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Original Fire Curtain Restored at Columbia Theatre

Original Fire Curtain Restored at Columbia Theatre
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By West Kentucky Star Staff
Nov. 18, 2015 | PADUCAH, KY
By West Kentucky Star Staff Nov. 18, 2015 | 06:09 PM | PADUCAH, KY
Thanks to gifts from a couple of organizations, the historic fire curtain has been fully restored inside the iconic Columbia Theatre in downtown Paducah.

The group working to restore the theatre to its prior glory received grants from the Kentucky Colonels organization and the Carson Myre Foundation, which paid for International Fine Art Conservation Studios in Atlanta to do the work.

A project manager and three artists repaired, restored, and repainted the original curtain so that it now looks much like it did when it was first raised on opening night in 1927. The curtain, which depicts the Statue of Liberty proudly standing in New York City's harbor, was actually a fire curtain designed to protect the audience. It was made mostly of asbestos and had been damaged from years of neglect, but it has been restored to its original grandeur.

The theatre announced and showed off the restored curtain in photographs last month.

"The first challenge we had at the theatre was to restore and preserve this beautiful fire curtain," said Darlene Mazzone, Chair of the Columbia Theatre Restoration Board. "We were fortunate to get a Kentucky Brownfields grant for environmental cleanup at the theatre, but there is a timeframe tied to that funding. So in order to take advantage of the Brownfields grant, we had to get the curtain restoration complete so we could encapsulate it and secure the asbestos before the rest of the abatement was done."

Geoffrey Steward is the CEO of IFACS and has been involved with restoration of historic buildings and their interiors for more than 40 years. From Royal apartments at Kensington Palace and Windsor Castle to the Sultan of Brunei's palace, Geoffrey has worked around the world assisting with projects in Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, and Paris.

"The Columbia Theatre is a real gem with a unique interior," said Steward. "The scale of the decoration and the size of the theatre will greatly enhance the attraction of downtown Paducah."

"Mary Aldrich, a highly-respected restoration artist working with IFACS, along with two assistants, coordinated the painstaking work of patching the large holes that had been cut into the screen and preparing it for the final work of repainting and restoring the classic scene," Mazzone added. "Mary and her co-workers also scraped away the layers of time and determined the original paint scheme and the subsequent paint applications in order to create a palette that will be used for our ultimate restoration of the theatre. This will give our design architects the tools to create an interior design concept based on the original history of the building."

The second phase of the abatement process in the theatre is scheduled to be complete by the end of the year.

Anyone interested in contributing to the Columbia Theatre restoration project can contact Mazzone at darlene@paducahlife.com or Landee Bryant-Greene at landee@maidenalleycinema.org.

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