Overview:
After a unanimous vote, developers plan to reopen Berkeley's historic Yates Theater as a movie theater and event space moves forward.
A century-old theater in Denver’s Berkeley neighborhood is getting closer to reopening, this time as a renovated movie theater and event space. On March 10, the Denver Board of Adjustment unanimously approved a zoning variance allowing the historic Yates Theater on West 44th Avenue to expand its seating capacity to 310, which has been the leading delay in the restoration led by married couple Macy Lao and Kyle Hagan.
“The hearing went really well,” Hagan said. “We feel really good about the approval and are excited to move onto the next steps in the project.”
The couple is leasing the building and will keep the name “Yates” while also branding the new venue as the “Waystation.” The Yates dates back to the 1920s, when neighborhood movie houses served as community gathering spaces.
According to Lao, turning the Yates back into a movie theater “happened on a whim.” She had wanted to own and run a “film- or TV-themed bar lounge” since 2004, but everything changed when she stepped inside the Yates building last year.
“As soon as we entered it in February of 2025, it felt really unique and interesting,” Lao said. “I went immediately back home and rebuilt the business plan from the ground up in a week and a half.”
For Lao and Hagan, the appeal was obvious: a historic theater that still had the original design intact.
“The building needs to go through a lot of work,” Lao said, “but the bones are all still there.”
“It’s a type of thing that isn’t here in Colorado,” Hagan adds. “We found the location as a historic building, a historic theater, and had the desire and the ability to restore it and get it up and running again.”
However, before that vision could move forward, the owners had to navigate the city’s zoning rules.
The March 10 Board of Adjustment meeting focused on a request to increase the theater’s seating capacity from 100 seats (the maximum currently allowed under the property’s zoning designation) to 310 seats. According to the variance application, the building itself presented what the city calls “unusual physical conditions.”
“The process was more complicated than we thought it would be,” Lao said, “because the theater was already built for a use capacity of 500 seats and our use capacity actually brought down the minimum seating requirement.”
Hagan noted that the zoning restriction applies specifically to arts and entertainment venues.
“For the district that it’s zoned in, arts and entertainment venues are limited to 100 seats,” he said. “If we opened a bar, we wouldn’t have that limitation.”
Despite the bureaucratic hurdles, the proposal gained support from neighborhood residents. The Berkeley Regis United Neighbors association, known as BRUN, worked with the owners for months leading up to the hearing.
“They’ve been really great and open with communication,” Lao said.
Those conversations resulted in a Good Neighbor Agreement, signed Feb. 24 between Hagan and BRUN president Scott Danenhauer. The GNA outlines how the theater will operate within the neighborhood.
For example, it limits the theater to 310 fixed seats in the auditorium and 44 seats in the lobby lounge, with alcohol service ending at 11 p.m. and operations wrapping up by midnight. It also includes policies for noise reduction, parking, safety, signage, lighting and much more.
“It’s an operations agreement between us and the neighborhood organization,” Hagan said. “It covers things like trash pickup and hours and noise levels.”
The goal, he added, was to show the project could work in tandem with nearby homes and businesses.
“It’s not so much them dictating our business plan,” Hagan said. “It’s considerations in the business plan to be a good neighbor to both the neighborhood as a whole and the immediate neighbors.”
With the zoning variance approved, Lao and Hagan can now move forward with designing and renovating the building. Hagan, a civil engineer, said the goal is to preserve as much of the original structure as possible.
“The main body of the theater is going to stay pretty much as it is,” he said. “It needs some new concrete, some new walls, but we’re not subdividing the space.”
Instead, the renovation will install a new screen and seating while restoring elements of the historic stage.
“We’re going to put in a screen and seats and restore the stage a bit,” Hagan said. “It’s being put back to its original use.”
While films will anchor the venue, Lao hopes Waystation will also host live events from comedy to lectures, continuing the theater’s early role as a neighborhood gathering place. For Lao, the project is ultimately about creating the kind of cultural space she wishes already existed in Denver.
“We just wanted to make something that we didn’t see specifically here,” Lao said. “We’re making it for an audience of one, and that audience of one is us.”
And if all goes according to plan, a building that has sat quiet for decades could once again become a place where audiences gather in the dark, just as they did nearly a century ago.