When it is renovated, Zelienople's vacant Strand Theater is expected to become a performing arts center, a place where creativity can thrive.

Appropriately, the center's construction began creatively, with a demolition crew made up of nine inmates from the Butler County Prison.

	Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette Darren Halli of Ambridge, right, kicks a row of seats loose from the floor of the old Strand Theater in Zelienople while Justin Sporny of Cranberry pulls them forward. Click photo for larger image.

The men arrived at 9 a.m. on June 9 and spent their Saturday laboring for the nonprofit organization that formed to save the theater. Their only pay came from a cooler of soft drinks and pizza from a nearby pizzeria.

Ron Carter, president of the Strand Theater Initiative, said he never asked about the offenses his workers committed to land in jail. He'd been assured by the prison officials that any volunteers were screened and would pose no security threat. What counted was that they came to work, Carter said.

"They're just regular people," he said. "They're just real people working off a sentence."

The day's labor was the first stage of demolishing the interior of the 1914 theater: removing all the old seats. Mr. Carter, always looking for new ways to raise money, decided that people with fond memories of the theater might be interested on buying the seats as keepsakes.

The challenge, then, was to remove the seats without destroying them. Carter envisioned the workers spending the day unscrewing each chair from the old wooden floor.

That painstaking effort didn't last long, however, before Ron Schaeffer, a crew member who does home remodeling for a living, determined that the old screws were rusty and small, and the chairs could just be pried out of the floor.

"When they said they weren't going to save the floor, I made the decision to use a crowbar to pull them out," Mr. Schaeffer said.

The chairs were so old and the screws so weak in some cases, the workers were able to simply push hard against the rows of seats until they were jarred loose.

Row by row, the seats went down. Before the pizza arrived for lunch, they were all knocked loose from the floor, and work had begun on deciding which would be salvageable and which were destined for the Dumpster.

Stepping out of the dark, dusty theater into the afternoon sunlight, Mr. Schaeffer said he was glad he signed up for the community service opportunity.

Raised in Jackson, Mr. Schaeffer, 31, said he was pleased to see the theater being preserved. He spent many weekend evenings as a boy watching movies in the Strand. The last time was in 1986, when he watched "Top Gun."

"This brings back a lot of memories," he said. "I grew up here; I wanted to help put the theater back together."

Mr. Carter said the $1 million renovation will involve gutting the brick structure and then rebuilding its interior and that of an adjacent building, which will be where the stage is located.

He said he hoped to have the building ready for live programs and film presentations by the end of the year. He doesn't have a building permit yet, but said the plans are being developed and he hopes to have a permit approved by the borough in eight to 12 weeks.

In another creative venture, the Strand volunteers hope to strike a deal with the borough to cooperate on a parking garage behind the theater. Mr. Carter said he has asked the borough to pay for the construction of a parking garage lot on land owned by the theater. That land abuts the borough building parking lot.

If constructed, the garage could provide as many as 130 parking spaces in the town where parking is at a premium, he said.

The final phase of the theater project would be to build a multi-purpose center on the top floor of parking deck, he said.

On the first work day, Mr. Carter was stunned with the speedy progress, and had to quickly plan what else he could use the crew for while they were on duty. He had agreed to return them to the prison by 5 p.m.

The Strand organization has hired a contractor to handle the more extensive work, but based on the results of his first community service crew from the prison, Carter said he would gladly work with the volunteers again should an opportunity arise.

And prison inmate Joshua Green, 29, of Butler, would likely be on that crew. He said this was the first time he'd ever worked for nothing, and he was enjoying the feeling as well as the opportunity to prove that he is ready to change.

"I'll do any community service they offer," he said.

"It shows my probation office I'm trying," said Mr. Green, who was in the fifth week of a 12-month sentence.

"It's something positive," he said. "And I've been doing negative activities all my life."

The Strand seats will be sold through a silent auction. Anyone interested in bidding on the seats should call 724-742-0400 to make an appointment to view them. The seats have been divided into sets of one, two, three and four seats.