Built in 1925, the Falls Theater in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, was an active live theater and then a movie house until the 1990s. It sat vacant for decades waiting for the right owners. Purchased in 2017, the Falls Theater required extensive work to reactivate the space for use today. The Blind Eye Restoration team provided architectural conservation services to bring the theater’s details back to life.
Those services included recreating approximately 45 linear feet of the missing cast plaster ceiling medallions, and running 60 linear feet of new cornice profiles. The work required patience and a detail oriented crew. The plaster work required custom casted molds as well as custom cut profile blades, which the Blind Eye Restoration team recreated by developing patterns and molds of the original designs. These molds were utilized to perfectly recreate both the curves, corners, and straight sections. Quality craftsmanship was imperative for the ceiling’s decorative plaster work and medallion, as well as good teamwork with the project electricians to fit the new ceiling medallion pieces over 40 carefully placed light sockets so that the flowers in the medallion could allow for light bulbs to be placed and lighted all around the room.
Extending the team’s eye for detail oriented conservation work, the team also brought the theater’s cornice back to life with the restoration of the historic painted design. Geometric detailing along the room’s cornice was heavily flaking, badly discolored by soot, and the original cornice itself had failed in parts. It was the Blind Eye Restoration team’s job to clean, touch up, and recreate sections of the pattern and cornice that had vanished over time. Working 30-feet in the air, the team utilized metal lathe to fill larger areas of loss and plaster to create the correct profiles for the smaller sections. It was important to match the original paint colors in order to bring out the best of the original design. The little diamonds around the red triangles- they’re actually iridescent gold and they shine from different angles around the room. A different “fish-scale” pattern was restored and recreated to frame the original stage.
You can visit The Workz today and see the beautiful plaster work and paint details, while playing 1980s arcade games! To learn more about the theater’s current use read this article!
