Goodbye to the Broadmoor Theatre

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Once home to several movie screens the former Broadmoor Theater will be demolished in the next year to add more parking to the connecting shopping center.

However, the theater could be leveled sooner if the price is right, according to Baton Rouge area developer Randolph Ogden, who originally developed the theater nearly 50 years ago.

Though he's considered a tenant, operating his property management office out of the theater along Florida Boulevard, Ogden currently holds a 50-year land lease on the property that expires in August of 2015, and he brings in cash from two tenants he subleases to. "(Property owners) have not offered us enough money to leave. I'm bringing in $3,000 a month in rental income. There's no reason to walk away from that," Ogden said.

Austin Earhart of Beau Box Commercial Real Estate, the company developing the adjoining Broadmoor Village Shopping Center, said crews have already demolished the 42,000 square-foot building next to the theater.

Both will be demolished to make way for additional parking for the shopping center, which houses Planet Fitness, Family Dollar, American Cash Advance and the recently-relocated Hi Nabor grocery store.

The Broadmoor Theater opened in 1965 under the Ogden-Perry chain, one of 18 theaters Ogden owned throughout the South at the time. All were sold by 1987.

The theater was restructured several times, until ceasing operations in the late 1990s, but in 1998, reopened under different management. By 2004 the theater was closed again.

Since then, a teen nightclub tried operating out of the space and currently a recording studio and a video exchange shop lease space at the Broadmoor Theater. Ogden, owns 60 other properties in the Baton Rouge area and runs his property management office out of the Broadmoor Theater.