The web site of Seattle architectural firm The Henry Architects lists the CineLux Tenant Station 11 as one of their projects. There is one photo of it in their slide show.
The Avery Theatre was designed by St. Paul, Minnesota, architect Henry E. Waldron, of the Sperry Realty Company. The theater was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.
The Avery’s web site has information about the history of the house and the renovation process. A drop-down menu from the ABOUT on the main page has a link headed RESTORATION PROCESS, and that page has a link from which to download a PDF of the NRHP Registration form, which contains several historic photos.
The page also has a link to a time line of the restoration, and at the end of the time line are links to PDFs of the two parts of a tabloid published by The Leader, the local newspaper, at the time of the theater’s reopening in August, 2013. These contain several photos of the renovation as well as additional historic photos of the theater.
My links in the previous comment are not going directly to the pages. The ca.1918 postcard with the “It” Theatre is at result 5 of the 8, and the 1939 photo of the Strand is at result 7.
An article in the March 15, 1965, issue of the Hagerstown, Maryland, Daily Mail said that the Strand Theatre Building in Waynesboro had been gutted by a fire. The building, it said, was nearly 100 years old, and had not been used as a theater since the 1940s.
The Strand Theatre was in operation by 1924, when the Cumberland Valley Volunteer Firefighters Association held its 23rd annual meeting there.
A small photo on page 183 of Waynesboro as We Knew it, by Todd Andrew Dorsett, (Google Books preview) shows Main Street east from Center Square in 1939. The Strand was in the building at the northeast corner of the square. The lower floor is obscured by a bus in the photo, but the theater’s vertical sign can be seen (though not easily read.)
Another page of Dorsett’s book (I hope this link goes right to it) has a ca.1918 postcard view east across Center Square, and the site of the Strand is occupied by an earlier theater called the “It” (the name usually appears in quotes in old publications.) The “It” Theatre first appears by name in the trade publications in 1910, but this item from the May 22, 1909, issue of The Moving Picture World is probably about it:
“Waynesboro, Pa.—Cashier W. H. Gelbach, of the Citizens Bank, has contracted with A. R. Warner for the building of a new moving picture theater on Center Square.”
In the 1918 postcard the “It” Theatre occupies a building with a gabled end facing the square rather than the two-story flat-roofed structure which had the Strand’s entrance, but if the report of the fire in the 1965 Daily Mail article is correct, and the Strand’s building was then almost 100 years old, it must have been the same building.
The last mention I’ve found in the trade magazines of the “It” Theatre is this item from The Moving Picture World of April 6, 1918:
“Theater at Waynesboro Sold.
“Waynesboro, Pa. — The ‘It’ theater, in this city, for some time owned by John Karper, has changed hands, having been purchased by Watson & Daley of Hagerstown, Md. The management of the ‘It’ was assumed by Watson & Daley on March 16. After extensive repairs and improvements they will add a program of vaudeville to the moving pictures.”
I’ve tried to find a connection between Watson and Daley and the Strand Theatre, but failed. In fact the only mention of the Strand I’ve found is a brief mention in The Film Daily in 1943. Still I think it very likely that the Strand was the “It” Theatre remodeled and renamed.
Here is an item from the January 30, 1915, issue of The American Contractor:
“Waynesboro, Pa. — Opera House, Apt. & Store Bldg.: 5 sty. 75x75, 84x85 & 75x100. Archt. J. W. Woltz. Owner Arcade Corp. Plans ready for bids Feb. 15.”
It took almost two years for the project to be completed, though. This announcement appeared in the October 14, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“Waynesboro, Pa.— Manager A. R. Zook announces that his new opera house, Waynesboro. Pa., will soon be thrown open to the public. This theater is one of the most beautiful in the entire state of Pennsylvania and should meet with the greatest success.”
Page 151 of Waynesboro as We Knew it, by Todd Andre Dorsett (Google Books preview) has a large version of the photo Lost Memory linked to earlier.
