The Pix: Lapeer's 1941 movie house, dark for a year and lit ever since

The marquee on Nepessing Street still glows the way it did on April 9, 1941 — the night the Pix Theatre opened, all streamlined art deco curves and bold neon, the kind of small-town movie house that was the whole event on a Friday night. For more than fifty years it did exactly the one thing it was built for: it showed films to Lapeer.

Then it did the thing nearly every downtown single-screen did. The multiplexes out by the highway pulled the crowds, the Pix couldn’t keep up, and in 1996 the lights went out. That’s the part of the story where most of these theaters get boarded shut or knocked flat for a parking lot.

The Pix didn’t. Lapeer’s downtown authority bought the building, ran a renovation through, and in 1997 the doors opened again — only now there was a stage where the screen had been. Instead of matinees it started booking concerts and live performances, keeping the original deco face and the lit marquee out front the whole time.

It runs that way still, under the Center for the Arts of Greater Lapeer, putting on something like fifty shows a season. So the Pix isn’t a preserved relic behind glass — it’s a working theater a small town refused to lose. The deco front is original, the marquee is real neon, and you can walk up, buy a ticket, and sit down inside a building that’s been Lapeer’s main stage, in one form or another, since the year Pearl Harbor was still nine months away.