Connor Delaney didn’t have to look hard to see the damage that was occurring inside the former movie- and dinner-theater property along Des Moines’ Ingersoll Avenue.

The roof had collapsed. Raccoons lived in the space. And mold was everywhere.

“It was absolutely destroyed,” said Delaney, who first toured the property at 3711 Ingersoll Ave. in 2018. “You could walk in and see the potential, but boy, I was really saddened by the state of it.”

The building had sat unused since 2013. After touring the building, it took four more years to negotiate a deal to buy the property and additional time to arrange financing for the property’s purchase and rehabilitation. Much of financing discussions took place during the pandemic when material prices constantly changed and interest rates fluctuated.

“There was some uncertainty in the market and there’s nothing that banks are more afraid of than a live performance venue that is relatively small,” said Delaney, who in 2017 launched White Oak Realty that specializes in the restoration of historic properties.

In July 2022, Delaney finally acquired the property that had continued rotting in plain sight.

The historic renovation took an investment of nearly $6 million and more than three years to complete. In December 2025, the Ingersoll reopened as a dinner theater, reviving one of its former uses.  

The public has embraced the theater’s revival, with many performances selling out and rave reviews about menu items like the thick prime rib and chocolate baby grand piano filled with Frangelico mousse and berries.

If the building could talk, Delaney said, “It would say, ‘Thank you for saving me.’”

Property’s history

A.H. Blank, a Des Moines businessman, built and operated several one-screen neighborhood movie theaters in the late 1930s and 1940s including the Ingersoll.

Blank “specifically targeted these smaller scale movie theaters that were intended to sit within a tight community and be part of a commercial district,” said Alexa McDowell, who wrote a historical narrative of the Ingersoll for its application to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Ingersoll movie theater, among the first in Iowa designed for films with sound, was built on a vacant lot in 1938. It opened in October 1939.

The 600-seat theater, with two-person “loveseats” at the end of rows, quickly became a neighborhood fixture, showing matinees on weekends and becoming a gathering place during World War II. During the war, the theater showed special newsreels of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Thursday night radio chats and hosted events like scrap metal drives to support the war.

The movie theater was shuttered in the mid-1970s.

The property’s second act began in 1978 when a local high school vocal teacher leased the space for the Ingersoll Dinner Theater, which staged shows like “Cinderella,” “Miracle on 34th Street,” “Funny Money,” “Faith County” and “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”

Financial reasons forced the theater’s closure in October 2004.

Over the next decade, a couple entertainment-type venues and a restaurant had short-lived runs in the space.

The property was essentially abandoned from 2013 until Delaney bought it in 2022.

Operating partnership forged

Delaney’s first task after taking ownership of the property was to put a new roof, gutters and downspouts on the building.

“I was told by my contractor that [the building] would not have survived another winter,” said Delaney, whose restoration projects include French Way Cleaners at 413 Euclid Ave., Wherry Block at 1600 Sixth Ave., and a strip center at 3619 Ingersoll Ave. that now includes a bar, boutique shops and a barber shop.

Delaney’s next task was deciding the building’s use and finding a partner who cared about reviving a piece of Des Moines history as much as he did. Those decisions were more stressful than the renovation itself, he said.

“It kept me up at night,” Delaney said. “I wanted the people who love the building to be very pleased and happy with the way it’s operated. I wanted to avoid the public being discontented.”

When Steven Peters, founder and CEO of Ames-based VenuWorks, learned about renovation plans for the Ingersoll property, he reached out to Delaney via email.

Within a minute of receiving the email, Delaney called Peters, who told him: “I saw you on the news and heard you lost your operator. We manage theaters – it’s what we do.”

Peters, who founded his company in 1996, manages over 50 theaters, arenas and convention centers in 13 states. Among them is the Chanhassen Dinner Theatres in suburban Minneapolis that Peters and a group of investors acquired in 2010. The theater is billed as the country’s largest professional dinner theater.

Peters shared his background and love for historical theaters over coffee with Delaney the next day. Delaney shared his love for historical properties and the Ingersoll. 

A partnership was formed, with VenuWorks managing the Ingersoll’s operations, bookings, marketing and food and beverage.

