Category Archives: Arizona

BusinessWeek features Mesa Drive-In

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Exit sign from the Mesa Drive-In

Exit sign from the Mesa Drive-In. Photo by mrdrivein, from the Carload Flickr pool.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek picked up Honda’s Project Drive-In renovation story, and its article this week focused mainly on one of my favorites. The Mesa (Pueblo CO) serves hamburgers that could be the featured dish at any restaurant, and they keep a good selection of movies showing at a pretty good location on the east side of town.

The article is great, but it isn’t perfect. It implies that Chuck and Marianne James added a couple of new screens right after they bought the Mesa in 1993, but that didn’t happen until 2000, when they recycled the screens from two closed Colorado drive-ins – the Pines near Loveland and the Estes in Estes Park.

Under the James’ careful stewardship, the place has done really well. The article describes a scene from 1994 when “3,427 people showed up for a double feature of Jurassic Park and The Flintstones, hanging out car windows and climbing trees to get a good view. A traffic jam stretched two miles down Highway 50.” After the Pueblo police intervened, the Mesa restricted the number of cars to 750, for an attendance of about 1800.

As with so many other drive-ins, the Mesa is scrambling to pay for new digital projectors. Although they’ve been saving up for the purchase, the Jameses don’t yet have the $210,000 necessary to convert three screens. Chuck said he’s really hoping that winning a free projector from Honda will put a big dent in that figure, but even if he loses, he hopes to stay open next year. “We’ll take our good credit and equity to the bank and start begging for money,” he said. “Please give me a loan for a projector! I promise I’ll pay!”

For a broader background on the national plight of drive-ins and more about the Mesa, go read the article! (Update: The Apache in Globe AZ was added to the Project Drive-In list after this post.) By the way, I was a little surprised that the Mesa is the only one of only two contest entrants in the Carload coverage area of 16 or 17 drive-ins (depending on whether we can still count the burnt Sunset in Vernal UT). If you’re a Colorado drive-in fan, you might want to set yourself a daily reminder to vote for the Mesa. I want to eat those hamburgers for years to come.

Apache will reopen for one more season

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Carload Exclusive NewsCarload.com has learned that the Apache Drive-In of Globe AZ will reopen next Friday, May 24, for its final season. Despite its forlorn appearance just a few weeks earlier, the Apache will continue to show movies for one more year; it won’t upgrade to digital projection.

Taking a step back, when Carload expanded last year, I identified 17 active drive-ins in the Four Corners states of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. If the Comanche Drive-In (Buena Vista CO) follows through on its plan to also reopen May 24, than all 17 will have survived the wave of digital conversion, at least for now.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that we’re going to lose this historic bit of Americana, which has stood for over 60 years. (According to my 1952 Theatre Catalog, the Apache was then being run by “O.K. Leonard”.) And the bittersweet news is that at least we all have this warning. If you want to experience a fine evening in Arizona’s high country, watching a movie at an old-time, intimate (300 cars) single-screen drive-in complete with old-fashioned speakers and an eternal mountain backdrop, you’ve still got a few months to visit the Apache.

Apache Drive-in globe light and screen behind brick wall topped with barbed wire

Glendale 9 is Drive-In Heaven

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Well, this is good timing. Just as I was getting ready to tell you exactly how the Glendale (AZ) 9 Drive-In is Drive-In Heaven, the Arizona Republic sort of beat me to it. This will go better if you go read the article now, then come back and let me add what I saw.

Did you read it? Great. Now let me tell you some more about the place. The article says that the Glendale 9 was built in 1979, which would make it one of the world’s most modern drive-ins. Unlike most multi-screen drive-ins, the Glendale was designed from the start for this many screens; its central projector room services all of them.

That central projector room sits atop a central snack bar and arcade, all unusually spacious for a drive-in theater. Nearby there’s a playground, plenty of benches, and a beer cart. Woohoo! Another unusual feature is a row of roofs to shade a back row of cars. This is suburban Phoenix, and that’s got to come in handy during all those triple-digit summer days.

How about that landscaping? Everywhere I turned, I saw palm trees and flowering bushes (or are those trees) along the edges. The snack bar island had more little flowering bushes. Again, this is in the desert, so maintaining such touches can’t be easy, but they illustrate a commitment to provide a great customer experience.

I can’t speak to how busy the Glendale tends to be, since I was there on a Thursday night and left before it got dark, but I did get to see the nine freshly installed digital projectors ready to work. Considering the many estimates for how much one of those babies costs, the West Wind folks who own the Glendale probably had to lay out around a half million dollars, even if they got a quantity price break. The Glendale must be doing very good business to justify that vote of confidence.

The assistant manager told me the sad tale of the nearby Scottsdale 6, which West Wind ran until September 2011, when it couldn’t renew its lease. Unlike that case, West Wind owns the Glendale’s land, and it sure sounds like it’s going to be around for a long time. Thank goodness. I’d hate to lose my Drive-In Heaven.

GlendaleTwilight