Latchis Hotel and Theatre

Address 50 Main Street, Brattleboro, VT

The Latchis is Brattleboro's most distinctive building and one of the few Art Deco structures in Vermont. Built in 1938 by a Greek-American family that ran a cinema and hotel empire across New England, it contains a hotel, a multi-screen cinema, and a ballroom in a single building decorated with Greek mythology murals and terrazzo floors.

It is now owned and operated by the Brattleboro Arts Initiative, a nonprofit that saved the building from decline in the early 2000s. The cinema still runs first-run films, the hotel is one of the better options in town, and the building itself is worth seeing just for the murals in the lobby. Brattleboro without the Latchis would be considerably less interesting.

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A story
The Latchis was built in 1938 as a memorial to Demetrius P. Latchis, a Greek immigrant who built a chain of fourteen cinemas and hotels across New England. His son had the building decorated with murals of Greek mythology painted by the Hungarian artist Lajos Jámbor — an unusual decorative choice for a small Vermont town that has given the building a distinctly idiosyncratic character.