Iconic Uptown Theater sign will get new letters to replace the ones that were trashed

Those iconic letters adorning the iconic sign towering over the Uptown Theater in Minneapolis — the ones that were supposed to have been saved when a new sign was installed — well, that won't happen. At least not the way some people had hoped.

The fact is, many of the old letters have already been trashed. Replicas will have to do.

Those developments became clear Tuesday, when a unanimous Minneapolis City Council committee essentially agreed with the developer and his experts that the old letters were too deteriorated to safely adorn the historic three-sided sign, where they had proclaimed their namesake neighborhood since 1949.

Barring some surprise reversal, the City Council's ratification next week of Tuesday's committee vote likely will close the story of the disagreement between the city's historic preservation officials and the theater's owner, Armory Holdings LLC, which also owns the Armory concert venue downtown.

"They are in compliance," City Planner Rob Skalecki said of Armory Holdings after the committee vote.

The plan to save the letters

The Uptown reopened as a concert venue in June following a year-plus rehab project. But its vertical sign — believed to be the nation's first three-sided movie theater sign, which became a local landmark — remains bare.

The sign's 18 letters — U-P-T-O-W-N, times three — were removed about a year ago without a required city permit, a move that irked some preservationists and drew the scrutiny of city officials. In an after-the-fact agreement not uncommon in such transgressions, officials set conditions that would excuse the matter.

Among those conditions: The original characters — 3- by 4-foot steel elements with wiring for affixed lights — would have to be restored and attached in their original spots.

That actually had been the plan all along.

"We were planning on bringing them down, renovating them and putting them back up," said Ned Abdul, who operates Armory Holdings.

In late June, the city's Heritage Preservation Commission approved that plan. But then there was some sort of mix-up.

Un-saveable

Once crews got a better look at the letters, sign contractor Serigraphics and a restoration architect told Abdul they were too far gone, according to public testimony and records submitted to the city.

"Those letters would have so much metal replaced ... you could be replacing the majority of the metal," Rita Goodrich, an architect with the Minneapolis firm MacDonald & Mack, told the committee Tuesday.

Once you get past 50% replacement, Goodrich explained, it's generally not seen as a meaningful restoration. And the city's preservation rules allow for historically significant elements of a restoration to be replaced when they're "deteriorated beyond repair."

The letters could be cosmetically patched and hung indoors, and one set of six letters is displayed inside the theater now. But setting them outside overlooking Hennepin Avenue, naked to the elements, wouldn't work.

So 12 of the 18 letters were essentially thrown in the trash — though city officials didn't know that.

Officials appear to have thought the letters could be repaired for exterior use when the preservation commission took its vote to restore and save them. But Armory Holdings didn't clarify that the letters now inside the theater were the only ones left.

Abdul said there's a happy ending. He's going to have replica letters manufactured, forged in aluminum and lit with LEDs, at a cost that's "significantly more" than the doomed restoration would have been.

Restoration of the old letters, he said, "just wasn't in the cards." The new letters should go up in the next couple of months.

"You'll never be able to tell the difference," Abdul said.