J. W. Woltz was Waynesboro’s leading architect of the period, practicing in the city from 1893 until his death in 1918. He must have been a very conservative fellow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so Victorian a building as the Arcade Theatre that was built as late as 1916. It would have fit right in to San Francisco of the 1870s.
The Star Theatre was most likely a storefront nickelodeon of the sort that flourished during the 1900s and 1910s. Even very small towns often had one or two, but if there was an existing theater to compete with they usually didn’t last long. They were like web sites at GeoCities.
I haven’t been able to find the Star Theatre mentioned in any of the trade publications from the era that are available on the Internet.
The name Colonial Theatre goes way back in Lebanon, but I don’t know if it was originally in the same building that became the Avon. Here is an item (somewhat belated, it appears) from the October 10, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“The Colonial, Lebanon, will move into the picture show auditorium made a part of the new Rural Loan Association building. The Colonial will be running in the new location before October 1.”
The November 7 issue of the same magazine had another item about the Colonial:
:“The New Colonial theater, Lebanon, Ind., will be reopened for business now soon. The work of remodeling and redecorating is about complete.”
From the two items, is sounds as though the theater might have temporarily occupied the auditorium of the Rural Loan Association building while its own building was being remodeled.
Another reference to the Colonial comes from the February 13, 1915, issue of Domestic Engineering:
“Clarence Miller, of Lebanon, recently finished the heating and plumbing in the two-story fireproof Colonial Theater building. This contract amounted to $1,100.”
The 1921 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide lists the Colonial Theatre at Lebanon as a 500-seat house with a rather small stage 20 feet by 21 feet. The guide says there were also two movie theaters at Lebanon, one playing vaudeville twice a week, but it doesn’t name them. The town’s population was 6,257 in 1920, so three theaters was not unreasonable.
Okay, the Strand and the Crescent/Elite were not the same theater. The Strand Theatre Company incorporated in late 1914 and the theater was open by 1915, while the Elite was still there in 1917 when an item in The Moving Picture World said it was being renovated. This is the October 3, 1914, item about the incorporation of the Strand company:
“The Strand theater of Nashville has applied for a charter of incorporation, listing the capital stock of the company at $25,000. The incorporators are Hugh M. Waddle, Roy C Shelton, H. A. Waddle, J. B. Brent and Frank Pierce.”
An interesting item shows up in the August 26, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. It indicates that the Strand was a “reverse theater,” with the screen at the entrance end of the house and the projection booth at the back of the building:
“Nashville, Tenn.—An actual demonstration of the feasibility of the new building ordinance recently enacted by the City Commission was had when fire broke out in the operating booth at the Strand theater on August 2d. The new law provides that no theater shall be constructed with the operating room in the front of the house, but that all seats must face the entrance, with the screen toward the street. The Strand was the first theater erected under these provisions, and it was due largely to the new arrangement that no panic ensued when a dense smoke quickly filled the auditorium, for the crowd was compelled to move away from the fire instead of toward it. The blaze started during the showing of ‘The Scarlet Road,’ when the film broke and became entangled In the projection machine, spreading quickly to a nearby pile of reels and destroying film to the amount of $2,000. The equipment was damaged about $200 worth, and all losses were covered by insurance. Operator C. L. Wheeler was painfully burned about the hands. Operator Carter was also slightly burned.”
This item is the first I’ve ever heard of a city requiring that movie theaters be built with the reverse pattern. Reverse theaters have been fairly rare, but if this law was on the books for any great length of time, Nashville must have a large share of them.
The 1917 item says that the Elite was then being operated by Crescent Amusement as a five-cent house, and was being renovated.
If the Fifth Avenue Elite was missing from the 1928 list, that means there were at least five Elite Theatres in Nashville over the years.
Actually, I’m not even sure how you pronounce “Lafayette” in Nashville. It gets pronounced more than one way in California. I rhyme the first two syllables with coffee.
