The Esquire Theatre, originally the Hiawatha Theater, is a historic movie theater building at 590 Downing Street in Denver, Colorado, at the corner of East Sixth Avenue and Downing Street in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Built in 1927 by theater operator Gordon B. Ashworth with an American Indian decorative theme inspired by Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha, the building housed a neighborhood cinema through the late 1920s and 1930s before closing around 1939. It reopened in November 1942 as the Esquire, operated by Fox-Intermountain Theaters, with Helen Jean Spiller as manager and an all-female staff.
Under Spiller's management (1942 to approximately 1954), the Esquire functioned as both a neighborhood cinema and a community gathering place, hosting annual toy matinees, children's programming, and prestige bookings including the 1949 Denver roadshow engagement of Laurence Olivier's Hamlet. In November 1954, Fox Intermountain formally repositioned the Esquire as its key Denver venue for international and art-house films, launching a subscription-based film festival circuit across a 25-city, seven-state territory. The Denver Film Society used the Esquire as its primary exhibition venue, and the theater introduced a no-late-seating policy for Diabolique in 1956, four years before Alfred Hitchcock's similar policy for Psycho. The building also served as a recurring venue for Denver's Jewish community, from Yiddish and anti-Nazi film screenings at the Hiawatha in the 1930s through civic events at the Esquire in the 1950s, a connection documented primarily through the Intermountain Jewish News.
Landmark Theatres began operating the Esquire in 1980, continuing its identity as an art-house and repertory cinema. The theater gained attention in 1988 as the site of Denver's exclusive run of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, which drew protests and record attendance. The Esquire also maintained a long-running midnight movie series, including one of the longest continuous runs of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the United States. The building's exterior was redesigned in 1965 by Denver architect Richard L. Crowther. After closures for water damage in 2018 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Landmark ceased operations in July 2024 when its lease expired. The building, owned since 2021 by Franklin 10 LLC, is slated for adaptive reuse as restaurant and retail space, with the theater's marquee signs to be preserved.
Construction and opening (1927) Announcement and groundbreaking In May 1927, Denver theater operator Gordon B. Ashworth announced plans to build the Hiawatha Theater at 590 Downing Street. Ashworth, a former World War I flier and lieutenant, described the project as inspired by Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha: "the architectural materialization of the story of this stalwart Indian." "The story of Hiawatha will be depicted in the decorative system," Ashworth explained, "and the brilliant, rich Indian coloring will be used throughout." He framed the Hiawatha in national terms, declaring that Denver would "find itself in the ranks of the unusual in theaters" alongside new cinema palaces being constructed across the country. Ashworth envisioned the Hiawatha as "a jewel in a western setting," with "every detail so perfectly arranged that there will not be one false note" and construction arranged so that "every seat will be the best seat in the house." The building was planned as "ultra-modern in every health-promoting, scenic and lighting detail," with a seating capacity of 900 and a construction budget of more than $40,000 ().
Excavation began on Tuesday, May 24, 1927, with the contracting firm of Dutton & Kendall handling construction. Ashworth targeted an opening in early September, a timeline of approximately three and a half months that the project met. The Hiawatha was sufficiently noteworthy to be picked up by the national film trade press: a July 13, 1927 Film Daily roundup, "Five New Theaters for Denver by Fall," placed the Hiawatha alongside other contemporaneous Denver projects including a 1,000-seat house being built by contractor Michael McEahern at West 44th Avenue and Yates Street and a 1,000-seat Carter Theatre being built by W. J. Carter at West 10th Avenue and Santa Fe Drive.
Architecture and interior design Denver artist Corliss McGee designed and painted a series of brilliantly colored murals for the interior, Indian in motif and tone, depicting the story of Hiawatha; the Rocky Mountain News article included an illustration of one of McGee's mural designs. The interior walls were finished in a light bronze tone; the upper portions, rounding into the ceiling, bore designs taken from Indian blankets, each an authentic symbol representing a legend, worked in reds, blues, and what the Rocky Mountain News described as "the brilliant Indian tones." Indian pottery jars arranged along the top of the walls provided indirect lighting, with additional Indian motifs below serving as light fixtures. The lighting system was combined "in a most unusual manner" with the ventilation system. The carpet was Indian in tone and design, and the lobby was described as "very handsomely dressed."
The Rocky Mountain News called the Hiawatha "the only really western theater in the community," with an exterior "effective in simplicity and of design." Less than two months after opening, the Denver Clarion, the University of Denver student newspaper, went further, claiming the Hiawatha had "the distinction of being the first theater in America built after the American Indian style." The community "looks upon the edifice with pride," the paper noted, and reported that "something original and new may be expected each time" from the stage presentations.
