Ryan and Tina North bought the old North Theater on St. Paul's W. 7th Street in late 2015 with the idea of making it a live performance space. After all, they'd met years before as cast members in the play "Tony n' Tina's Wedding."
But after sweating through a year of doing the renovation work themselves, they discovered that with another business to run in Minneapolis, it would be saner to operate the century-old former movie house as an event center and occasional pop-up performance space.
Eye On St. Paul recently revisited the Norths at what is now North Garden Theater, which opened in 2017, to catch up. This interview has been edited for length.
Q: How long did it take you to get in here?
Tina: It took about a year of work just to get the doors finally open. There was no heat. No water. The electricity was just one string of yellow construction lights down the center of the building, which could have just not been there for as useful as it was.
Ryan: We bought it at the very end of 2015. And then it took a year to get our construction loan.
Tina: It was less than that. It was something like six months, because we were doing all the pre-working with the city and bringing our plans to them.
Q: You needed some kind of parking plan too, right?
