After more than 60 years in downtown Chapel Hill, the Carolina Theatre has closed its doors.
“It was always a vanity project to have a big, beautiful theater in Chapel Hill,” former owner Bruce Stone said. “But it was never self-sustaining.”
Stone has owned the theater since 1993, but the theater was completed in 1942, local historian Doug Eyre said.
Eyre said one of the new theater’s attractions was a special double seat. The seat was originally made to fit one man who was about 350 pounds when he died.
But Eyre said it was used more often as “favorite, first-priority seating for guys on a date who wanted to snuggle a little bit.”
During the turbulent decades of the civil rights era, the theater was the site of several protests calling for integration. An executive committee called Citizens for Open Movies organized the protests outside the Carolina and the Varsity Theatre.
Walter Dellinger, a UNC sophomore at the time of the demonstrations, was the only Southern undergraduate on the integration committee. The experience in the group led him to pursue a career of advocating for civil rights, he said.
Dellinger said that the theater protests were relatively calm and peaceful, with the occasional derogatory comment from passersby.
Eventually the Carolina Theatre became one of the first integrated movie theaters in the south, according to The Daily Tar Heel archives.
