The Cole Memorial Building is a historic municipal event hall in Pequot Lakes, Minnesota, United States. It was built in 1937 with New Deal funding, generating jobs and revenue for a community suffering the effects of the Great Depression. With an auditorium large enough to seat 400 people, the Cole Memorial Building served as a key venue for numerous local events. From 1941 to 1967 it was converted into a municipally-run cinema, the Lakes Theater, whose profits were channeled back into community improvements. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004 as the A.L. Cole Memorial Building for having local significance in the themes of entertainment/recreation, politics/government, and social history. It was nominated for illustrating the long-lived benefits and substantial return on investment achieved with New Deal funding. The Cole Memorial Building now houses a senior center and a museum operated by the Pequot Lakes Historical Society. Description The Cole Memorial Building measures and has a full basement, a ground floor, and two small half-story attic spaces at the north and south ends. The walls are reinforced concrete with a stucco finish, though the gables are framed with vertical wood siding. The south end of the building has a projecting gabled vestibule with a porch over the centered entrance. There is a pair of three-pane transom windows over the front door, and four tiny windows near the apex of the main gable which light the attic space. Perched atop the porch roof for most of the building's history but no longer extant was a small room serving as the projection booth. The east and west walls are divided into six bays, most of which have pairs of six-over-six sash windows topped by three-pane fixed windows on the main floor, and glass block windows for the basement level. Inside, the vestibule provides a staircase to the basement, a coatroom on the left, and an office on the right. A small storage room next to the office contained a ladder up to the projection booth. Beyond the vestibule the main floor was mostly open space serving as the auditorium, with a stage flanked by stairways and dressing rooms. The stage, with its proscenium arch, was lost in the building's 1967 conversion into a senior center. The basement originally had a hallway with doors leading to a dining room, a kitchen, a furnace room, and boys' and girls'