The Fox Became the Meyer: Green Bay's 1930 Movie Palace Refused to Die
On Valentine's Day, 1930, Green Bay got a movie palace. The Fox Theatre opened February 14 of that year on South Washington Street — an atmospheric, Spanish-Renaissance fantasy designed by architect Larry P. Larsen, with 2,037 seats and the kind of ornamental swagger that Depression-era audiences craved precisely because the world outside was falling apart. You bought a ticket, you walked into a Mediterranean courtyard that didn't actually exist, and for a couple of hours the 1930s could wait.
That was the whole idea behind an "atmospheric" theater: the interior was dressed to feel like an open-air plaza under a Spanish sky. Larsen built Green Bay a daydream with a marquee.
For 68 years, the Fox did its job. Then, like nearly every grand single-screen house in America, it lost the war with multiplexes and television. The Fox closed as a movie theater in 1998, and if the story had ended there, we'd be talking about a parking lot. Green Bay has watched enough beautiful buildings meet the wrecking ball to know how these things usually go.
They didn't go that way. After a roughly $8 million restoration, the building reopened on February 27, 2002 as the Meyer Theatre — reborn as a performing-arts house rather than a cinema. The renovation's showpiece was a genuine act of historical devotion: the original 1930 Wurlitzer pipe organ was rebuilt from the original blueprints and reinstalled. That's not a replica bolted in for atmosphere. That's the theater's original voice, reconstructed from the plans, put back where it belonged.
The reborn Meyer seats about 1,011 — roughly half the Fox's original capacity, which is the trade nearly every restored palace makes. Modern comfort, better sightlines and code-compliant everything cost you seats, but they buy you a room people actually want to sit in. What you gain is a mid-size hall intimate enough for a listening-room show and grand enough to feel like an occasion.
Here's the honest part, and the same story that follows most of the region's historic halls: the Meyer largely sits out the touring-concert summer. Comb the 2026 calendar and the earliest listed act is the Oak Ridge Boys on Sept 10. In July and August, the touring-rock action is over at EPIC and the free outdoor series are eating the region's live-music attention. The Meyer, like the Grand down in Oshkosh, plays a different game — a presented and rental season that gears up as the lawn chairs get folded away.
But this is exactly why the Meyer matters in a summer-preview town like ours. It's the reminder that Green Bay's music life isn't only sunburns and beer gardens. A block off Washington Street sits a nearly century-old room where a Wisconsin audience once gasped at the first talkies, and where — thanks to a city that decided in the early 2000s that some buildings are worth saving — that same audience's grandkids can now hear a touring songwriter under the same faux-Mediterranean sky.
The name changed. The Fox became the Meyer. The seat count shrank and the movies moved out. But the bones are Larry Larsen's 1930 daydream, the organ is the actual 1930 Wurlitzer, and the marquee still glows on South Washington. In a country that bulldozed most of its movie palaces, Green Bay kept one and gave it a second act. When fall comes, go claim your seat in it.
Sources: Meyer Theatre (Cinema Treasures); Meyer Theatre official site