I was wondering because I found an item about the Elite Theatre on Fifth Avenue in the August 25, 1917, issue of The Moving Picture World. If it wasn’t the same house as the Strand then it isn’t listed at Cinema Treasures yet. Do you know what become of that Elite? The 1917 item is the only mention of it I’ve been able to find.
I am wondering if the Strand is the same theater that DavePrice says in this comment was opened around 1908-1909 as the Crescent Theatre and renamed the Elite Theatre around 1910. It was at 233 Fifth Avenue, but the address might have shifted, especially if there was a major remodeling at some point.
DavePrice: Is there any chance that the Crescent/Elite Theatre at 233 Fifth Avenue is the house that we have listed as the Strand Theatre at 235 Fifth Avenue?
Page 27 of this PDF has a photo of a derailed streetcar with the Home Theatre in the background. The document says that streetcar service in Portage ended in 1916, so the Home Theatre was in operation by then.
I had a friend in high school who had lived in Portage, but he never mentioned the names of any theaters there.
The movie 7th Heaven was released in 1927, so that photo’s caption is off by several years. As the article I cited in my previous comment was dated January 7, 1927, I think we can safely assume that the Palace was in operation by 1926.
The Frances Theatre keeps getting older, though. If it was named for the 1923 high school valedictorian, it got the name even before she started high school. This is from the August 25, 1917, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“Dyersburg Theaters Consolidate.
“Dyersburg, Tenn. — C. J. Enochs has been appointed manager of both the Vaudette and New Frances theaters of this town, following the recent consolidation of these two moving picture houses. Mr. Enochs was formerly manager and proprietor of the Vaudette, but is now in active charge of both theaters. The orchestras of both the New Frances and Vaudette theaters have been released, and music is being supplied by electrical instruments at both places.”
The use of the name “New Frances” suggests that there might have been an earlier Frances Theatre. Perhaps Frances Shepard Fowlkes' parents owned the theater.
This item also reveals that the Vaudette Theatre was in operation as early as 1917, and that it was large enough to have supported an orchestra. As we don’t yet have any overlap between the operating years of the Palace and the Vaudette, perhaps they were the same theater?
Here is information about Dyersburg from the January 7, 1927, issue of Motion Picture News:
“Three Dyersburg Houses
Bought by Crescent
“The deal for the purchase of three theatres in Dyersburg, Tennessee, and four in nearby West Tennessee towns from the Dyersburg Theatre Corporation by the Crescent Amusement Company, of Nashville, Tenn., has been concluded.
“Tony Sudekum, president; Harry Sudekum, treasurer; General Manager Dean, and J. P. Masters, district manager, returned to Nashville the latter part of last week after contracts had been signed and negotiations fully completed.
“The Crescent Amusement Company already operates one theatre in the city, the Palace. One of the purchased motion picture houses will be closed. The other will be operated and the road show house, the Frances, also will be operated. The Crescent Company also will continue operation of the other picture houses purchased at Ridgely, Tiptonville. Obion and Halls.”
So the Frances and Palace Theatres were in operation by early 1927. It’s unfortunate that he other two houses bought by Crescent were not named in the item.
Ripshin: If you are referring to the Capitol Theatre, we had the wrong address for it. The Capitol was actually south of Market Street, at modern address 202 S. Main. Check the photo in my comment of 6:39 pm yesterday. A thumbnail link to a photo showing the Capitol is at the bottom of the third page of thumbnails. The photo shows the front of the building at the northeast corner of Main and Market as well. I think that building is actually still there, but has had its second floor removed. It looks much too narrow to have had a theater in it.
I didn’t double check the link in my previous comment. Go to page three of the thumbnails, and the scene showing the Capitol Theatre is the one at the bottom.