More than $6 milion was spent renovating the Ingersoll, a dinner theater at 3711 Ingersoll Ave. in Des Moines. The venue originally opened as a 600-seat movie theater in 1939. The historic renovation included meticously matching original parts of the building, including the ceiling edging in the lobby. “We had to have a master plaster person come in and match it because we couldn’t take it down,” said Renee Crowell, the Ingersoll’s executive director. The interior of the theater was rebuilt, including the replacement of the balcony, which had structural deficiencies.

The stage was raised at the Ingersoll to provide guests in the back of the theater a good view of the stage. New accoustical wall coverings were put on the walls. Photos by John Retzlaff

The balcony includes two types of seating — at high tables or along a bar that overlooks the theater. Photos by John Retzlaff

Photos by John Retzlaff

Photos by John Retzlaff

Chase Johanson is the executive chef at the Ingersoll. One of his signature dishes is a chocolate baby grand piano filled with Frangelico mousse and berries. Johanson said the Ingersoll will offer seasonal menus. “We want to offer customers something different each season, which will keep them coming back,” said Johanson, who attended culinary school in Boston. Photos by John Retzlaff

The Ingersoll also offers beers from local breweries. Photos by John Retzlaff

Façade’s restoration

Before shows could be booked at the Ingersoll, the theater’s interior and exterior needed to be refurbished. The interior was gutted to the exterior’s masonry walls.

Peters described the interior as “a dirty – filthy – blank canvas. Everything was a mess.”

The stage was raised. The balcony, which had structural deficiencies, was reconstructed. An addition was built on the building’s northeast corner for a new kitchen. New electrical wiring, state-of-the-art sound system, lighting, flooring and acoustical wall coverings were installed. A new bar was built in the back of the theater, under the balcony. A 16-foot-wide by 8-foot tall screen was added on the stage. A new dressing room was added in the basement that includes lighted mirrors, toilets and shower. 

While the interior renovations were pretty standard in restoration work, the exterior was a meticulous process.

An update to the property in the 1970s included covering the lower portion of the building’s original brick façade with fake stone, which was kept in place with a thick adhesive substance, said McDowell, the historian. Also, a synthetic stucco insulation system had covered the east bay of the upper facade. The stucco covered the original teal-colored, glazed brick.

Removing the fake stone damaged numerous bricks, she said. Cracks and other damage were discovered in the bricks in the upper facade when the stucco was removed.

“There were choices to be made: How do you salvage as much of the original material as possible and recreate, where necessary, a façade that is sympathetic to the original?” McDowell said. “What we ended up doing was salvaging as much of the teal brick that existed on the upper facade that had been covered up. There was also some of that brick in an area below the marquee. We salvaged as much as we could from there to do the repairs on the upper facade of the east bay.”

New bricks were found to replace the damaged ones on the façade, matching the light taupe color. To represent the original design, some of the bricks were painted with an epoxy, high gloss paint to match the historic color of the teal glazed bricks in the east bay and the bands across the front of the building, McDowell said.

“It was a very careful process to do the very best job of historically representing the character of the façade,” she said.

Marquee restoration

Restoring the marquee was also difficult and it was important to the integrity of the historic rehabilitation to do it right, McDowell said.

“The marquee is a character defining feature of the building,” she said. “It is the visual cue to the building’s function and it operates as advertising for what’s going on inside.”

Metal in the marquee had significantly deteriorated. Some of the hardware that attached the marquee to the building was missing.

Over the years, there were different iterations of the marquee. The development team, with input from McDowell, decided to replicate much of the original 1939 marquee, including keeping what’s known as the “comma” between the two sides of the sign. Some changes made to the marquee over the years were also kept including bulb design on the “comma.”

When the marquee was removed from the building “half of [it] had looked like sheet metal was actually painted duct tape,” Peters said. “It was amazing that it was still attached to the building.”

The Ingersoll’s debut was originally planned for the day after Thanksgiving. Delays in getting interior lighting pushed the opening back to New Year’s Eve.

Enduring community ties

Delaney has completed eight historical renovation projects since founding White Oak Realty nine years ago. The Ingersoll has been the most challenging, not because of the work that was needed to refurbish the building but because of the public’s expectations, he said.

“So many people are so nostalgic about [the building] and wanted it to be brought back in the correct way,” Delaney said. “I felt more pressure to get this one correct than I ever have on a project before.”

