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• The State will screen first-run films during the summer and holiday seasons, when blockbusters are typically released, but focus on art house and indie films the rest of the year while hosting an occasional small-venue concert.
• Williams said the State has a relatively small stage, so it will leave plays to Sioux Falls' other arts venues -- the Orpheum Theatre on the north end of Phillips Avenue and the city's main performing arts center, the Washington Pavilion.
• Such a historical centerpiece can anchor a small Midwestern city's downtown, said Emily Beck, executive director of North Dakota's Fargo Theatre, a sister cinema that opened in 1926 just 13 days after the State.
• "I think it's incredibly important for the artistic identity of a community to have a theater like this that they can call their own -- that isn't just some sort of big-box, corporate theater showing the next 'Twilight' film," Beck said.
• Though the Fargo Theatre sports an Art Deco style that harkens back to how it looked in 1937, it and the State share much in common. Both were designed by St. Paul, Minn., architects Buechner and Orth for the firm of Finkelstein and Ruben, which operated nearly 90 theaters in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
• The theaters' Wurlitzer organs, which in that era provided the soundtrack and sound effects for silent films, are just one serial number apart.
• Fargo's downtown gem, however, was closed for just eight months in the late 1990s while it underwent its $2.6 million renovation.
• Residents of Sioux Falls who were seeing businesses flee downtown in favor of newer retail centers wondered if their historic theater would ever reopen.
• "Downtown Sioux Falls was dead -- moribund -- and rigor mortis had set in," Henkin said. "The multiplexes came out to the malls and that took the place. I'm sure television had a lot to do with it, too."
• After the State closed around 1990, the building was bought by private owners who held onto it for about a decade. The Sioux Falls Film Society bought the property in 2001 and sunk more than $400,000 into the beginning stages of restoration.
• "They put a new roof on it, which really saved the facility," said Stacy Newcomb-Weiland, board president of the nonprofit Sioux Falls State Theatre Co.
• The organization, which took over ownership in 2007, raised enough money to fix the facade at a cost of $250,000, but that just restored the structure as an historic building.
• "They were looking at selling the building to a business that was going to tear the theater part of it out," Newcomb-Weiland said. "I decided to try to form a group of people to turn it into a theater again."

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