You might as well add the Palace. It must have been in the building on the north side of the square at 120 Court Street (street view) now occupied by an attorney’s office. Mill between Court and Market would have been the west side of the square, so the Pastime would not have become the Palace. It’s possible that it became the Ritz, but the Ritz is still a puzzle so I’m not at all sure.
lalain: The construction of a balcony is always a possibility. It’s also possible that there was always a balcony or gallery of some sort, but the operator chose not to use it until business picked up, and then it was opened, or maybe a new operator took over the house and opened it. It’s also possible that Film Daily got the count wrong, and later adjusted it up or down. I don’t know where the Yearbooks got their seat counts, but I suspect that it was from either the theater operators or managers, or from the film distributors. I think some of them just didn’t bother to make an accurate count, or just didn’t report it correctly. I know that there were a lot of mistakes in the books.
There’s also a possible explanation for why a theater would drop out of the Yearbook’s reports even though movies were still being shown there. The Yearbooks only counted commercial theaters that got their movies from regular distributors. There used to be a company that rented 16mm prints of movies to individuals, schools, civic organizations, clubs, and towns without regular theaters. I went into their office on Hollywood Boulevard once in the early 1960s and picked up one of their catalogs, but I can’t remember the name of the company. There might have been other such companies in other parts of the country. It’s possible that after the Point Theatre was no longer viable as a commercial theater, some civic group began renting movies to show. They would not have been allowed to charge for admission (the company would rent films only to non-profit groups), but they could have accepted donations from the patrons.
Also, the Stone Opera House was definitely in Binghamton. It is listed at Cinema Treasures under its later name, the Riviera Theatre. But it’s also quite possible that the hall the Point Theatre was in was also called the Opera House when it was built. It might sound pretentious today, but in the 19th century every small town wanted an opera house, and when they built any sort of public hall that’s what they would call it, more often than not.
I don’t think the Capitol Theatre has been demolished. The last photo on this page of Dyersburg Street scenes shows the Capitol on the east side of Main Avenue in the second building south of Market Street.
The address of the building at that location, now housing the offices of a law firm, is 202 S. Main Avenue, and the building does look old, though the brick of the facade has been carefully restored and repointed. The theater entrance has been closed up with brick matching the old structure, but it is slightly lighter in color. If you go south of the building and look along the side it looks like the stage house is still there.
It would be worth the trouble of getting good grades to have a theater named after you.
I think the Palace must have been at the northeast corner of Court Street and Mill Avenue, opposite the town’s “skyscraper.” The building there has the same pedimented parapet on the front, although the whole structure has been plastered over, losing all its nice brick and stone details.
The photos of the Ritz don’t give enough context to tell where it was, though they show that it had buildings on both sides.
The last photo on page three of the “Street Scenes” collection shows the Capitol Theatre.
The “Theater Gossip” column of the September 26, 1932 issue of the St. Petersburg, Florida, Evening Independent said that, on October 3, the “Francis” Theatre in Dyersburg, Tennessee would be the site of the world premier of the movie The Cabin in the Cotton, which was based on a novel of the same name by Dyersburg native Henry Harrison Kroll (scan at Google News.)
I’ve seen this theater referred to as the Francis as often as it is the Frances, including by angelamatlock, whose father once operated the theater, in an earlier comment here. Does anyone have a photo of the marquee, or a scan of an advertisement for the house?
When AMC sold the Cinema 4 to a local investment group, there was a stipulation that the building would never again be used as a movie theater, according to this article at the web site of NBC TV affiliate WPSD.
The former theater has since been converted into a gun shop and indoor firing range, so I guess it still sounds like movies are being shown in it.
The Facebook account “Greenville Texas Revisited” has an album of theater and theater-related images here (if the link works, Facebook being Facebook.) There are photos of the Texan, the Crystal, the Opera House, the Rialto, and the Lyric.
The caption to the Lyric photo says that it had two locations. The one in the photo was on Stonewall Street, just south of Washington. It doesn’t say which of the two theaters was earlier, but the hats and dresses on the women in the photo look to be from the 1910s, so the Lee Street location, having been called the Savoy in the 1910s, must have been the second Lyric.
The web site of Seattle architectural firm The Henry Architects lists the CineLux Tenant Station 11 as one of their projects. There is one photo of it in their slide show.
The Avery Theatre is open again, showing movies seven nights a week, with a matinée on Sunday.
This is their web site.
