Originally built in 1913 as the Lagoon Theater, this 1,500-seat venue was considered among the finest movie houses outside downtown. In 1929, it was rechristened the Uptown, and its reopening publicity proclaimed, "New Uptown Theater Rises in Splendor of Recreation of Old Lagoon: New Theater Marks Stride of Section from which it takes its Name." The reopened theater was equipped for talking pictures. After a 1939 fire damaged the original building, theater architects Jack Liebenberg and Seeman Kaplan designed a new Streamline Moderne-style masterpiece. The Uptown featured the first three-sided vertical tower sign on a movie theater in the United States, rising 60 feet and topped with a flashing beacon to attract attention in a busy commercial district.