History

George R. Mann had already given Arkansas its Beaux-Arts State Capitol when he turned to the Masonic commission in Fort Smith. The resulting building, completed in 1929, deployed his knowledge of monumental stone construction in a more eclectic vocabulary: Art Deco massing and surface treatment on the exterior, Egyptian Revival decoration in the interior, a pairing that reflects the Masonic fraternity’s longstanding identification with the ancient world and the contemporary moment in equal measure. The temple housed multiple Masonic bodies—Scottish Rite, York Rite, Eastern Star, and DeMolay chapters—through the first decades of its life.

On 3 November 1930, the building’s 800-seat auditorium began its second career as a movie theater under Malco Theaters, with Rain or Shine as the inaugural program. A marquee was added to the B Street side to advertise showings, and for decades the Masonic Temple was also one of Fort Smith’s principal picture palaces. The juxtaposition of Masonic ceremony and mainstream entertainment in the same stone shell is characteristic of how American fraternal buildings adapted to changing economic conditions through the mid-twentieth century.

In 2017, the building was reimagined once more as Temple Live, a concert venue exploiting the acoustic volume and dramatic atmosphere of the Egyptian Revival interior. The concept proved scalable: Temple Live expanded to Wichita, Kansas and Cleveland, Ohio by 2019, making the Fort Smith original the flagship of a small regional concert brand rooted in repurposed Masonic architecture.