Crest Theatre – Old School Square – Delray Beach
A historic South Florida theater that opened in the 1920s will renovate its interior to the tune of about $1 million. The first phase of the renovations will take about nine weeks and among the improvements will be increased space, seating and natural light, new carpet and fixtures, updated restrooms and more.
The Crest Theatre in Delray Beach — located in the heart of Old School Square — is a National Register of Historic Places site built in 1925 as a high school that now hosts art classes, exhibits, comedy and musical theater performances.
“The Cornell Art Museum [which sits next to the theater] just went through a $1 million renovation as well from the same donor and the same builders as well, so it will take that same look, refresh it and still pay homage to the history and the feel of the historic site,” said Holland Ryan, chief operating officer at Old School Square Center for the Arts. “Margaret Blume is our private donor; she’ll be doing the donation of $1 million.”
Ryan said the renovations will be completed in two phases, the first of which is expected to take about nine weeks.
“The first phase will…be completed by Nov. 1 of this year and will include various upgrades including automatic openers to our historic doors. Because we’re a national historic site, the doors are smaller and a little bit harder to get to and from for our art students and all our patrons, so we’ll be adding automatic openers to those,” he said.
The Crest Theatre in Delray Beach is undergoing the first phase of its $1 million renovation.
Other renovations include “updating the lobby, opening it up, putting in a new box office, creative art school, reception desk, doing upgrades to our first-floor restrooms, all the carpeting and some of our bar area to increase and improve traffic for patrons that are visiting us for events to really move bar lines along,” he said.
During the first phase, the Crest Theatre building will be closed, according to Ryan, but the box office and creative art school registration area will be available at the Cornell Museum and online.
“Some of the classes for the creative art school that start next semester are going to be relocated to the facilities on the south end of the building that are not a 
part of the phase-one renovation,” Ryan said.
The renovation will be done by Fort Lauderdale-based architecture company Walters Zackria Associates.
“We are a not-for-profit organization,” Ryan said. “We obtained the land in 1989 […] and we definitely appreciate and thank our generous donor, Margaret Blume, and the help of our architect and builder.”
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