Flynn Theater

John J. Flynn and his partners spent half a million dollars in 1930 on what Burlington was promised would be Vermont's largest entertainment palace, and it opened that November with vaudeville and film. Wartime audiences came for the newsreels; the 1970s nearly took the building down. It was bought instead, returned to live performance, and from 1981 restored in a project counted among the most important Art Deco restorations in the United States. In September 2000 it reopened again, enlarged, as a full performing arts centre with a second, smaller stage and studios for teaching. Something like two hundred thousand people pass through it each year, in a city of fewer than fifty thousand.