For Chandler Warden, giving the Fox Tucson Theatre Foundation $2 million for its expansion project takes him back to his 7-year-old self.
Warden, a trustee of his family’s Chicago-based Bert W. Martin Foundation, remembers sitting in the theater on an early June Saturday afternoon in 1958 watching Disney shorts as part of the “Mickey Mouse Club.”
Every month that summer, he and his friends would go back to the Fox to be part of what turned out to be one of the theater’s most treasured memories.
“I kept going back to the Fox as I got older and went to shows and this and that,” said Warden, who this week pledged $1.6 million to the Fox’s expansion project and $400,000 to its operating expenses.
The Bert W. Martin Foundation‘s gift, to be spread over four years, is the second largest in the Fox Tucson Theatre Foundation’s “Just Around the Corner” capital campaign. The goal is to raise $26.4 million to grow the Fox by 20,000 square feet.
The Fox Tucson Theatre landed a $2 million gift from the Bert W. Martin Foundation to support its multimillion-dollar expansion project. That brings the total raised to date to $6.4 million, a quarter of the way to the $26.4 million campaign goal.
Rio Nuevo, which had owned the theater at 17 W. Congress St. since 2014, sold it to the foundation for $100 in October 2022 and agreed to kick in $2 million in matching dollars towards the renovation.
“There’s a lot of people who care deeply about the Fox in this community,” Fox Tucson Executive Director Bonnie Schock said. “And beyond the sort of emotional connections that people have to this place, the sense, the understanding that people have that it needs to be here. It’s part of our overall fabric of the community.”
The Fox Tucson Foundation spent $2.7 million in late 2022 for the adjacent properties on North Stone Avenue including Rae’s Place Downtown Market. The $26.4 million budgeted for the expansion includes that expense, Schock said.
Architectural rendering of the proposed expansion of the Fox Tucson Theatre into the space occupied by Bruegger’s Bagels to the east of the theatre.
Plans include adding a lobby bar, food and beverage services and catering, as well as a gift shop. There will be space on the second floor for small music and speaker events or private group events.
There will be no changes to Fox Theatre itself, which opened in 1930 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Bert W. Martin Foundation, run by Warden and his brother Andy and their two daughters, supports local charities in Tucson and Southern Arizona, California’s San Mateo and Santa Clara counties and central Florida.
In addition to giving more than $1 million to the Fox over the past decade, the foundation has supported projects at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and Banner Diamond Children’s Medical Center.
Warden, who grew up in California and spent his childhood summers in Tucson as a camper at the El Carnila Ranch Camp at Tanque Verde Ranch, moved to Tucson full-time 32 years ago.
In addition to the Martin Foundation gift, the Fox also received $500,000 pledges from Tucsonans Nancy March and Neil Ampel, and Jerry and Mary Beth Radke.
Schock said the foundation has raised $6.4 million, a quarter of its goal, during what she described as the campaign’s “quiet phase,” which is targeting six-figure-plus donations.
“It is so exciting to get to this point,” she said. “You know this is not a small amount of money to raise in this community, and we know that. And at the same time, this project is absolutely essential to the future of the Fox, the arts in downtown, the kind of vibrancy, the growing localness of the sense of arts and culture here in Tucson.”
Schock said the theater hopes to break ground on the expansion in 2028 and open in 2030, in time to mark the Fox’s 100th birthday.
