Historic Paynesville Landmark Reopens After 10 Years

UPDATE 10/21:  Everson says they have found out they need to place three furnaces and 2 air conditioners that had not been started since they bought the building.  She says they have started a Go Fund Me page to help with the costs.  You can use the QR code below to go to the page if you would like to help.

PAYNESVILLE (WJON News) -- A valued community business in Paynesville has recently reopened after a decade. The Koronis Theater reopened in September after being shuttered for 10 years.

Gloria Everson purchased the business with her two sons and they have been renovating it for the past three years. Everson says they had planned for the theater to be a retirement project but the community kind of forced their hand to open sooner:

"People are going crazy on Facebook, it's, I think I have 777 followers today. It just kept climbing and climbing but then I realized after the first week that not everybody has Facebook or looks at it so I did start to put posters around, I think my next step will be putting it in the newspaper."

Right now the theater is open on weekends and Everson travels up on Friday from her full-time job in the Twin Cities to run the theater. She says it has been fun getting the theater back open:

"It's sort of a bit of a dream and just something we really enjoy at this point, like I said, hopefully if I can get up here more like next year or something we could be open during the week."

She says they only have one screen open right now but they hope to get the second screen up and running in the next 6 to 12 months and the updating went pretty smoothly overall but they did run into a few challenges:

"Probably the most interesting thing that we have found is the heating system, which has this giant air blower in the basement, and every time we send people down there to look at the furnaces they come up with pictures and they're like wow have you seen this before and apparently it was the way they heated the old theaters."

Everson says they still have some work to do to get the theater up to date:

"Overtime we will slowly change out the seats they're in very good condition and comfortable but people like the reclining seats and that so you know it will be an ongoing project."

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Everson says they are currently showing second-run movies but hope to be open more days as time goes on and update the equipment further so they can show first-run films.

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