Frankfort's Garden Theater, a century of one screen

The marquee glowing over Main Street in Frankfort has been doing its job since the silent era. The Garden Theater opened on August 15, 1924, with a now-forgotten picture called “The White Moth,” built by a local man named Custer Carland who wanted the little harbor town to have a proper modern playhouse. For a brief early stretch it carried a different name, the Victoria, said to honor the builder’s wife.

A 1947 makeover gave it 700 fresh seats, a new marquee, and a porcelain sign, and the single screen kept running, year after year, while drive-ins and multiplexes came and went elsewhere. By the early 2000s, though, the building was worn out and sliding toward the fate that closes most small-town movie houses for good.

What saved it was the town itself. In 2008 a group of Frankfort-area residents bought the Garden with the plain goal of bringing back its Art Deco bones, closed it that October, and worked through the winter and spring stripping decades of patch-jobs back to the original 1920s lines. New seats came from a maker over in Grand Rapids. It reopened in June 2009, and a place that could easily have become an empty storefront on the main drag was instead packed again.

It is still community-owned and still showing films, and in 2024 — its hundredth year — the theater put solar panels on the roof, which is a very Frankfort way to keep a 1920s movie house alive. Catch a show on a rainy summer night and you are sitting where this town has watched movies for a full century.