In the next year or so, the Mancos Creative District plans to raise enough money to purchase the historic opera house in downtown Mancos.
The district has long been interested in the space, and in using it in “creative ways, as a community asset,” said Chelsea Lunders, the executive director of the Mancos Creative District.
Plus, it aligns with its goals.
The whole purpose of the creative district, which is in its 10th year, is to promote creative industries in the Mancos Valley and the vibrancy of its economy, Lunders said.
So at the end of 2024, the creative district’s board of directors voted in favor of the long-term stewardship of the opera house, and plans to continue to rehabilitate it.
The transaction is still in its infancy.
No numbers are public yet, and the couple that owns it now “has been really supportive” and worked with the district, sans deadlines, to make this happen, Lunders said.
“It’s definitely not your normal real estate transaction,” said Philip Walters, who owns the opera house with his wife, Linda.
As it stands, the small nonprofit that is the creative district doesn’t have the means, financially, to make the purchase, but it’s launching a capital campaign soon to change that.
Aside from raising money to buy the building, their first order of business will be to renovate a part of the building in its lower east side they call the “East Bay.”
At present, that space has no HVAC, plumbing or electrical.
Renovating that space is tactical, as it’s a promising rental opportunity, likely for something retail, which will be a revenue source to support the rest of the project, Lunders said.
Plus, it’ll bring another business to town.
“We hope to get a lot of support from foundations in the state and donors for that initial phase,” said Lunders. “After that, we’ll start to think about the fun stuff like, how are we going to remodel the bar, and what are we going to do upstairs to the theater.”
Philip and Linda Walters, the couple who owns the opera house now, got the opera house to where it’s at now, which is a place of sound, stable mechanics.
“We are just two people in a long line of caretakers,” said Philip. “We’ve accomplished what we wanted to. There’s still some infrastructure work with the theater, but it’s at point where the decision on how to do those things ought to be made by whoever will be its long-term operator.”
Which is something Philip and Linda never intended to be.
They had long been involved with the opera house, and remembered how it was nearly condemned in 2002 because the roof and east wall were in danger of collapsing.
“That got everybody’s attention,” Philip said.
Since it’s a historic place, it was eligible for emergency funding from History Colorado. A $250,000 grant saved it from condemnation – and collapsing – but the building was a long way from being sound.
So the VFW, who had owned it for many years, put it up for sale in 2017 since the constant repairs were distracting them from their core mission of serving veterans, Philip said.
“And Linda, being the brave soul she is, said let’s just buy it and get it off the market,” Philip said.
They figured they’d be a “bridge buyer,” and soon sell it to a nonprofit, so they agreed to buy the place on Friday, Oct. 13, 2017, for $195,000.
“That was probably about $400,000 more than it was worth at the time,” Philip said.
But they bought it anyway.
“We like the community, and we liked the fact that the building was once a hub of the community and we wanted it to be that once again,” said Linda. “Besides, we like a challenge occasionally.”
“And we loved the building,” Philip said.
Linda remembered living in Texas, in cities like Houston and Austin.
“They really were not – especially Houston – into preserving a lot of things. They bulldozed and built something else; a shiny, new thing,” Linda said.
“We just didn’t like that. We like the fact that people care about the originals here.”
With that in mind, they took care to preserve the unique, historic character of the place as they renovated it, and ended up being more involved with the place than a traditional “bridge buyer” might be.
“The more we looked at building and state it was in, we realized it would probably just drag a nonprofit down,” Philip said. “They’d be stuck in same loop VFW had been in, not ever making enough money to get out of cycle and continuing to put Band-Aids on.”
He said their contribution, then, “needed to be to rip all the Band-Aids off and get down to the nitty-gritty, not pretty stuff.”
“A lot of what we did isn’t visible,” Philip said.
One of the first things they did was “gut it,” Linda said.
They replaced all the plumbing in the building, added an elevator, new bathrooms, a sprinkler system, fire alarms, fire suppression and an HVAC system.
They did a majority of the work themselves; for the big undertakings, they hired someone.
“Obviously building an elevator hoist way is not a DIY project,” Philip said.
But rebuilding the street façade, for example, was.
In the 1950s, the building was a bar, so its storefront was “bricked up” with narrow windows and uninviting steel doors, which aligned with that era’s “concept of bars being dark places with little light,” Philip said.
That way, passersby couldn’t look in and see who was at the bar drinking, he said.
“Or smoking,” Linda added.
“It had all the glamour of a warehouse, really,” Philip said.
To return the storefront to its original glory, Philip – with the help of a contractor called Martin Built Homes – repurposed some of the building’s floorboards, which were made up of ponderosa pine from 1910 and “a lot more stable than stuff nowadays” to make decorative trim.
“You can’t run to a hardware store and buy that kind of trim, you have to make it,” Philip said. “It’s built more like furniture.”
The couple also talked about renovations in “the green room,” which was originally built as an apartment in the Depression era and, over time, became a space for artists performing in the theater to hang out.
Linda said they found a wadded-up newspaper behind some plaster in the wall dated Nov. 8, 1932, with the headline “Roosevelt Wins!”
“That was his first election,” she said of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In rebuilding that room, they made sure to salvage some of graffiti that artists from long ago wrote on the walls.
Some writing was from Diane Hall, who’s better known by her film name, Diane Keaton. In the summer of 1965, she lived in that space during her “Little Mary Sunshine” era.
Philip said that throughout the renovations and the years, he’s spent a lot of time “grabbing a chair and sitting somewhere to try and understand what she (the opera house) needs.”
Like letting light in from the north, as was initially intended, since “some of the original light concepts of light are really good.”
It’s important to live in the space, he said, and connect with the spirit of everyone who’s worked on the place, performed there, or otherwise loved it.
“That’ll inform a lot of decisions,” Philip said. “Before you jump in and start spending money renovating things, get to know the building and how people interact with it.”
He said that he and Linda have had conversations with the creative district, and that their goals and intentions align, specifically when it comes to the idea that the space is, first and foremost, for the community.
“I’ll say ‘she’ because I’ve worked with the building long enough that to me, she’s a she. She needs to be a community asset,” he said.
“And to be a community hub, it needs a staff of more than two,” Linda said.
And so that’s why, roughly a year ago now, the couple approached the creative district and asked if they’d be interested in buying the opera house.
Lunders said the creative district took time and did their “due diligence” to make sure the purchase made sense for them.
“We took a year to really think it through,” she said.
They hired a consultant, Ayers Associates, to look at things like “remaining rehab costs, potential uses of space, different ways to generate revenue to support its sustainability, and its potential social and economic value to the region,” she said.
Already, creative industries are critical to the local economy, Lunders said.
“We want to leverage the space to expand creative industries, foster entrepreneurship, boost tourism, promote skill and creative workforce development, and enhance art education,” she said.
The opera house will still be available to rent out for events.
“It already has this great momentum of use, and the Walters have been great about allowing that and fostering that,” Lunders said.
Cult movies stream there once a month. It’s where high school seniors have their prom, and where a fundraiser of “true burlesque, down to the panties and pasties” happened last year, Philip said.
Under the creative district’s oversight, there’s this added goal that over time it will become “a draw for all kinds of acts and a regional hub for the arts and creativity here in the Southwest,” Lunders said.
They also have an emphasis “on supporting children and youth,” so the opera house can be a space where younger generations in our community can grow up, Lunders said.
“The excitement is really in seeing how everything that the opera house has been comes together and ushers us into what it will become, which is a new lifetime of a building that sits right there on the corner of our downtown,” Lunders said.
