Olympia Theater

This guide to the Olympia Theater in downtown Miami opens on an August night in nineteen fifty-six, when a twenty-one-year-old Elvis Presley played fifteen sold-out shows beneath a domed ceiling painted like a starlit Spanish night sky. It traces architect John Eberson's nineteen twenty-six design, the first 'atmospheric theater' of its kind, through decades hosting vaudeville, premieres, and stars like Etta James and B.B. King, before the theater sat threatened and half-empty by the late sixties. Businessman Maurice Gusman bought the theater in nineteen seventy and began pouring millions into its restoration.