Despite a stripped interior, the Anthony Wayne Theater still exudes a sense of grandeur. At 97 years old this June, its sweeping facades, cavernous theaters and mosaic tiled floors recreate an image of forgotten wealth and, hopefully, future prosperity, thanks to the Anthony Wayne Theater Organization (AWTO).
The AWTO is led by Todd Scott, a 59-year-old Radnor resident and founder of Platoon Fitness. For almost a decade, he’s had a vision for the theater. Once the jewel of the Main Line, it had become second-rate after decades of mismanagement.
He took notice of locals complaining about narrow seats, choppy sound and projection bulbs that seemed like they hadn’t been changed in decades. And in 2020, when the pandemic shut down the Anthony Wayne Theater, Scott saw his opportunity.
A Vision for the Anthony Wayne Theater
As the fog of the global shutdown began to clear in 2022, Scott approached the property’s owner, Stephen Bajas, about restoring the theater to its former splendor. Though Scott was originally rebuffed, it wouldn’t be long before Bajas came to see Scott’s plan more clearly.
“About eight months ago, I was approached by [Bajas],” Scott shares.
“Are you still interested?” Bajas asked him.
“Yeah, I have a vision, and it’s a nonprofit that’s community-centered. I don’t want to open a restaurant that would pull from other restaurants. I want to help the restaurants and the businesses in the area,” Scott explained to him.
“I wrote it up, and we got lucky enough that he let us do it. So I pulled together a board and now we’re on our way,” Scott adds.
A Work in Progress
In the eight months since Scott’s plan has come to fruition, there has been a tremendous amount of work done on the interior of the theater, but much labor remains before movies will be screened there.
Though the grand facade of the building, a monolith reminding passersby of a more refined past, still looms over the 100 block of Lancaster Avenue, its interior is a stark reminder of the scope of a project of such magnitude.
Every seat has been removed from each theater, walls have been demolished to find boarded-up rooms, there are potholes in the floor like armed landmines and Scott must use a flashlight during his tours as lighting throughout the building is sparse.
Nevertheless, the town is enraptured by the project. Rarely does a day go by when Scott fails to hear a knock on the covered-up glass windows out front. Residents are eager for their theater to return, and they want to know about the man behind the project. Does he have the town’s best interests at heart? Is he just doing it for the money? Will he pack up and leave when the going gets tough?
As far as Ken Kearns, president of the board of the Wayne Business Association, is concerned, Scott’s project seems entirely authentic.
“There’s a great group that’s involved, that’s got the wherewithal, but also the connections and the ability to figure out how to not only program [the theater], but operate it properly,” Kearns observes. “The nice thing is that they’re all doing it for the right reasons, which is that they understand the importance of that key piece of the community and also what that does from an economic development standpoint for the rest of the community.”
Kearns’s role on the Wayne Business Association isn’t his only connection to the town. He’s also the owner of 118 North, a local music venue just blocks away from the theater, and he notes that the idea of the extra foot traffic created by the theater has local business owners invested in the project.
“Everybody wants to see [the theater] figured out and understands the importance of having that in our community and what it does to support other businesses around, at the restaurants and shops that are all adjacent that are going to feed off of the traffic into the theater,” Kearns adds.
A Meaningful History
Kearns remembers going to the theater when he first moved to Wayne with his family 20 years ago. By then, the theater was a bit shabby, having been run by a rotating carousel of conglomerates and owners over the past decades. The lobby’s koi pond had been covered up while tiled walls and ornately decorated floors had been replaced with carpets and monochrome paint.
Kearns and his family saw Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith there, but aside from the lightsaber display on the screen, it was not a particularly memorable experience. For Jim Brooks, though, who saw his first film there in 1958, the experience was one he remembered for the rest of his life.
“The first movie I can recall seeing there was King Kong, and it scared the heck out of me. I almost didn’t want to go back to the theater, thinking that was what was being presented [there],” he recalls.
Back then, the theater was not only a magnificent piece of architecture, but a Main Line institution in its prime. The ticket booth that now sits to the left of the theater’s entrance was placed in the center, and lines would circle all the way around the block to Wayne Jewelers (which closed for good in 2023).
“So, you got your ticket. You walked into the right-hand door. There were three preview coming attraction [boards],” Brooks remembers. “You got to the top of the plateau to the top of the theater. On the left-hand side was the concession stand, and on the right-hand side was that koi pond. There were, I believe, four different cutouts that had pictures of Anthony Wayne, George Washington and other revolutionary figures.”
