntridge, which opened in 1944 to show Disney movies, hosted its final public event New Year's Eve -- a punk rock concert that attracted almost 850 fans to the theater that sits on the corner of East Charleston Boulevard and South Maryland Parkway.

Lee's trio stood outside Tuesday morning waiting for Eric Jordan, Friends of Huntridge Theatre Inc. president, to show up and open the building for a second day of cleaning.

A homeless man in thick clothes strolled from behind the theater and pawed through a trash can out front before making his way toward the street.

The building's peach and cobalt paint job looked garish by morning light. With burglar bars barricading its historically protected front doors, the Huntridge has almost always looked abandoned and worn by day.

"That's it," Lee said, staring at the curved marquee that still listed names of the New Year's bands.

"VooDoo Glow Skulls" and "GuttermOuth," leered at the empty parking lot from a space that in another age hawked "Cinderella" and "Jungle Book." From the other side of a concrete block wall, huge painted letters listed discount mattresses available at Cima's Furniture store.

Cima's owner paid $925,000 for the Huntridge. Mattresses sell better than history, these days.

"I saw my first movie here -- 'Jungle Book.' I grew up here," Jordan said as a worker pulled down another piece of the concert stage.

The Huntridge was placed on the state Historical Register in 1999, six years after it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Friends of Huntridge, a nonprofit group, worked nine years to save it.

Jordan says they didn't fail.

"The goal of the Friends of Huntridge was to save the Huntridge, and we've done that even though a lot of people don't agree with the way we did it," he said.

Historic preservation is about saving the outside, Jordan said, and selling it was the only way to do that. The terrazzo tile entrance, the original brick portion of the building, the curved marquee and the trademark Huntridge sign must remain until 2017 -- the year the building turns 73.

The new owner can do what he likes with the interior, most of which was gutted and renovated to accommodate the concerts that played out in the Huntridge's final years.

"It's maybe not the use we would like. We would like it to be a use that would be more public, but we can't control that," Jordan said. "If we had not sold it to someone who would abide by the covenants it would be a Walgreens or something."

The state spent $1.4 million in renovation grants on the place, and Jordan says his group will give the state whatever is left after paying off the $630,000 mortgage and other debts. Legally, they don't have to do that. But morally, they do, he said.

"People may look at this and think it was a waste, but it wasn't. The issue was always saving the building," Jordan said. "It's still here."

Until 2017.

Look while you can.