History

Torrington at the turn of the 1930s was a company town writ large. The Torrington Company — manufacturer of precision needle roller bearings whose components went into automobiles, aircraft engines, and machine tools — anchored the local economy alongside smaller brass and hardware firms that had operated in the Naugatuck Valley since the mid-19th century. Industrial prosperity in the 1920s funded civic improvements, and the arrival of a Warner Bros. first-run theater on Main Street was one expression of that prosperity: a signal that Torrington belonged to the network of American cities that could support and sustain a major circuit venue.

The timing of the 1931 opening was not comfortable. The stock market crash of October 1929 had already begun to erode the industrial orders that kept the valley’s factories running, and the Depression would deepen through the 1930s. Yet the Warner survived and continued to attract audiences, in part because cinema offered affordable entertainment at a moment when more expensive amusements were out of reach. The theater became a fixture of community life in Litchfield County, an anchor that outlasted the manufacturing decline of the postwar decades.

By the late 20th century the Warner had weathered the transition from movie palace to multiplex competition, and a series of restoration and renovation campaigns over the years — the most extensive in the 1990s and 2000s — preserved the Art Deco fabric while modernizing the stage and technical infrastructure for live performance. Today the Warner is the leading performance venue between Hartford and the Berkshires.