The Avery Theatre was designed by St. Paul, Minnesota, architect Henry E. Waldron, of the Sperry Realty Company. The theater was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.
The Avery’s web site has information about the history of the house and the renovation process. A drop-down menu from the ABOUT on the main page has a link headed RESTORATION PROCESS, and that page has a link from which to download a PDF of the NRHP Registration form, which contains several historic photos.
The page also has a link to a time line of the restoration, and at the end of the time line are links to PDFs of the two parts of a tabloid published by The Leader, the local newspaper, at the time of the theater’s reopening in August, 2013. These contain several photos of the renovation as well as additional historic photos of the theater.
My links in the previous comment are not going directly to the pages. The ca.1918 postcard with the “It” Theatre is at result 5 of the 8, and the 1939 photo of the Strand is at result 7.
An article in the March 15, 1965, issue of the Hagerstown, Maryland, Daily Mail said that the Strand Theatre Building in Waynesboro had been gutted by a fire. The building, it said, was nearly 100 years old, and had not been used as a theater since the 1940s.
The Strand Theatre was in operation by 1924, when the Cumberland Valley Volunteer Firefighters Association held its 23rd annual meeting there.
A small photo on page 183 of Waynesboro as We Knew it, by Todd Andrew Dorsett, (Google Books preview) shows Main Street east from Center Square in 1939. The Strand was in the building at the northeast corner of the square. The lower floor is obscured by a bus in the photo, but the theater’s vertical sign can be seen (though not easily read.)
Another page of Dorsett’s book (I hope this link goes right to it) has a ca.1918 postcard view east across Center Square, and the site of the Strand is occupied by an earlier theater called the “It” (the name usually appears in quotes in old publications.) The “It” Theatre first appears by name in the trade publications in 1910, but this item from the May 22, 1909, issue of The Moving Picture World is probably about it:
In the 1918 postcard the “It” Theatre occupies a building with a gabled end facing the square rather than the two-story flat-roofed structure which had the Strand’s entrance, but if the report of the fire in the 1965 Daily Mail article is correct, and the Strand’s building was then almost 100 years old, it must have been the same building.The last mention I’ve found in the trade magazines of the “It” Theatre is this item from The Moving Picture World of April 6, 1918:
I’ve tried to find a connection between Watson and Daley and the Strand Theatre, but failed. In fact the only mention of the Strand I’ve found is a brief mention in The Film Daily in 1943. Still I think it very likely that the Strand was the “It” Theatre remodeled and renamed.Here is an item from the January 30, 1915, issue of The American Contractor:
It took almost two years for the project to be completed, though. This announcement appeared in the October 14, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:Page 151 of Waynesboro as We Knew it, by Todd Andre Dorsett (Google Books preview) has a large version of the photo Lost Memory linked to earlier.J. W. Woltz was Waynesboro’s leading architect of the period, practicing in the city from 1893 until his death in 1918. He must have been a very conservative fellow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so Victorian a building as the Arcade Theatre that was built as late as 1916. It would have fit right in to San Francisco of the 1870s.
The Star Theatre was most likely a storefront nickelodeon of the sort that flourished during the 1900s and 1910s. Even very small towns often had one or two, but if there was an existing theater to compete with they usually didn’t last long. They were like web sites at GeoCities.
I haven’t been able to find the Star Theatre mentioned in any of the trade publications from the era that are available on the Internet.
