This Art Deco Theater Is the Heart of a Small Northern Town

Rogers City — Not much about the small town of Rogers City suggests that it can support a movie theater. The town boasts a modest population of about 2,800 (and that shrinks in the winters when many residents flee for a warmer climate).

But this art deco beauty still persists on the Lake Huron coast.

Construction on the Rogers Theater finished in 1937. It’s a classic, single-screen movie palace in the Art Deco style. Before its completion, residents would gather to watch Charlie Chaplin sprouting from a crank projector on a glorified bedsheet.

Despite the trials of the Depression (or perhaps because of them), people were willing to pay a couple cents to see a film. Local lumber magnate Charles Vogelheim struck a deal with Walter Kelly of Alpena, who had recently gotten into the movie theater business.

Vogelheim would build a movie theater in Rogers City if Kelly agreed to a 10-year lease to run the business.

Films ran seven nights a week (quite impressive compared to today’s four-night showings). But the building was not limited to moving pictures. Vogelheim, perhaps to give himself a backup should films fall out of style, included extra space in the building for separate businesses.

Even into the 1960s and ’70s, either side of the building’s front housed everything from a wallpaper store to the local Secretary of State office. From the 1950s into the 21st century, the building also housed an ice cream parlor.

In January 1948, after the Vogelheim family took over operations from Kelly, the boiler behind the screen exploded and fire spread through the building’s vents. Everything except the brick exterior and the marquee was destroyed. The building was rebuilt and continued to host film showings, alongside other local businesses.

The movie house was later reimagined when Vogelheim’s son, Richard, sold the theater to its next owner, Karl Heidemann, in 2003. He continued showing films but also ran the ice cream shop on the side, then called the Super Scoop.

At this time, Heidemann had seats cleared out and put in a large stage in front of the screen. Given the town’s smaller population, a first-run movie every week did not garnish a large audience, and so the theater began hosting live theatrical productions.

One weekend, you might conceivably go catch the latest Marvel flick, and the next, see friends and acquaintances performing a rollicking comedy or musical.

In 2013, however, the community demonstrated its support for the Rogers Theater. By this point, the film industry had collectively decided to stop producing films on 35mm reels and instead opt for digital projectors. The local theater was still showing films off of physical reels, on the same projector installed in the 1948 remodel.

Someone had to be trained to run the film from the projector room. The theater’s current manager, Daniel Bielas, remembers coming to watch a Disney film as a kid when a bubble came up on the screen, because the film had caught fire. It was a matter of seconds before an employee had snipped the burned film and fed the new film through the reel.

Despite the nostalgia of a 35mm projector, running it was cumbersome and the theater could and could not afford a digital projector, which would have cost somewhere in the ballpark of $40,000 at the time.

To keep the films on the screen in Rogers City, residents began a Kickstarter campaign and raised almost $117,000. In a sleepy coastal town, the projector fundraising was the hot topic of conversation in the summer of 2013.

The fundraising efforts, it turns out, supplied not only a digital projector but a new sound system, RealD 3D capabilities, and new seats for the center section in the auditorium. (Friends of the theater jokingly refer to the “Truman seats” and “Obama seats” in reference to when the theater’s seating sections were installed.) After the renovations, the Rogers Theater reopened for a first-run showing of Frozen in 3D.

Given that the theater would have closed without the community, Heidemann essentially donated the theater in 2016. He sold it to the Presque Isle District Library for $1. The library had already been renting the theater regularly for a host of programs and events, so the transfer from private to public seemed like a natural next step for the historic space.

A library-owned-and-operated movie theater strikes one, perhaps, as a strange marriage of entities. But it turns out, a library’s mission of cultural engagement and education fits nicely with a movie theater, which Bielas calls the beating heart of the community.

The space continues to show first-run films, but it also hosts various free one-off and film festival showings. Residents might pop in for the annual film noir or classic Hollywood monster movie festivals. The film noir series will get a turnout of at least 50 movie-goers—about 2% of the town, which seems low until you consider that, relatively, that works out to about 13,000 people in Detroit.

The library has also started a “books on the screen” series, with the hopes of incorporating book clubs in the future.

But despite the building’s long history of films, the space’s new life is just beginning. In 2024, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. And, with the aid of grants and other funds, the library has managed to restore and renovate much of the theater’s physical space.

Beyond an expanded concessions area and a much-needed repair to the outer wall, the library was able to completely restore the historic marquee. The chaser lights once again run across the marquee, a feat for which the library won a 2025 Governor’s Award for Historic Preservation.

It isn’t the movies or the building’s history alone, however, that make the theater the heart of Rogers City. With no other large auditorium-like space, the town holds a variety of events at the theater. The space houses everything from local Christmas concerts and dance recitals to traveling Shakespeare plays and northeastern Michigan’s first TEDx event in 2018.

On the civic side, the theater also has hosted forums to give voters a chance to hear from local political candidates.

In addition to outsized fundraising efforts, it appears that the diversity of programs and events has saved the Rogers Theater from abandonment and demolition. And the relatively small number of owners in the theater’s 88 years of existence undoubtedly has helped the building’s longevity.

In the end, however, it seems that it comes down to the people that have shown up over the decades. Perhaps streaming executives overlook the desire for in-person entertainment, be that the latest blockbuster or live drama.

People in the small town want arts and culture programs, whatever that looks like. And so the Rogers Theater lives on, because where there’s an audience, there’s a theater.