If a developer’s plans proceed, Minneapolis’s Uptown Theatre will become a concert venue with a size comparable to St. Paul’s Palace Theatre.

Last week, Racket broke the news that the City of Minneapolis has issued a permit allowing building owner Ned Abdul to proceed with an expansion and reclassification of the venue, which opened as a movie theater in 1916 and was operated by Landmark Theatres from 1978 until 2020’s Covid closure led to Landmark’s eviction after a rent lapse.

Plans filed with the city have the newly-designated event space spilling over into the neighboring Legeros Building, emerging from the renovation as a live performance venue with a capacity of 2,516 - very close to the capacity of St. Paul’s popular Palace Theatre.

The Palace is operated by First Avenue; Abdul is also the owner of the Armory, which opened as a concert space in 2018. The Armory’s journey from neglected parking garage to well-received concert space was tortuously long, so Abdul seems to have the patience to wait out plenty of hurdles in the development process.

Those currently include a construction stay related to additional approvals that are necessary to redevelop the historic Uptown Theatre, a moderne landmark with an iconic marquee defining the heart of a commercial district that’s never had officially defined borders.

If there’s one thing Minneapolitans can agree on about the buzzworthy, oft-maligned, currently struggling Uptown area, it’s that the Uptown Theatre is in it. As Racket’s Jay Boller notes, an expanded venue could provide a big boost to nightlife at Lake Street and Hennepin Avenue, the latter of which is about to get a major reconstruction that will dramatically increase accessibility by bicycle and public transit.

Local film fans are mourning the seeming end of the Uptown Theatre’s life as one of the Twin Cities’ last prominent urban movie theaters - less than a decade after a $2 million remodeling job that added improved seating and two bar areas. However, historic theaters have often been reimagined for changing times; the Palace Theatre and the Varsity Theater are both examples of spaces that opened as live entertainment houses, then became movie theaters, and are now music venues.

There’s nothing quite like the Uptown, though, which sports America’s first three-sided tower sign, exterior roundels evoking cinema’s epic sweep, and interior murals including the Father of Waters ushering symbolic sprites into the City of Lakes.

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