Beacham Theatre
Despite the new recognition for the theater by the City of Orlando, Mr. Juarez saw the building as a liability with many pleasant memories surrounding it, but with little economic potential. Citing maintaining the building and rehabilitation of the area, he first announced plans to raze the building for an unspecified mix-use purpose and later to redevelop the former Beacham Block with a new skyscraper that would be used as a combination office building and hotel. In 1988 Juarez received two successive approval Certificate of Appropriateness permits from the City of Orlando Board of Historic Preservation to demolish the Beacham Theatre within 180 days. The "Bye-bye Beacham Bash" was promptly organized by Orlando Remembered and attended by former theater doormen, ushers, candy girls, and cashiers on December 9, 1988. However, Mr. Juarez's redevelopment plan and the new construction of a 20-story office building and parking garage fell through at the last moment due to poor timing. Additional parking could have contributed to a revitalized downtown area, but the market for office space in Downtown Orlando was nearly saturated in the late 1980s and there was a general lack of interest from prospective future tenants. Had the project materialized, Mr. Juaraz would have been required to reconstruct a replica of the original Beacham Theatre facade using original building materials of brick, stucco, decorative tile, and pastel colors.
New Theatre Royal
The present site was built to replace a theatre located in the High Street (now designated "old Portsmouth". The theatre features in Charles Dickens' novel "Nicholas Nickleby". A popular music hall, it hosted performances by Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt and Mr Keane the leading actor manager of the early nineteenth century. It closed in 1854 and was demolished in 1856 with a number of other buildings to allow for the construction of a military establishment, the Cambridge Barracks. This building now houses Portsmouth Grammar School, a fee paying independent school. The three-arch entrance to the school occupies the location of the theatre. The city archives contain an 1824 poster/playbill of a performance of The Merchant of Venice starring Mr Keane and paintings of the exterior and interior of the theatre. These show the theatre to have been a low building with no windows and a door with a Grecian portico typical of larger houses of the era.The interior was rectangular with two tiers of boxes along each wall and standing in the pit. It would have had a smaller audience capacity than the theatre which replaced it. The illustration of the Portsmouth Theatre by Phiz in Nicholas Nickleby is true to reality though not to scale.