The name Colonial Theatre goes way back in Lebanon, but I don’t know if it was originally in the same building that became the Avon. Here is an item (somewhat belated, it appears) from the October 10, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World:
The November 7 issue of the same magazine had another item about the Colonial:From the two items, is sounds as though the theater might have temporarily occupied the auditorium of the Rural Loan Association building while its own building was being remodeled.Another reference to the Colonial comes from the February 13, 1915, issue of Domestic Engineering:
The 1921 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide lists the Colonial Theatre at Lebanon as a 500-seat house with a rather small stage 20 feet by 21 feet. The guide says there were also two movie theaters at Lebanon, one playing vaudeville twice a week, but it doesn’t name them. The town’s population was 6,257 in 1920, so three theaters was not unreasonable.Okay, the Strand and the Crescent/Elite were not the same theater. The Strand Theatre Company incorporated in late 1914 and the theater was open by 1915, while the Elite was still there in 1917 when an item in The Moving Picture World said it was being renovated. This is the October 3, 1914, item about the incorporation of the Strand company:
An interesting item shows up in the August 26, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. It indicates that the Strand was a “reverse theater,” with the screen at the entrance end of the house and the projection booth at the back of the building:This item is the first I’ve ever heard of a city requiring that movie theaters be built with the reverse pattern. Reverse theaters have been fairly rare, but if this law was on the books for any great length of time, Nashville must have a large share of them.The 1917 item says that the Elite was then being operated by Crescent Amusement as a five-cent house, and was being renovated.
If the Fifth Avenue Elite was missing from the 1928 list, that means there were at least five Elite Theatres in Nashville over the years.
Actually, I’m not even sure how you pronounce “Lafayette” in Nashville. It gets pronounced more than one way in California. I rhyme the first two syllables with coffee.
I was wondering because I found an item about the Elite Theatre on Fifth Avenue in the August 25, 1917, issue of The Moving Picture World. If it wasn’t the same house as the Strand then it isn’t listed at Cinema Treasures yet. Do you know what become of that Elite? The 1917 item is the only mention of it I’ve been able to find.
I am wondering if the Strand is the same theater that DavePrice says in this comment was opened around 1908-1909 as the Crescent Theatre and renamed the Elite Theatre around 1910. It was at 233 Fifth Avenue, but the address might have shifted, especially if there was a major remodeling at some point.
DavePrice: Is there any chance that the Crescent/Elite Theatre at 233 Fifth Avenue is the house that we have listed as the Strand Theatre at 235 Fifth Avenue?
Page 27 of this PDF has a photo of a derailed streetcar with the Home Theatre in the background. The document says that streetcar service in Portage ended in 1916, so the Home Theatre was in operation by then.
I had a friend in high school who had lived in Portage, but he never mentioned the names of any theaters there.
The movie 7th Heaven was released in 1927, so that photo’s caption is off by several years. As the article I cited in my previous comment was dated January 7, 1927, I think we can safely assume that the Palace was in operation by 1926.
The Frances Theatre keeps getting older, though. If it was named for the 1923 high school valedictorian, it got the name even before she started high school. This is from the August 25, 1917, issue of The Moving Picture World:
The use of the name “New Frances” suggests that there might have been an earlier Frances Theatre. Perhaps Frances Shepard Fowlkes' parents owned the theater.This item also reveals that the Vaudette Theatre was in operation as early as 1917, and that it was large enough to have supported an orchestra. As we don’t yet have any overlap between the operating years of the Palace and the Vaudette, perhaps they were the same theater?
Here is information about Dyersburg from the January 7, 1927, issue of Motion Picture News:
So the Frances and Palace Theatres were in operation by early 1927. It’s unfortunate that he other two houses bought by Crescent were not named in the item.Ripshin: If you are referring to the Capitol Theatre, we had the wrong address for it. The Capitol was actually south of Market Street, at modern address 202 S. Main. Check the photo in my comment of 6:39 pm yesterday. A thumbnail link to a photo showing the Capitol is at the bottom of the third page of thumbnails. The photo shows the front of the building at the northeast corner of Main and Market as well. I think that building is actually still there, but has had its second floor removed. It looks much too narrow to have had a theater in it.
I didn’t double check the link in my previous comment. Go to page three of the thumbnails, and the scene showing the Capitol Theatre is the one at the bottom.
