@downinnadesert: Buckeye had a movie theater when about 3,000 people lived there. It has over 90,000 now and the theater is gone. The Roxy opened on Christmas Day 1935 at 330 East Monroe Avenue in downtown Buckeye. One screen, 470 seats, and a quarter to get in. It ran one or two pictures a day. The staff were Buckeye high school kids, and for a lot of them it was the first job they ever had. On a Friday night in a farm town thirty miles west of Phoenix, it was the thing to do. Hollywood came through too. Studios sent people out to promote pictures, and a Buckeye woman who grew up going there remembered Hopalong Cassidy turning up, and Tonto, who signed a photo for her that she has long since lost track of. The photo going around right now, the one with the crowd out front and the cars parked along Monroe, dates to about 1962. You can tell because the marquee is advertising The Three Stooges Meet Hercules, which came out in January of that year. That is how you date a picture with no date on it. The Roxy closed in 1971. It sat empty for years and then fire took the building. City Hall sits near where it stood. Here is the part worth sitting with. Buckeye had 3,434 people in 1980. It had 6,537 in 2000. By 2010 it had 50,876, and by 2020 it had 91,502. In 2019 it was the fastest growing city in the entire country by percentage. The town that could support a movie house in 1935 grew into a city that could not get one. What is left of the Roxy is at the Buckeye Valley Museum. A replica marquee still advertising quarter movies, and a section of seats somebody pulled out of the debris after the fire. Forty minutes west on the 10 if you want to go see it. Send us your stories to be featured on the page. #Buckeye #WestValley #ArizonaHistory #ArizonaNews #DownInnaDesert

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Wednesday 16 September 2026 20:00:00 GMT