The theater's opening capacity was reported as 800 seats, down from the 900 planned during construction.
The original Hiawatha Theatre was a brick building with a stepped parapet along Downing Street, a boxy marquee, steel casement windows, and decorative arched windows on the primary façade. The original architect is unknown; the building was constructed by Dutton and Kendal General Contractors.
Phil Goodstein, a Denver historian whose The Ghosts of Denver: Capitol Hill is one of the few published accounts of the building's early history, wrote that the Hiawatha was built "at the behest of John Thompson of the Bluebird." Contemporary Rocky Mountain News accounts from 1927, however, consistently identify Gordon B. Ashworth as the theater's builder and owner. Thompson may have been a financial backer, or the attribution may reflect an error in Goodstein's account, written approximately 95 years after the theater's construction.
Opening weekend The Hiawatha opened on the evening of Saturday, September 3, 1927. That morning, Ashworth, drawing on his aviation background, flew over Denver with Justin A. McInniny of the Alexander Aircraft Company in an Alexander Eaglerock biplane, dropping numbered circulars over the city. Circulars ending in "0" earned a 30-day theater pass; those beginning with "5" earned a free airplane ride from Alexander Airport.
The opening-night feature was Winners of the Wilderness starring Joan Crawford, accompanied by a color film of Whittier's The Barefoot Boy. On stage, a trio of melody makers performed alongside a child singer performing an Indian song, a live theatrical extension of the building's decorative program, reflecting the performance conventions of the era. The following day's booking was College Days with Marceline Day. The Rocky Mountain News described the opening as "a gala affair attended by all the film men as well as fans in town," with crowds arriving "from all parts of the city." On Saturday afternoon, Ashworth hosted a free children's matinee for the neighborhood.
Local businesses took out a full-page welcome advertisement: Quality Bakery at 1308 East 6th Avenue ("Welcome to Our Neighbor The Hiawatha Theater"), Hannon Drug Company at the corner of 6th and Marion ("One Block From the Hiawatha"), Wobido's Pharmacy at the corner of 4th and Corona, the National Quality Meat Market at 1310 East 6th Avenue, the Colorado Photo Company at 1942 Broadway ("The Hiawatha Selected Us"), and a screen and millwork company that had done finish work on the theater's interior.
Early programming and sound technology
Within weeks of opening, the Hiawatha began staging live dance prologues on weekend evenings. Bernard Hoffman, a dancer previously associated with the America Theater, composed and staged the programs, decorating the stage for each performance. In December 1927, Billy B. Beam, a vaudeville comedian from Muskogee, Oklahoma, completed an eight-week residency across the Hiawatha, Cameron, and other Denver neighborhood theaters. A veteran of Big Time vaudeville circuits, Beam had originated the "gift night" format (comedy combined with prize giveaways) in 1909, and toured nationally with his wife, booking himself independently. The combination of film screenings and live vaudeville acts was the standard presentation model for neighborhood theaters in the late silent film era. In late December 1927, just two months after The Jazz Singer launched the sound film revolution, the Hiawatha installed the Orchestraphone, described by the Rocky Mountain News as "the most recent of the talking motion picture machines." Released by the National Theater Supply Company, it was the only Orchestraphone in Denver.
The Orchestraphone was a non-synchronous, disc-based system. Rather than mechanically locking a soundtrack to the projector, it played commercial phonograph records through turntables and loudspeakers to accompany silent pictures, and was marketed to smaller and independent houses as an inexpensive alternative to the costly synchronized systems such as Vitaphone then being installed in downtown movie palaces. The cultural historian Emily Thompson has described such non-synchronous theater turntables as a "curious prehistory" of later disc-jockey and remix practice, while cautioning that there is no known connection between the booth equipment of the late 1920s and the turntablism that emerged decades later. First National held a trade-style preview of The Shepherd of the Hills using the system on December 29, in cooperation with the National Theater Supply Company.
Ownership changes and Depression-era operations (1927–1939) Change of ownership Ashworth sold the Hiawatha within approximately three months of opening. By December 1927, J.J. Hamilton had purchased the theater and installed the Orchestraphone, planning to make the venue "ultra-modern in every particular." In November 1933, the International Amusement Company, headed by Theodore Zadra and H.A. Goodridge, took over operation. The company already controlled the Ogden Theatre on East Colfax Avenue and the Liberty Bell Theater in Leadville. Manager Louis Williams and the entire Hiawatha staff were retained.