Sunnyside Couple Signs Ten-Year Lease for Historic Yates Theater With Plans to Turn It Into a Movie Venue

For the past forty years, the Yates Theater has sat vacant in Denver’s Berkeley neighborhood. That could be changing soon, as Macy Lao and her husband, Kyle Hagan, plan on revitalizing the historic building and reopening it as a bar and cinema. They’re taking inspiration from one of their favorite bars when they lived in Brooklyn, Videology Bar & Cinema. 

Lao and Hagan moved to Denver in 2021 during the height of the pandemic. After being in the area for a few years, they got the idea of opening a bar and lounge. 

“We didn’t intend to open a theater; the original concept was actually a bar/lounge that was able to have screenings in it,” explains Lao, a resident of Denver’s Sunnyside neighborhood. She was even initially skeptical about considering the Yates when it was suggested by their real estate agent at Denver’s Sullivan Group.

The former theater located at West 44th Avenue and Yates Street is nearly a century old, and there have been several previous restoration attempts that did not come to fruition. A recent attempt to convert the theater into a music venue was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Lao and Hagan say they kept an open mind when it came to finding a space. 

When it was opened in the 1927, the Yates was a silent movie theater with a 500-seat capacity, and it operated as a cinema until the 1950s. After that, until the ’80s, a variety of tenants, including a piano store, moved in and out of the property; then the building sat empty for decades.

But with a high ceiling and original painted plaster still adorning the walls, the interior still evokes the motifs of the Roaring Twenties, despite disrepair. 

“As soon as I walked in, I fell in love with the place. It’s a great building,” Lao says. After talking it over, Lao and Hagan shifted their plan to primarily operate their business as a theater. “I reworked the entire concept and business model in a week and a half, as soon as we saw it,” Lao explains. 

Lao and Hagan signed a ten-year lease in June for the building; on November 13, they invited the neighborhood to see renderings of their restoration concept. The couple plans to apply for a liquor license and zoning variance to use the space as a lounge and 300-seat movie theater that shows repertory films or movies past their first run. 

“It’s something we’ve seen in both New York and here in Denver, where a lot of individual theaters will do repertory screenings of older movies, either on anniversaries or to coincide with new releases or special events,” Hagan notes. “The ones we’ve been to always sell well and fill up. There’s a real demand for people to see movies in a communal space.”

Lao and Hagan loved the experience of being in a setting where they could enjoy film and television with other cinephiles.

“A big thing that I’m passionate about, given that my background is in entertainment, is the existence of fourth spaces, which is different from third spaces,” says Lao, who’s worked in video production and entertainment for nearly two decades and was most recently the director of social media strategy at Warner Bros. Discovery and content director at DC Comics.

“Fourth spaces are things that come about in real life due to the interest in people having them in digital spaces,” she continues. “You give people a reason to be somewhere because of something that they’re interested in, and I’ve always had this theory that there’s a lot of interest in social media [around film] that never gets a place to culminate in real life. We’re hoping that Yates gets to be that kind of place, not just for the local community of Berkeley, but also the Denver area.” 

The couple still plans to have a lounge and bar area where concessions can be sold, similar to that of the Holiday Theater. But the couple wants the lounge to serve as a cafe or meeting space even when movies aren’t showing.

“I spent my teenage years and my twenties in New York City, and I always had the thought, ‘Why can’t you hang out in Radio City when there’s not an event?'” Lao says. “The thought is that [the Yates] is not always going to operate as just a movie theater.”

“It’s the availability of larger spaces when they’re not in their primary use, so in operating a lounge up front, the theater is still available to be in,” Hagan adds.

During the public meeting on November 13, area residents were invited to share their thoughts with their neighborhood association, Berkeley Regis United Neighbors. Lao and Hagan also created an online survey to hear from neighbors.

There have been a few attempts in the past to revive the Yates, including a 2014 try by Frank Schultz of Tavern Hospitality Group that would have transformed the theater into a music venue. Schultz later sold the building to developer Ken Wolf’s Downtown Property Services and Ari Stutz.

Wolf and Stutz proposed a plan in 2018 that would have turned the theater into a venue for concerts, and while they successfully applied for a liquor license, the COVID-19 pandemic ended that endeavor.

Lao has been researching the history of the building with Historic Denver. Though information is limited, Lao says they found that the Yates was used for summer stock theater, stage plays and radio shows.

Right now, the goal is for the theater to be operational by the end of 2026. But Lao stresses there is a lot of work to do.

“We’re trying to preserve as much of this theater as we can,” she says. “For example, behind these soundboards is all this peacock muraling, which is all original. Obviously, there is stuff that still has to be evaluated and brought up to code, but something I want to get across is that there are a lot of steps we have to go through… the first real step is going to be getting that zoning variance.”