Connie Moses, who had a professional background in radio and theater, learned in 1977 that the Carolina Theatre was scheduled to be demolished to make way for a parking deck. She told the Durham Sun, “That I can’t take.”

The group she and her husband organized to save the building—one of Durham’s architectural gems—garnered widespread support, and it became an art house cinema. It closed in 1988 for renovation and reopened in all its 1920s splendor on Feb. 2, 1994.