I’m still working on a couple of additional entries about CONduit, but I wanted to note that the last of the Salt Lake movie theaters I remember attending as a kid, Trolley Corners, quietly closed its doors on Thursday after 27 years of business.

Trolley Corners was something of an oddity, architecturally speaking. Occupying three floors of a modest office building on the corner of 7th East and 5th South (right across the street from the Trolley Square shopping mall that gave the theater its name), TC tried to bridge the gap between old-fashioned movie palaces like The Centre and The Villa, and the more modern multiplex concept that was emerging when TC was built in the 1970s.

From the outside of the building there was nothing to indicate that you were looking at a theater, aside from the marquee. It just looked like a non-descript business complex, with a bank at the very corner of the building, an entrance to a parking structure, and an Italian restaurant running toward the south end of the building. Entering the theater complex from the ground floor, you were confronted with a free-standing box-office kiosk surrounded by staircases; you bought your tickets and then went up- or downstairs to see your movie.

The lowest floor contained two side-by-side auditoriums that were of the basic, 70s-vintage, multiplex variety, which meant that they weren’t much larger than many people’s basement rec rooms, with lousy insulation that allowed sound to bleed over from the show next door.

TC’s big house on the top floor made up for the general crappiness of the smaller ones, however. It looked and felt very much like an old movie palace, with seating for hundreds and a waterfall curtain that concealed the screen until just before showtime. This was where the spectacles and prestige films played — the Star Wars movies, for example, or the 1989 re-release of Lawrence of Arabia — while the basement houses were set aside for more mundane fare.

Stepping inside Trolley Corners was like taking a journey back to 1977, the year the place opened. The restroom doors were heavy, made of solid wood with brass push plates; the upholstery was goldy-orange. I know the 70s aesthetic doesn’t work for a lot of people, and I’ll admit that it can be pretty god-awful in its more extreme forms, but I’ve always liked the way it worked at Trolley Corners. In that place, it wasn’t garish or antiquated. It was like going home again, back to the days when I was a wide-eyed kid that had come in from my distant rural outpost to the big city to see a show with my folks, back when going to the movies was a Big Deal.

The entire place was a monument to the idea that movies are a Big Deal. TC was decorated with portraits of stars and murals depicting some of the all-time great movie moments. As you bought your tickets, Paul Newman and Robert Redford gazed down upon you with friendly, Butch-and-Sundance expressions. Entering the basement houses, you saw reminders of the Yellow Brick Road, Tara, and Rick’s Cafe Americain. None of this seemed cheesy or synthetic. Those paintings weren’t there because some corporate architects specified them to be. Rather, it felt more like these things had gone up spontaneously, like the people that owned the place put all that stuff up because they genuinely liked it.

For me, personally, the coolest of these decorative elements was a huge mural on the outside of the big house, a re-creation of the original poster art for my all-time favorite movie, Star Wars. I imagine that back in ’77 this mural — which was reportedly painted by the theater’s manager — must have been a very exciting, cutting-edge touch among all the images from much older films. (For photos of this mural as well as the rest of Trolley Corners, have a look at this web page.)

The final chapter of the Trolley Corners story is grimly familiar to people who love old theaters, the same damn ending shared by all of Salt Lake’s grandest movie palaces. As newer, bigger, and flashier venues were built, business started to dry up and TC went into a state of decline from which it just couldn’t recover. The last time I attended a movie there, over a year ago now, the place wasn’t in bad condition, but it obviously wasn’t being maintained as well as it could have been. Nothing was broken; there was no graffiti in the restrooms and no seats had been slashed. But everything seemed kind of dim, like the wattage on the lightbulbs had been turned down. The teenage employees were glum and disinterested, a far cry from the panache shown by the “Trolley Dollies” in the old days, and there was a funny smell in the air, a funk consisting of faint mildew and despair. I knew then that Trolley Corners wasn’t long for this world. I haven’t been back since, partly because I don’t get downtown much anymore, partly because the place hasn’t been showing anything I’ve wanted to see, but mostly because I just didn’t want to watch another beloved old haunt of mine fade away. I’ve gone through it with The Villa and Bill and Nada’s Cafe and a dozen other unique treasures throughout the SL valley that have been bulldozed in the name of “progress,” and I just didn’t want to do it again.

And so Trolley Corners has faded away without me giving it a proper send-off, and soon it will be gone altogether, replaced by a 24-Hour Fitness Center, according to the reports I’ve read. It was the last operating movie theater in the valley built prior to the mid-1980s, the last that was equipped with a 70mm projector, the last that seemed to be more about the movies themselves than the box office receipts.

I’m saddened by its loss, and I feel some degree of guilt for not supporting the place more, or at least visiting it one last time. But it wouldn’t have done any good. Trolley Corners would have died anyway, with or without my patronage, just as The Villa did. That’s progress for you. And I have to say, after careful consideration, that progress sucks.

[Ed. note: If you’re interested in this subject, local film buff Grant Smith maintains two excellent websites devoted to Salt Lake’s cinema treasures, both living and dead. One of these is focused purely on The Villa, the last of SL’s Golden Age movie palaces which is now destined to become a rug gallery, while the other, utahtheaters.info, covers all of Utah’s historic theaters, including Trolley Corners, the fabulous (and long-gone) Centre, and even Salt Lake’s first dingy little arthouse, The Blue Mouse.]