Ragtag Cinema, Hitt Street

Stephen Bybee
Columbia, MO
2011

When I made this photograph during the winter of 2011, this building on Hitt Street was still a fairly new location for Ragtag Cinema. At the time it also housed the wonderful Ninth Street Video, no longer on Ninth Street, and Uprise Bakery. Two buildings north of this, on the corner of Hitt and Broadway, the glorious Campus Twin once provided a darkened and air-conditioned oasis from the endless and oppressive heat of my series of un-air-conditioned rentals on east campus, bringing arthouse cinema to my corner of Columbia in the 1990s. Now back to Ragtag…if you have ever wondered why the Ragtag Cinema building at 10 Hitt Street looks a little bit like a house, and less like a commercial structure, that is because it was designed that way. Built in 1935 utilizing Colonial Revival styling, this structure originally housed the Columbia Coca-Cola bottling plant, followed later by Kelly Press. When plans for the building were being drawn up, architecturally unnecessary flourishes such as a gabled roof and dormers were added to preserve a domestic and residential look, in keeping with the rest of Hitt Street at the time. And in an era less than fifty years before the construction of this building, Hitt Street was home to some of Columbia’s most desirable residences, including homes built for the Hitt, Garth, Fyfer and Samuels families. The architectural history of Hitt Street aside, this nocturnal view of the Ragtag Cinema photographed from deep inside a snow globe winter captures the magical, determined, creative, intrepid, and imagination-friendly essence that pervades everything now connected to this enduring Columbia edifice.