History

The Esquire Theater began as the Hiawatha Theater at 590 Downing Street, Denver, CO 80218, designed and built by the Duttan & Kendall Company. It opened on September 3, 1927 showing Joan Crawford in “Winners of the Wilderness”. The design included a stage space that hosted The Patterson Sisters. The property served as a meeting place for the Jewish community in the 1930s.

It reopened as the Esquire Theatre in 1942, under Fox Inter-Mountain Theaters Inc., with a new “streamline moderne” front facade and the balcony remodeled to create a second theater upstairs and a total of 780 seats across both rooms. It had Denver’s first female theater manager, Helen Spiller and an all-female staff. The inaugural programs were “Thunderbirds” and “Counter Espionage”. “The Graduate” was its longest running first-run feature, lasting 52 weeks through 1967-1968. It was later acquired by Mann Theaters and lastly, Landmark Theatres.

The Esquire was a Capitol Hill icon, screening foreign and independent films and providing weekly, late-night retro revival entertainment in the form of its $5 movie series: Midnight Madness, which was inherited from the Mayan and, in 2023, evolved into CineInsomnia, screening at 10pm instead of midnight. Monthly, “The Room” and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” each screened for about 20 years.

In 2019, the theater was briefly closed due to flooding and as a result, some of the interior was remodeled to include an expanded concessions stand and upgraded seating only to close again months later due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was finally closed on July 18, 2024 with plans to be redeveloped into restaurant, retail, and office spaces as part of Denver’s Adaptive Reuse program. The final two movies to publicly screen were “A Quiet Place: Day One” upstairs and “Maxxxine” downstairs. Employees held a private screening of “Jojo Rabbit” as the final film to be projected in the theater.