History

The Indiana Theatre was built in 1927 as part of the wave of large entertainment palaces that American cities constructed in the middle and late 1920s, when the prosperity of the decade seemed to promise unlimited expansion of cultural infrastructure. Rubush and Hunter designed the building in the Spanish Baroque style that was fashionable in American entertainment architecture in this period — a vocabulary drawn from the elaborate surface ornament and spatial theatricality of Spanish Plateresque and Baroque architecture, translated into the materials and construction methods of 20th-century American commercial building.

The ballroom on the top floor was conceived as a complement to the theater below — an entertainment space in its own right, accessible to a different clientele and serving a different social function than the movie palace below. The atmospheric design of the ballroom, which deploys architectural scenery to simulate a Spanish courtyard seen under a night sky, applied the same conceptual logic as John Eberson’s atmospheric theaters but in a social space rather than a theatrical one: the audience was not in seats watching a screen but moving through a space designed to put them in another time and place.

The Indiana Theatre itself closed and was eventually converted to other uses — the theater auditorium was transformed into a concert hall and later into a different configuration — but the ballroom survived relatively intact and continued to operate. The National Register listing recognized the architectural significance of the combined building and the particular quality of the ballroom’s atmospheric design. The Indiana Roof Ballroom has since become a celebrated venue for Indianapolis social events and remains one of the finest examples of 1920s entertainment architecture in the American Midwest.