Historic Old Liberty Theater spotlights strange music, coffee

RIDGEFIELD, Wash. (KOIN) — Decades after a grand opening, a Old Liberty Theater found a groove.

The ancestral museum resides on willing North Main Street in Ridgefield. It has a welcoming coming with a straight neon pointer and false-front design from another age when American uncover business was most younger. A happy coffee emporium finish with smiling baristas and cans of locally-roasted coffee beans greets those who enter by a front doors. Heavy red fate on possibly side of a coffee bar spirit during a building’s strange purpose.

Enter by those fate and learn a cavernous space watchful patiently for a subsequent possibility to make people smile.

Don Griswold and his family possess a Old Liberty Theater. They bought it behind in 1995 after renting it for dual years and regulating it as a Muay Thai training facility. Muay Thai is a form of fighting grown in Thailand. But a Griswolds were positively not a initial to use a museum as something other than a theater.

Built in a mid-1940s, a museum — afterwards famous as customarily a Liberty Theater — was designed for a son of a internal male named Red Hicks. Hicks, who was an strange owners of The Reflector newspaper, wanted his son to have a place to live and work after he got out of World War II.

The immature male finished it by a fight — customarily to die tragically in an airshow, Griswold explained.

“The son was killed 3 months before a grand opening,” he said. “The fight was over though he was killed. He was their customarily child.”

Griswold pronounced a Liberty Theater’s initial film played on Apr 25, 1946. But a building’s days as a film museum were shortlived.

“TV came out large time and so it never unequivocally entirely satisfied that dream,” Griswold said. “I consider TV gave them a tough strike and we don’t know accurately when it hermetic down — it was dormant. Then another fella attempted like in ’75 for a integrate years to do a cinema.”

But zero stuck.

In between owners, a Liberty Theater was rented out for several uses: art studio, bike shop, storage facility, etcetera. The run where a coffee emporium is now located was hermetic off from a behind of a building.

By a time a Griswolds entered into a theater’s history, a building had been gutted and was being used for storage. It was a mess. But where many would have seen a rickety aged place that had left a excellence days distant behind, a Griswolds saw potential.

“I customarily fell in adore with a place,” Griswold said. “My mother and we had lived in Brookings and we would see these buildings with a storefront and what would be like a vital space and we always suspicion — wouldn’t it be cold if we could find a space where we could live, work and emanate your possess office and means a lifestyle that way.”

Not prolonged after purchasing a building, Griswold found an online ad for some used museum seats. He bought them and finished a fighting ring.

It noted a start of a new chapter.

New start, ‘old’ name

Griswold motionless to renovate a museum into a verbatim theatre where industrious musicians and strange artists could cut their teeth and get exposure.

“I had played song for years before that and played a Satyricon behind in a early ’80s when it was an initial place,” he said. “I always suspicion it’d be cold if there was a place where we could showcase strange music, initial music.”

He renamed a building a “Old Liberty Theater.”

“The ‘Old Liberty’ kind of reminds me of a aged ways. Or a aged etiquette. Or a aged manners. And it seems like that’s a bit of a onslaught these days,” he said.

Elbow douse and thriftiness helped him revive it behind to a former glory.

“Most all of this things in here is recycled,” he said, indicating to a complicated red theatre fate and explaining how they came from a propagandize that didn’t need them anymore.

The Griswolds non-stop a coffee business in 1998. It started with a transport on wheels that they’d hurl onto a sidewalk.

“I would pull a transport out in a morning and do it compartment about noon, afterwards go to my office in Portland,” Griswold said. “We did that for a while and we eventually customarily gradually took over a storefront, finished it a coffee shop, got a museum licensed; afterwards a dual became one.”

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Today, a Griswolds work with a family in Yacolt — a Millars — to fry and sell their possess wood-roasted coffee called Pull Caffe. They use a Probat spit alien from Serbia built over a century ago. The transport they once used to sell coffee on a path is now partial of a opposite in a coffee emporium where an Italian espresso appurtenance — which they built by hand — sits. On uncover nights, a coffee bar transforms into a benefaction mount finish with drink and booze service.

“I always suspicion it’d be cold if there was a place where we could showcase strange music, initial music.”

Don Griswold, Old Liberty Theater owner

Since a Griswolds became owners, a museum has been a plcae of dances, village Christmas bazaars, weddings, memorials and birthday parties. Every fourth Wednesday of a month, they uncover a documentary followed by a contention and a assembly gets a possibility to speak to internal filmmakers.

“It’s a venue with a menu,” Griswold quipped.

But a theater’s loyal job is music.

“My strange concentration was to spotlight strange music, strange bands, ’cause that’s what we did when we was younger — initial music, art. Just strange things — that is tough since people don’t take chances to come see someone they haven’t heard, usually,” Griswold said.

The goal, he said, is to yield a space for encouraged artists and producers to work their craft.

“One of my categorical priorities is we wish a musicians and a artists to feel good,” pronounced Griswold. “Like it could be their home — so we can keep operative together and means it.”

He likened a theater’s purpose to Vaudeville and a event it presented to industrious opening artists. Speaking of which, Griswold pronounced he’s operative on starting a Vaudeville uncover during a Old Liberty Theater in a nearby future.

It’s all partial of his office of doing what he loves, assisting artists do what they love and giving a village noted experiences.

“The lane record, we feel, for what we’ve finished here on a shows — people withdrawal happy and carrying a good knowledge — it’s unequivocally a high commission in my mind; it’s in a high 90s,” Griswold said.

Upcoming events during a Old Liberty Theater

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