Preparing for a
second act
By Tracy Goldizen
OTTUMWA — The theaters overlooking the intersection of
Main and Green streets haven’t shown movies in years, but
they’ve continued to play a role in the history of downtown.
“The Capitol was not built as a theater,” said Molly Myers
Naumann, architectural historian. “It was built for a man by the
nam of Sax. It was a three-story building, and I believe he had a
men’s clothing store. It dates, I would say, to the 1880s.”
A 2014 Artspace consulting report on the theaters said the Capitol
“was built as a hotel with two small stores at street level.”
Myers Naumann said the Capitol building lost its third floor
when the building next door, also a theater, burned down in
1940.
That’s when the Ottumwa Theater, later renamed the Capri, was
built, she said.
“The Ottumwa Theater was simply a magical place. It is a beautiful
example of art-deco design,” said Myers Naumann, who
has lived most of her life in Ottumwa. “The Ottumwa Theater
was built as a THEATER, much more like theaters that you
would imagine being in California or New York, much fancier
than what our normal theaters were here in Ottumwa.”
She offered to give a description of the Ottumwa Theater as she
remembered it as a child:
“You would walk into that lobby, and it was just huge to a little
girl. And then you went through doors to where the snack bar
was, and from that space where the snack bar was, and it was
big, there was a staircase that went up from here and a staircase
that went from the other side. They were wide and carpeted, and
to a little girl, you could just imaging floating down those steps
in a beautiful dress or pretend being a bride and coming down. I
mean, it was really, really neat, something special.
“Those steps led to the balcony. And then there were two or
three more steps that went up to the second floor where the re-
New equipment at the
Capitol in January 1972.
The line snakes around the corner
onto Green Street as Jaws showed
at the Capitol in 1975.
We Are Ottumwa
5