By Denise Neil/The Wichita Eagle
One of Wichita’s once-majestic theaters will be part of a food-hall concept that its owners hope could be open in a little more than a year.
The Nomar Theater at 2141 N. Market — which opened in 1929 but has been shuttered since the mid-1980s — is included in the second phase of a $12 million project by Empower, a nonprofit whose focus is revitalizing the North End of Wichita and serving its largely Hispanic/Latino residents through education and workforce and career development.
The group can’t start work on the food hall, which will be called Provecho (the Spanish equivalent of “bon appétit”), until it has reached its fundraising goal, executive director Ariel Rodriguez said, but it’s very close to doing so. Construction could begin by year’s end, he said.
The food hall will occupy the theater as well as the vacant mural-covered building directly to its north, which sits on the southwest corner of 21st and Market. The two buildings will be joined, and the corner building will be remodeled to include spots where six or seven food businesses could operate. Provecho will have space for retail vendors.
The theater will be transformed into a place where people can sit down and eat the food they purchased while enjoying live music and entertainment. Plans call for the theater’s sloped main floor to be flattened out, and designers have special plans for the theater’s old balcony.
“We’ll bring back all the historical value,” Rodriguez said of the old theater. “Our vision is 100 percent to keep the look and identity, especially of the facade. We want to restore it and make it what it was, and we’ll reimagine the inside.”
The idea, Rodriquez said, is to turn the two buildings into a Wichita version of Mother Road Market in Tulsa, which opened in 2019 inside a 1930s grocery building on Route 66. The 27,000-square-foot market, a nonprofit project by the Lobeck Taylor Family Foundation, gives burgeoning food businesses “incubator spaces” where they can get up and running without crushing overhead costs. Today, the market is home to 20 food-and-drink vendors as well as several retail popups.
“Our vision is to have our own Mother Road Market of Wichita,” Rodriguez said. “I truly think we have the ability to get there.”
Restaurant incubator
The Provecho food hall, Rodriguez said, is the natural next step for Empower, which in April opened the first phase of the project inside the old Basham Home Store building at 103 E. 21st St. Empower purchased that building, which sits directly to the west of the future food hall, in 2022.
It then spent $3.5 million turning the building into a space that now includes three full commercial kitchens, three prep kitchens, one baking kitchen, dry storage, cold storage and a demonstration kitchen. All of the equipment was purchased new.
Though the kitchens just opened in the spring, they’re already being used by 32 different burgeoning food-business owners, who are required by state health regulations to use commercial kitchens to prepare their food.
Among the clients at the new kitchens are the owners of Tamu Samosa, which sells Indian Samosas at the Old Town Farm and Art Market; Veronica’s Kitchen, which sells aquas frescas at the Kansas Grown Farmers Market; and J&S Smoked Snacks, which sells beef jerky and smoked sausages.
The kitchens also are the home base of MJ’s Catering and More, a business that recently launched an every-Sunday soul food popup business. Its owner, Tayneka Diggs, prepares her food at the kitchens then sells it from the building, using both a drive-up window and provided indoor seating.
Aspiring entrepreneurs who become members of the kitchen can get all their required licenses with the help of the kitchens’ operations manager. Members also get access to special programs and educational workshops that help them learn how to run their businesses.
Many of the kitchen’s members have already been able to scale up their businesses, Rodriguez said. But the food hall is intended to provide a bridge between, for example, serving at a farmers market and opening a brick-and-mortar business.
“The idea was, ‘How do we create a hub?” Rodriquez said. “So for instance, Veronica’s Kitchen: She can start here then be at the farmers market. But what does it look like when we give her access to an affordable state-of-the-art space that is open six days of the week for retail and visitors?”
Future food hall vendors will pay rent on a scaled tier, Rodriguez said, and the hope is that they’ll gain the customer-bases and skills that will help them open their own spaces.
Investing in the North End
Empower board president Gene Camarena was part of a committee formed around seven years ago that included city council members and people from Wichita’s Hispanic community.
Camarena — the president and CEO of La Raza Pizza, which owns and operates more than 60 Pizza Hut restaurants in three states — said that the committee first got together to talk about the proposed closure of Evergreen Library at 2601 N. Arkansas and to brainstorm possible uses for $1 million from the sale of the Hyatt Hotel that the city had earmarked for use in the neighborhood.
Ultimately, it was decided that the library would be renovated and turned into the Evergreen Community Center and Library, which would include not only the library but also a neighborhood resource center. It reopened in February 2022.
The idea for Empower grew from those discussions, Camarena said, and the nonprofit was launched in March 2021.
In May of that year, Rodriguez and Camarena attended an auction of the Nomar Theater and three neighboring buildings, which had been owned by the late James Basham since the 1980s.
Camarena won the theater and the building to the north with a $300,000 bid. When the nonprofit began planning what to do with the space, it returned to feedback it had received during an earlier grassroots campaign, when it asked people who lived in the community what they thought it most needed. Many people said that they wanted places where they could be entertained, get together and enjoy food. They also wanted help learning how to start small businesses.
“We knew the need was here,” said Camarena, who donated the theater and the neighboring building to Empower. “It’s just that nobody really took the time or the money or the energy to make that investment to make it happen.”
The ultimate plan, Camarena said, is that the kitchens and the new food hall become an anchor that will draw people from across the city — and in turn more businesses — to the North End.
The food hall will be a “logical extension of the kitchens,” he said.
“We hope the entire city of Wichita comes and supports this,” he said. “But just as importantly, it is a signal that these communities in the North End have value in that they’re places that the community wants to invest in and visit. Hopefully it’ll create some new jobs and businesses.”
Nomar Theater’s early days
The Nomar Theater was built in 1938 for $100,000 — which translates to about $1.9 million today. According to articles printed in The Wichita Eagle ahead of its 1929 opening, the interior was done “in flame, gold and Chinese yellow, the entire effect carrying out the Spanish-Oriental style of architecture of the building.” The theater also had drapes made of rayon silk velvet and heavy amber glass chandeliers.
Originally, it had cushioned chairs with upholstered seats for 800 people. It provided free parking for up to 400 cars, and it showed first-run movies. The first movie it played — with “full sound and talking effects” was “The Shopworn Angel,” starring Gary Cooper and Nancy Carroll.
By the 1970s, though, the Nomar — like many aging theaters in Wichita — was airing only adult movies, and in 1973, it was padlocked after the Kansas Supreme Court upheld a Sedgwick County Court ruling against the theater for showing obscene movies.
By 1978, the theater was open again, and its new owners, brothers Julio and Greg Caudillo, were showing Mexican movies there that regularly drew Sunday crowds of around 250 people. Basham later bought the theater and used it as a warehouse for his furniture business.
Empower and its builders are already deep into planning what the food hall and the theater renovation will look like when renovations are complete. A drawing by Hutton Construction shows the two buildings joined as one with a fresh coat of white paint. Cactuses provide landscaping in the front, and the theater has a new marquee that reads “Provecho.”
Rodriguez said that Empower plans to keep as many pieces of the theater’s historic architectural features intact as it can, including old stonework lions on the interior walls. It hopes to eventually restore the marquee and add the Provecho name.
For the food hall to work, he said, it will have to attract people from all over the city.
“We have to bring people in from Haysville, Andover. They have to come in from outside of the North End,” he said. “I hope 10 years down the road, it’s just like Delano, just like College Hill and we start seeing a different cultural district emerge. But we need the anchor to help start some of that redevelopment. “
This article was republished here with the permission of: The Wichita Eagle