The movie house at 1576 Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway is becoming a theater again. On Nov. 4, residents, public officials and media gathered outside the building in Grove Park to mark the start of a renovation that will reopen it as the Grove Park Performing & Cultural Arts Center.
Grove Park Foundation led the groundbreaking with Mayor Andre Dickens. The foundation bought the circa-1941 theater in 2017, after years of other uses had left it in disrepair. Executive director Gavin McGuire said the space went through many iterations after the theater closed, including a skating rink and a pawn shop.
What the building becomes
The ground floor keeps its theater use. Above it go offices, storage and a break room, per Invest Atlanta documents from 2024, and the facade gets restored according to project renderings. Plans call for 10,400 square feet of total leasable space, including flexible performance and studio spaces for arts and culture partners and a slot for a cafe or other retail. No tenant has been named for that space.
A building programmed entirely by one organization serves one vision. Space that art groups and small businesses can rent means the room fills with whoever in the neighborhood needs a stage, a rehearsal night or a class, and the rental revenue comes back to the building.
Grove Park Foundation puts the renovation at roughly $5.1 million. Bank of America and Chick-fil-A each gave $1 million, announced in April 2023 as a combined $2 million commitment for the performing and cultural arts center. Invest Atlanta committed $830,000 from the Perry Bolton Tax Allocation District Resurgens Fund. The Fox Theatre has also backed the building over the years, listing four grants to the Grove Theatre totaling $240,000, beginning with historic structures studies and planning in fiscal 2017-18.
The money arrived without a construction loan behind it. Karen Rose, the foundation's director of development, said borrowing could have shortened the renovation by five years but would have left debt to repay instead of rental revenue and grants supporting affordable community programming. That is a deliberate trade of speed for a lighter building to operate once it opens.
When it opens
There is no firm date. Project officials have described the renovation as a 12-month project, and McGuire said in July 2025 that residents could expect the center open by the first quarter of 2027.
The history the building carries
The Grove Theatre opened in June 1941 and shuttered in 1969. Leigh Burns, director of community partnerships at the Fox Theatre, said at the groundbreaking that when the theater opened the city was deep in segregation, with White residents seated downstairs and Black residents upstairs. Now the theater has a chance to be restored as a place the neighborhood could enjoy equally.
For anyone tracking the Donald Lee Hollowell corridor on the Westside, that changes the look of the block. A restored 1941 facade with an active ground floor reads differently from a boarded storefront, and it sits across the street from KIPP Woodson Park Academy and the YMCA Early Learning Center, which already bring daily foot traffic to that stretch.
McGuire said in July 2025 that residents normally have to leave the community for performing arts options, and that the center would let them stay in the neighborhood. That is the practical measure of this project: a rehearsal, a recital or a Saturday class that no longer requires a drive.
I like that the foundation built the thing it can afford to run. Choosing grants and rent over a construction loan means a longer wait for the doors to open, and it also means the center is not opening with a debt payment competing against the programming it exists to offer. For a 10,400-square-foot building on a commercial corridor that has had little to offer at street level, that math matters more than a faster ribbon cutting.