That pressure is rooted in the building’s long place in the neighborhood.

“There’s lots of deep community ties to that building,” McDowell said. “It goes back to that idea that it was built in a neighborhood purposely to serve that neighborhood.”

The amount of work that went into restoring the property will ensure many more years of use, McDowell said. “There isn’t any reason to think that this building won’t last another 75 to 100 years.”

For now, Delaney and Peters are focused on what comes next. They’re mapping out the Ingersoll’s next five years, hoping to broaden programming and give audiences more reasons to return. If the reopening honored the past, they say, the next chapter will be about proving the theater’s future is just as enduring.

“Projects like this prove that historic preservation isn’t just about nostalgia,” Delaney said. “It’s smart business when done correctly.”

The Ingersoll timeline

January 1938

Tri-States Theatre Corp., owned by businessman and philanthropist A.H. Blank announced plans to build a “motion picture theater” at 3411 Ingersoll Ave., although the proposed construction site was not where the structure was built. The theater’s construction at 3711 Ingersoll Ave. included a new design that would “make the acoustical properties of the new house outstanding.”

Oct. 5, 1939

The Ingersoll Theater’s grand opening included a double feature of the movies “Second Fiddle,” a romance musical, and “Torchy Runs for Mayor,” a comedy drama. The theater’s 600 seats were staggered in a “novel” way, with each viewer seated between two people in the row ahead. The building was air conditioned and had a “new kind of heating unit.” It cost $35,000 to build the theater. The theater was originally owned and operated by Des Moines businessman and philanthropist A.H. Blank. Photo courtesy White Oak Realty

1951

The theater was sold to American Broadcasting-Paramount Theaters. Blank remained involved with the property until his death in 1971.

October 1960

The Ingersoll was remodeled to include new carpet, lighting and drapes. The lobby was upgraded in a “New Orleans motif.” The front of the building was refreshed with new granite and ceramic tile.

1976

Plans to lease the theater to an adult movie operator caused backlash from local businesses and neighborhood residents. The plan was scrapped.

June 1977

The theater, which had fallen into disrepair, was shuttered. A business owner who had considered relocating his camera shop to the building estimated repairs would cost between $30,000 and $100,000.

1978-2004

Charles Carnes, a vocal music teacher at Des Moines’ East High School, operated the Ingersoll Dinner Theater, with performances that included musicals, comedies and tribute performances. The theater also served meals with the performances.

October 2004

The dinner theater closed after Carnes decided that a hike in rent would not make the business financially sustainable. The building sat vacant for nearly six years.

2010-11

The building was renovated and reopened as Copa Cavana, a Caribbean/Cuban-themed restaurant and bar.

2012

A music venue called the Marquee opened in the building. Operation of the venue was short-lived.

2013

The city of Des Moines sued the property’s owner for failing to bring it into compliance with zoning codes. The building remained vacant and unused until December 2025.

July 2022

In early 2022, city officials said the building could be declared a public nuisance and razed. Des Moines-area developer Conner Delaney bought the property from Lee Family Properties LLC for $550,000. Photo courtesy White Oak Realty

December 2025

The property reopened as the Ingersoll, a dinner theater with live performances of music, comedies, cabarets and other show types.

‘Prolific’ theater designer

Between 1928 and 1964, the Des Moines architectural firm Wetherell & Harrison designed 25 movie theaters in Iowa, including the Ingersoll. The firm, described as Iowa’s “most prolific movie theater designers,” also designed five Iowa drive-in movie theaters and at least four theaters in other states. According to a historical narrative of the Ingersoll, Des Moines movie theaters designed by Wetherell & Harrison included:

Lincoln (1935) at 3402 SW Ninth St. The building was razed.

Forest (1937) at 1343 13th St. The building is now a community center.

Hiland (1938) at 423 Euclid Ave. The building is used for storage space.

Varsity (1938) at 1207 25th St. The Varsity Cinema opened in December 2022 after an extensive renovation of the building.

Ingersoll (1939) at 3711 Ingersoll Ave. Renovated and reopened as a dinner theater in late 2025.

Eastown (1941) at 1536 E. Grand Ave. The building was torn down and a retail center was built on the site.

— Kathy A. Bolten