Lensic Performing Arts Center

The Lensic is a 1931 movie palace at 211 West San Francisco Street, restored in 2001 and now Santa Fe’s principal performing arts venue. It seats just over eight hundred, which is small for a house that takes touring work, and it is the reason an evening there feels closer to the stage than the programming would suggest.

The 1931 Building

It was built by the local merchant Nathan Salmon and his son-in-law E. John Greer, and designed by the Boller Brothers of Kansas City, who put up several hundred theaters across the West and the Midwest. The style is Spanish Renaissance with Moorish detail: plasterwork, shields, a coffered ceiling, and gilding, none of which has anything to do with the adobe outside. That was the point. A picture palace was meant to be somewhere else entirely, and for four hours it was.

The name is an acronym. Greer took the initials of his six grandchildren and made a word out of them. The theater opened on 24 June 1931 as a vaudeville stage and cinema, and over the following decades Rita Hayworth, Judy Garland, Errol Flynn, Roy Rogers, and Yehudi Menuhin all appeared on it.

The Restoration

By the 1990s it was a tired single-screen movie house on a downtown block that had moved on. A campaign led by Nancy and Bill Zeckendorf, with broad community support, spent roughly nine million dollars between 1999 and 2001. The stage was enlarged, the fly system, lighting, and sound were rebuilt to touring standard, and the 1931 decoration was conserved rather than replaced. The National Trust for Historic Preservation named it a Save America’s Treasures project in December 2000. It reopened in April 2001, no longer a commercial cinema but a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with 821 seats.

What It Does Now

The Lensic is both a presenter and a rental house, and that dual role accounts for a calendar that refuses to sort into a genre. A single season will carry orchestral concerts, chamber music, touring dance, flamenco, jazz, film, lectures, author events, and the local companies for whom this is the principal stage. It runs in the region of four hundred events a year and reaches about 14,500 students annually through its education work. Lensic 360, its producing arm, makes free programming, including the annual Santa Fe Summer Scene.

For a visitor the useful thing to know is simply that the Lensic is the default. If a touring act of any kind comes through Santa Fe, this is usually where it lands. It is worth looking at the calendar before you book a trip rather than after.

The theater stands two blocks west of the Santa Fe Plaza, so dinner before a show is a short walk. Coyote Cafe and Cafe Pasqual’s are both a few minutes away, and Geronimo and The Compound are a short drive up Canyon Road.

Common Questions

What is the Lensic?

A 1931 movie palace at 211 West San Francisco Street in downtown Santa Fe, restored in 2001 and now the city’s principal performing arts venue, run as a nonprofit.

Where does the name Lensic come from?

It is an acronym. E. John Greer, who built the theater with his father-in-law Nathan Salmon, made the word from the initials of his six grandchildren.