Saturday, August 22, 2009

Regent Changes its Hue..


After a little over a year and a half, the "Main Street Recovery" mural came down today. A fresh new coat of bright yellow paint is now gracing the facade of the Regent Theatre..

view from a Rowan studio
The mural as seen from spring of 2008. The mural was originally installed on the Regent Theatre the 30th of January, 2008. Each part of the mural tells a story of Main Street's changes and the changes in Downtown. It was a temporary installation, but one can't help but think it had become a part of the landscape of Main Street.

This morning.. the scaffolding was being raised:

setting up the scaffolding
setting up the scaffolding 2



By late afternoon, the mural was halfway down.. and much of the new paint had been applied.

DSC_3534
DSC_3535

painting the facade

and then a little after 7pm.. this is what the Regent looked like:
DSC_3540

As for the "Main Street Recovery" mural, it's rumored that it may make future appearances around the Old Bank District at some point. As for now, for the immediate future, the Regent will be grooving out in bright yellow.

6 comments:

Joe Cornish said...

Has it been a year and a half already? I remember the excitement when the mural went up. I wondered at the time if it would fade from the sun, but it seems to have held up fine. Thanks for this update, Pamela!

MeekoRouse said...

yeah it went up the end of January of last year.. so it's been about 18 1/2 months. Not sure how it long it was originally meant to be there.

They had painted in plain letters "Third Man Records" in black for a 'pop up' venue for the later part of the week after they did this (blogdowntown did a story on it) and then just this Sunday (day before yesterday) they were painting over the bright yellow w/ like a yukky brown. Made me wish they'd left the banner up.

Joe Cornish said...

Did you attend the pop up venue? Is the brown the top coat or (hopefully) the undercoat? Who has the mural?

MeekoRouse said...

I didn't catch the pop up bands but someone did a story on them for Blogdowntown. (btw I don't write stories for Blogdowntown very often.. just update headlines section mainly)

I didn't find out about the Regent yet as I haven't been outside down that way since Sunday when I saw the brown paint. It looked yukky so I hope it's an undercoat. My sinuses are bugging me this morning (and my eyes were burning so I'm doing eyedrops) but if the overcast goes away some I may venture out to check.

Mr Gilmore has the mural. It's been said he may put it on display from time to time, maybe on the OBD parking garage or something. It was a bit of a hassle getting it up on the Regent but maybe Mr Gilmore has his own cherry picker. ;)

LAkompany said...

Glad to see the Regent is getting some poorly needed attention. In January 2007 I took some exterior pics and it was in a bad state.

MeekoRouse said...

LAKompany I wish that you had seen it with the "Main Street Recovery" digital mural/ banner. It really brightened the theatre up, not to mention it's been used in one form or another.. art galleries, live music venue.. etc.. since the end of 2007 at least.

I personally think the brown paint looks bad.. I miss the bright yellow with blue banner. The brown makes it look deserted again. =(