There is a renewed effort to sell a more than 100-year-old historic staple in Downtown Peoria.
The 102-year-old Scottish Rite Theatre, located at 400 NE Perry Ave., is back for sale on the market, at a lower price, as its former owner Kim Blickenstaff’s KDB Group tries to find the right buyer.
Blickenstaff purchased the building in 2019 and spent millions restoring and modernizing the cathedral, turning it into a “turnkey” theater and live events space.
The price of the building has been lowered from $4.8 million to $3.9 million, according to real estate agent Julie Bielfeldt, who gave the Journal Star a tour of the building.
Bielfeldt, who is the listing agent for the Scottish Rite and other former KDB properties, envisions the Scottish Rite as a space that could be bought by a theater operator, a church or some other kind of performing arts-centered business.
“Since I am the listing agent, I really put myself in the shoes of who the buyer would be and this is such an amazing building, so unique, because it offers more than the theater,” Bielfeldt said. “The theater is a huge part of it and the income generator, but you can’t disregard the fact that there are wonderful rooms, rental rooms. You could have Chamber of Commerce meetings, you could have banquet hall events, you could have private events in rooms. So rental room is a whole other feature and there is plenty of it.”
Finding the right buyer for a building that is so niche has been somewhat difficult, especially given the struggles indie operators are facing as lawsuits against entities such as Ticketmaster and Live Nation continue to play out, Bielfeldt said. However, she said larger cities and operators are beginning to realize that cities like Peoria are becoming more attractive.
Bielfeldt said something that is always on her mind is “passing the torch” and seeing Blickenstaff’s vision passed to a new owner who will open the doors once again and make it a “thriving part of our community.”
“How could you not want that?” Bielfeldt said. “That would be great.”
The building’s Downtown Peoria location lends itself to the idea of a “theater district” in Peoria, Bielfeldt said. The concept that would include both the Madison Theater and the Scottish Rite is something that Blickenstaff had in mind when he renovated the Scottish Rite. It could also include the new amphitheater being built on the Peoria riverfront, she added.
“You’re creating this theater district, this pathway,” Bielfeldt said. “Absolutely love the riverfront plan with the amphitheater because now it is showing it’s coming on the site, it’s creating that synergy and, I don’t know, there’s a lot of good stuff going on.”
The Scottish Rite had been leased, briefly, by the group TempleLive, which reopened the facility in 2025 for live shows. TempleLive’s tenure didn’t lasted less than a year, however, and it pulled out of the Scottish Rite and a host of other venues nationwide.
Renovations make Scottish Rite a “turnkey” venue
The building, having undergone the multi-million-dollar renovation thanks to Blickenstaff, is ready to use and is “turnkey,” said former Scottish Rite and Betty Jayne Brimmer Center Director Jenny Parkhurst.
“My biggest dream would be to see someone else come in and utilize that building to its full extent because it is primarily a turnkey situation, it is ready to go, it is completely updated and remodeled, not only on the surface but underneath. The core of the building has been renovated in the correct way,” Parkhurst said.
Parkhurst was the point person for the renovations that she said were “extensive.” Those included roof repairs and aesthetic repairs on a building she said was, at the time, in “disrepair.”
“It had serious issues and to this day I am so grateful that Kim Blickenstaff came back to Peoria and decided to invest in our community and save that building from was ultimately would have been a destruction and tear down because it was in disrepair,” Parkhurst said.
Blickenstaff was a developer who bought up properties in 2019 around the Peoria region, renovating some while leaving others unfinished. In 2023, he put the Scottish Rite and other properties such as Sankoty Lakes and the Peoria Armory building up for sale.
The theater can hold more than 800 people, and the rest of the building is outfitted with a surprising number of rooms that could host a variety of other events. Much of it had been modernized and designed for new uses that went beyond just live shows.
“In the renovation that was so much that, they call it functionally obsolete, for this time and this era and Kim brought it up to today, but he had so much respect for the structure and the craftsmanship that anything new he did, he wanted to feel like it was here all along,” Bielfeldt said.
The Scottish Rite’s renovation tried to pay homage to its age but also modernize a building that was desperately in need of care.
“We kind of blended the old and the new. We removed the drop ceilings to reveal beautiful arched windows, we did masonry repair and woodwork repair on the interior of the building,” Parkhurst said. “… My greatest joy was seeing that building not only repaired structurally for the integrity of the building but also to bring it back to its original, beautiful glory for the year it was built, which was 1924.”
This article originally appeared on Journal Star: Behind the effort to sell a century-old theater in Downtown Peoria
Reporting by JJ Bullock, Peoria Journal Star / Journal Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
