CODY — Locals have noticed the marquee of the historic Cody Theatre steadily sagging over the years. Now they can notice that it’s suddenly perked up again, holding to the building higher and tighter than it has in years.
After decades of sagging under its weight, the 88-year-old marquee got a facelift last week. After months of planning, permits and engineering, it took one afternoon to save the marquee.
“It was actually relatively easy and scary,” said Ryan Fernandez, the owner of the Cody Theatre. “We were all puckered a little bit, wondering what would happen, but it all went exactly as planned, and it’s not going anywhere for another 100 years.”
The Slump
The marquee on the facade of the Cody Theatre is the same one that greeted moviegoers when it first opened in 1937.
State-of-the-art for its time, the Cody Theatre was the first building in Wyoming with built-in air conditioning via a massive swamp cooler still in use.
While lavishly adorned with neon lights on the outside, the inside of the marquee was a series of wooden trusses clad with metal sheets, anchored to the front of the building by cables.
“They created the marquee so it could float,” Fernandez said. “The whole point was to make it structurally sound horizontally and rely on those anchor points on the front of the building to keep it up.”
The marquee has slowly sagged in the decades since it was erected. That kind of gradual decline is expected for any historic structure, but Fernandez said the Cody Theatre marquee “got some help” it didn’t need.
“It’s been hit by a trailer and an RV, and that’s just in the time we’ve owned it,” he said. “The theory is that it happened before and was hit a couple of times over the years.”
When Ryan and Liz Fernandez bought the Cody Theatre in 2019, the marquee’s slump was already pronounced. Despite several exterior inspections showing it was in good shape, the marquee kept inching lower until it got precipitously slanted.
For Fernandez, there was only one question: how can the original marquee be restored to its former glory?
“It would have been so easy to eliminate it,” he said. “It would have been much easier to replace it with a new, modern theater sign. But for us, that sign is iconic. It’s beautiful and historic. There was never a doubt that we were going to save it.”
Permits, Planning And Problem-Solving
Lifting a sagging theatre marquee isn’t easy. The location of the Cody Theatre and the circumstances contributing to its slump made the restoration even more difficult.
Because the theater sits along Sheridan Avenue, Cody’s main street, Fernandez needed a permit from the city to restore the marquee. However, Sheridan Avenue is also U.S. Highway 14, so the Wyoming Department of Transportation (WYDOT) also had to sign off on it.
Fernandez hired Justin Lundvall with Stahly Engineering and Associates to do a structural investigation of the marquee. The first step in fixing something is to identify the cause of the problem.
“We worked with Justin for a long time to get ourselves into the right position,” Fernandez said. “We needed to know weights, but how do you measure the weights of something you can’t necessarily see? What if the entire structure is compromised?
“But the city and the state needed a plan, which had to be done by a structural engineer.”
Instead of removing the marquee from the front of the theatre, cameras were used to probe the interior to examine the trusses and assess their weight and quality after 87 years.
The biggest issue was evaluating the quality of the anchors that supported the floating marquee, which were built into the building itself.
“If the islets coming out of the building aren’t good, you’ve got yourself a serious problem,” Fernandez said. “If we’re compromised on the building side of things, we’re not supporting a sign.”
Built Like They Used To
After many months and thousands of dollars, the report from Lundvall was surprisingly optimistic. Despite the sag and the hits, the 87-year-old marquee was in remarkably good shape.
“The sign itself was in excellent shape,” Fernandez said. “The wooden trusses were in good shape, and the building was fine.”
The cause of the slump was the turnbuckles on the marquee, which were connected to the building by steel cables. Those turnbuckles and the support beams they were attached to had cracked and were straining under the weight.
That threw out the script on the Cody Theatre marquee renovation. They didn’t have to rebuild it – they just had to find a different way to keep it up.
“When we realized it wasn’t compromised, there was a pivot,” Fernandez said. “How do we create a structure that would put the sign back in place?”
Stahly Engineering designed a new support structure that would support the underside of the marquee and through the top, rather than adding more support and potential points of failure to the islets and anchors attached to the building. It was the “semi-permanent solution” to keep the marquee up until a more permanent solution could be designed.
Now, all that was needed was a day to do it. That day came on June 18.
Afternoon Facelift
After months of planning and permitting, the city of Cody and WYDOT approved the installation of the “semi-permanent solution” on June 18. But there was another pleasant surprise in store.
“We thought that was going to be a semi-permanent solution, and we'd have to rebuild everything in the fall,” Fernandez said. “But with the entire structure being in such good shape, the city and the state approved it as a final fix.”
Once the new steel structure was installed, hydraulic lifts were placed on the underside of the marquee to lift it to the desired height. Then, it was lifted 3 inches higher.
“We wanted it slightly above optimal to account for the slack in the cables,” Fernandez said. “Once we got all the cabling put into place and took the slack out of them, it settled exactly three inches. There are so few times you create a plan, and it executes this beautifully.”
The marquee is still somewhat sloped, but that was a deliberate choice to allow water to drain off the top. Nevertheless, it’s still hovering higher than it has in decades.
“We raised it over a foot,” Fernandez said. “The quote of the day was, ‘It’s higher now than it’s been for the past 35 years. It was lower than this in the 1980s when I was seeing movies here.”
Decades of sagging and months of planning — rectified in a single afternoon, and strong enough to last for the next century.
While You’re Up There ...
The marquee of the Cody Theatre has returned to the highest point of its life on Sheridan Avenue, and not a moment too soon.
The project was finished hours before the opening night of the tenth consecutive season of “The Wild West Spectacular,” an original musical staged in the historic theatre since 2015.
“It was a slow process, but it came together at the fixed moment when we wanted it most,” Fernandez said.
The marquee got its facelift, but there’s still a significant glam-up planned for the historic façade. If you’re going to rearrange the furniture, you might as well vacuum.
“It’s still going to be an old-school, backlit marquee, but we’re going to modernize it,” Fernandez said. “We’re going replace the tar roof covering the top. We're going to fix the broken neon lights but modernize them with LEDs so the light is more even, strong, and efficient. We may add some modern neon lights to the Cody sign above, but it needs to match and look good.”
The marquee's only visible change post-lift is the steel support beam on its underside. Rather than try to obscure it, Fernandez thinks it's in the perfect position to enhance the visual splendor of the structure's historic Art Deco design.
"We are thinking about leaving that infrastructure in place, building a light box around it, and just embracing it," he said. There needs to be some painting and cleaning up. But we think that having that good support underneath could be a great place to place downlights to shine on our posters."
What's Different?
Many aspects of the Cody Theatre have been modernized over the years, but always with the intent of retaining the historic integrity of the facility. What was once Cody’s premiere movie theater has been transformed into a performing arts venue with a stage and modern systems for lighting and sound optimized for live performances.
Fernandez knows there were cheaper alternatives that would have added a lot more modern flair to the façade of the Cody Theatre. But that would have meant losing a piece of Cody’s historic identity, so restoring the existing marquee was always the only option.
“How do you maintain something that’s been here since the 1930s,” he said, “make it safer and more cost-effective, but also keep it awesome at the same time? That’s the hardest thing to do, and often the most expensive thing to do, but I think it’s worth it in the end.”
Many Cody residents might not have noticed the higher position of the Cody Theatre marquee unless it was pointed out to them. Despite the cost and effort, that’s a win in Fernandez’s book.
“The key is cleaning it up without changing it,” he said. “We like to move pretty fast, but if it’s a project that’ll take a while to do the right way, we’ll go slow. And if people can’t put their hands on what’s different, it means you’ve kept the integrity.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