The effect of the grandiose theater left an imprint on the young Brooks and, several years later, in 1964, he got his first job there.
“As an usher, if there was a problem, you had your flashlight, you would flash people. And, of course, the people who always arrive late for a movie, you’d have to usher them down via light,” Brooks shares.
He remembers ushering The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night so many times that he had every line memorized in a perfect British accent. A few years later, he began working the ticket booth and then the marquee, getting out the ladder on Wednesday nights to change the letters.
“You’d have to do it while there were people waiting in line. So it was always like, ‘You folks don’t want to walk under this ladder because I may drop one of these very heavy metal type letters,’” Brooks remembers.
His toughest assignment was trying to get It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World up on the marquee. He ended up running out of A’s.
For nine-year-old Barbara King, now the owner of Wayne’s Valley Forge Flowers, her first experience at Anthony Wayne Theater was similarly awe-inspiring. In 1973, her mother dropped her off one afternoon for a matinee re-release of Cinderella.
“I remember going in and just feeling so special at the opulence of the red velvet and the wonderful seats in the theater,” King says. “I had my popcorn and waited for the movie to start. I can still remember hearing the reel flickering before the movie started and the excitement that would build up.”
During the intermission, the young King looked back up to the balcony seats above and thought, “I want to try those seats someday.”
With the innocence of youth propelling her, King took advantage of guests filing back into the theater from the concession stand and found her way to a staircase to grab a seat in the first row of the balcony.
“I felt like the belle of the ball in the most glamorous seat,” she shares. “And there laid my forever love of the Anthony Wayne Theater.”
Michael Reath, publisher of Main Line Today, has similarly wistful experiences of the theater. He remembers going to the Woolworth’s across the street in the early ‘70s to get his milkshake at the counter before heading to the theater. He saw Star Wars and the Sound of Music there and recalls being awed by the palatial amphitheater.
“I remember being like, ‘Wow,’ when I walked in as a kid. It was so big, and the ceiling was so high. And that medallion in the middle…” Reath recalls. “When the lights went down, and then there was the movie. I mean, it was Hollywood, you know?”
For generations of kids and adults growing up in and around Wayne, the theater was an institution that bound them together. The community shared a love, not only of film, but of the palace in which the silver screen was housed.
A Bright Future for the Anthony Wayne Theater
For Scott and the AWTO, they’re not just looking to bring a movie theater back to life; they’re aiming to return the Anthony Wayne Theater to the citizens of Wayne.
Scott has toured numerous movie palaces in a quest for inspiration for a revitalized theater in Wayne. Stops like Chicago’s Music Box Theatre and Westerly, Rhode Island’s United Theatre, have both touched on aspects that Scott wants to implement on the Main Line.
“It’s just every little light, every little sign, every little everything in [United Theatre] had a lot of thought. They didn’t slap it up. They really carefully thought of everything there,” Scott notes.
Cognizant of details, he’s aiming for a boutique experience at the Anthony Wayne Theater. It won’t be all art house films, but you also won’t see repeated showings of Minecraft for rowdy teenagers.
Scott hopes they can offer elevated food at the concession stand and perhaps even cocktails if he can acquire a liquor license. He wants popcorn with real butter and one day a speakeasy downstairs.
“My vision would be more of an encompassing experience where you walk in and you feel relief. You feel like it’s a sanctuary, but also very entertaining. So it’ll be a much nicer level than what it was before. It won’t be that down-and-dirty theater look,” he explains.
The new Anthony Wayne Theater won’t be the same as it was 20 years ago, nor will it be as it was 50 or even 100 years ago. No matter how hard anyone tries, we can’t bring the past back. Nostalgia is fleeting. Trying to rebuild the past is like trying to grasp clouds; you’ll never truly be able to capture it.
Instead, Scott and the AWTO will attempt to recreate the ideas and feelings that made the theater sacred for past generations. When the theater reopens, it will be different, but Scott hopes that some leftover magic will endure.
“You want to bring it forward, but you also want to honor what was there,” he says. “You don’t want people to walk in and go, ‘Oh, this is like a modern cinema.’ You want them to walk in and say, ‘Wow, this really pays homage to the old way.’”
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