In what was increasingly apparent, the Tulsa World reported today that the Admiral Twin Drive-In theater would postpone its planned reopening to next year.
The historic drive-in’s fabled twin screens burned down during a fire in September 2010. After more than $30,000 in donations and securing a loan, co-owner Blake Smith announced the theater would reopen in August.
But save for some earth-moving, little activity could be seen on the Admiral Twin’s grounds all summer. The report tells why:
As a condition of new construction – the 60-year-old, nine-story wooden screen tower went down in flames last Sept. 3 – co-owner Blake Smith had to prove that the drive-in site was not located in a floodplain. Until that happened this month, he couldn’t get a building permit.
Until he got the building permit, he couldn’t order the steel for the new fire-resistant tower, and until he bought the steel, it couldn’t be fabricated for assembly of the two-sided tower.
“I don’t know when we’re opening now, but we finally got our permit, and we finally got our steel ordered, and (surveying determined that) we’re not in the floodplain,” Smith said with a sigh. “It seems ridiculous, and I don’t want to jinx things, but I have to think we’ll be having a grand opening in April of 2012.”
Smith said he hopes to test the new double screens late this year.
It’s probably just as well the Admiral Twin didn’t reopen this summer. Oklahoma is enduring what almost certainly is the worst heat wave in recorded history, and attendance at outdoors events in the past few months has suffered.
The drive-in initially opened in 1951, and the second screen was built a year later. Even as the number of drive-ins in the United States dropped over the decades, the Admiral Twin continued to show first-run movies. The Admiral Twin sits very close to the Admiral Place alignment of Route 66 in Tulsa.
The Admiral Twin also was used in a prominent scene in the movie adaptation of “The Outsiders.”