You might as well add the Palace. It must have been in the building on the north side of the square at 120 Court Street (street view) now occupied by an attorney’s office. Mill between Court and Market would have been the west side of the square, so the Pastime would not have become the Palace. It’s possible that it became the Ritz, but the Ritz is still a puzzle so I’m not at all sure.
lalain: The construction of a balcony is always a possibility. It’s also possible that there was always a balcony or gallery of some sort, but the operator chose not to use it until business picked up, and then it was opened, or maybe a new operator took over the house and opened it. It’s also possible that Film Daily got the count wrong, and later adjusted it up or down. I don’t know where the Yearbooks got their seat counts, but I suspect that it was from either the theater operators or managers, or from the film distributors. I think some of them just didn’t bother to make an accurate count, or just didn’t report it correctly. I know that there were a lot of mistakes in the books.
There’s also a possible explanation for why a theater would drop out of the Yearbook’s reports even though movies were still being shown there. The Yearbooks only counted commercial theaters that got their movies from regular distributors. There used to be a company that rented 16mm prints of movies to individuals, schools, civic organizations, clubs, and towns without regular theaters. I went into their office on Hollywood Boulevard once in the early 1960s and picked up one of their catalogs, but I can’t remember the name of the company. There might have been other such companies in other parts of the country. It’s possible that after the Point Theatre was no longer viable as a commercial theater, some civic group began renting movies to show. They would not have been allowed to charge for admission (the company would rent films only to non-profit groups), but they could have accepted donations from the patrons.
Also, the Stone Opera House was definitely in Binghamton. It is listed at Cinema Treasures under its later name, the Riviera Theatre. But it’s also quite possible that the hall the Point Theatre was in was also called the Opera House when it was built. It might sound pretentious today, but in the 19th century every small town wanted an opera house, and when they built any sort of public hall that’s what they would call it, more often than not.
I don’t think the Capitol Theatre has been demolished. The last photo on this page of Dyersburg Street scenes shows the Capitol on the east side of Main Avenue in the second building south of Market Street.
The address of the building at that location, now housing the offices of a law firm, is 202 S. Main Avenue, and the building does look old, though the brick of the facade has been carefully restored and repointed. The theater entrance has been closed up with brick matching the old structure, but it is slightly lighter in color. If you go south of the building and look along the side it looks like the stage house is still there.
It would be worth the trouble of getting good grades to have a theater named after you.
I think the Palace must have been at the northeast corner of Court Street and Mill Avenue, opposite the town’s “skyscraper.” The building there has the same pedimented parapet on the front, although the whole structure has been plastered over, losing all its nice brick and stone details.
The photos of the Ritz don’t give enough context to tell where it was, though they show that it had buildings on both sides.
The last photo on page three of the “Street Scenes” collection shows the Capitol Theatre.
The “Theater Gossip” column of the September 26, 1932 issue of the St. Petersburg, Florida, Evening Independent said that, on October 3, the “Francis” Theatre in Dyersburg, Tennessee would be the site of the world premier of the movie The Cabin in the Cotton, which was based on a novel of the same name by Dyersburg native Henry Harrison Kroll (scan at Google News.)
I’ve seen this theater referred to as the Francis as often as it is the Frances, including by angelamatlock, whose father once operated the theater, in an earlier comment here. Does anyone have a photo of the marquee, or a scan of an advertisement for the house?
When AMC sold the Cinema 4 to a local investment group, there was a stipulation that the building would never again be used as a movie theater, according to this article at the web site of NBC TV affiliate WPSD.
The former theater has since been converted into a gun shop and indoor firing range, so I guess it still sounds like movies are being shown in it.
The Facebook account “Greenville Texas Revisited” has an album of theater and theater-related images here (if the link works, Facebook being Facebook.) There are photos of the Texan, the Crystal, the Opera House, the Rialto, and the Lyric.
The caption to the Lyric photo says that it had two locations. The one in the photo was on Stonewall Street, just south of Washington. It doesn’t say which of the two theaters was earlier, but the hats and dresses on the women in the photo look to be from the 1910s, so the Lee Street location, having been called the Savoy in the 1910s, must have been the second Lyric.
And there is the very photo on our page!
This is a Google Street View of the location I think the Aurora Theatre might have been.