Esquire Theatre (Denver)

The Esquire Theatre, originally the Hiawatha Theater, is a historic movie theater building at 590 Downing Street in Denver, Colorado, at the corner of East Sixth Avenue and Downing Street in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Built in 1927 by theater operator Gordon B. Ashworth with an American Indian decorative theme inspired by Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha, the building housed a neighborhood cinema through the late 1920s and 1930s before closing around 1939. It reopened in November 1942 as the Esquire, operated by Fox-Intermountain Theaters, with Helen Jean Spiller as manager and an all-female staff.

Under Spiller's management (1942 to approximately 1954), the Esquire functioned as both a neighborhood cinema and a community gathering place, hosting annual toy matinees, children's programming, and prestige bookings including the 1949 Denver roadshow engagement of Laurence Olivier's Hamlet. In November 1954, Fox Intermountain formally repositioned the Esquire as its key Denver venue for international and art-house films, launching a subscription-based film festival circuit across a 25-city, seven-state territory. The Denver Film Society used the Esquire as its primary exhibition venue, and the theater introduced a no-late-seating policy for Diabolique in 1956, four years before Alfred Hitchcock's similar policy for Psycho. The building also served as a recurring venue for Denver's Jewish community, from Yiddish and anti-Nazi film screenings at the Hiawatha in the 1930s through civic events at the Esquire in the 1950s, a connection documented primarily through the Intermountain Jewish News.

Landmark Theatres began operating the Esquire in 1980, continuing its identity as an art-house and repertory cinema. The theater gained attention in 1988 as the site of Denver's exclusive run of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, which drew protests and record attendance. The Esquire also maintained a long-running midnight movie series, including one of the longest continuous runs of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the United States.