The Hardacre is what preservationists call an opera house movie theater: a ground-floor auditorium wrapped in a commercial block, with shops on the street and a fraternal lodge upstairs. It was designed by Davenport architect Benjamin W. Gartside Jr. and has been remodeled in layers ever since.
The side and rear walls are a softer orange common brick, perhaps made locally.
Inside, the Hardacre divides into three parts from front to back, separated by two masonry walls that run from the basement to the roof.
The street side holds the outdoor and indoor lobbies and two storefronts. The whole second floor was built for the Odd Fellows' Manitou Lodge, a large lodge room across the front with smaller rooms behind.
The raked auditorium floor runs down toward the stage. Above the back rows, the balcony rises on six wooden risers.
A 50-foot brick fly loft rises over the stage, with fly galleries and a gridiron still in place. Five dressing rooms sit below the stage.
The 1948 neon marquee shelters a wide outdoor lobby with poster recesses and the stainless steel ticket booth, flanked by double doors.
Its plaster ceiling is hand-painted with green, pink and white floral vines, freehand work from the 1948 redecoration by Dahlstrom & Weinberger of Minneapolis. The paint is now badly peeling.
A narrow foyer added in 1928 holds a stair on each side up to the balcony and two doors down into the auditorium. The trim is rose and blue.
264 seats from different eras sit on a sloped concrete floor. The walls are dark blue with white floral motifs, and four original pendant lights still hang from the ceiling.
132 more seats on six wooden risers.
Today's stage is not original. It projects 16 feet past the proscenium and covers the original orchestra pit and the ducts of a 1936 "washed air" cooling system.
The second floor was built for the Odd Fellows. In 1916 the Tipton Conservative described it this way:
"The second floor is devoted exclusively to the use of the Odd Fellows, the large lodge room extending clear across the front part of the building, with a suite of smaller apartments, lavatories and toilet rooms in the rear."
— Tipton Conservative, April 12, 1916
After the lodge disbanded in 1988, the hall was split into two apartments. Its original green plaster ceiling survives above a modern dropped ceiling.
Benjamin W. Gartside Jr. was born in Davenport in 1885, the son of an architect who headed the design department of the T. W. McClelland Company, Davenport's most prolific nineteenth-century builder. He trained with his father, opened his own practice by 1913, and by 1925 had designed more than 500 homes in Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin.
His first plans for the Hardacre drew bids far over budget. The restrained design that was built, a broad brick front with white terra-cotta trim, may have been his way of bringing the cost down.
The Hardacre was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 5, 2016, for its role in local entertainment and social history and for its architecture. The nomination calls it "a rare, surviving example of an early twentieth-century opera house movie theater," with a period of significance from 1916 to 1965.
Interior descriptions reflect conditions recorded in 2015 and may have changed during restoration.