Actress Tippi Hedren, who spent part of her childhood in Morningside, outside the Westgate Theater for a special screening of The Birds. Photo: Edina Historical Society
For 84 years, the Westgate Theater at the intersection of France Avenue and Sunnyside Road brought Hollywood to Morningside. It opened in 1935 with Lady Tubbs, starring Alice Brady and Douglass Montgomery. The theater was a genuine community center, with a room for bridge and other card games as well as the stylish theater designed by Perry E. Crosier with Liebenberg and Kaplan, an architectural firm that built many of the Twin Cities’ prominent early movie theaters.
The Westgate featured popular matinees like Charlotte’s Web and Herbie, the Love Bug on school holidays. Along with entertaining locals, the Westgate hosted actors and actresses. Tippi Hedren, the star of The Birds, grew up near the theater and visited for the premier. Academy Award winner Ruth Gordon and Golden Globe nominee Bud Cort made appearances during anniversaries of the interminable run of Harold and Maude, which you can read more about in our feature, Discover the Tale of the Westgate Theater.
The final film shown at the theater was The Late Show with Art Carney and Lily Tomlin. After the movie theater closed in 1977, the building remained an impressive art deco geometric silhouette, across the street from the neon and Streamline Moderne style of Convention Grill, until it was razed in 2019.
Contributed by Laura Westlund, an arts writer and editor in the Twin Cities.
