I don’t have any theater catalogs myself, and as far as I know the few editions at drive-ins.com are the only ones available on the Internet. They are fairly rare books, and the 1949-50 edition is probably the one most in demand. I’ve seen copies advertised for sale but they are out of my price range. Google Books has a scan of it but displays only snippet views, as it is apparently still under copyright.
It’s been so long that I don’t remember for sure, but I probably did get the information about Shult from Google snippets, and it probably was the 8th (1949-50) edition of the catalog. See my recent comment on the Freeport Showboat Theatre page for more information.
A Google Books snippet view of the listing of architect Ernest Shult in the 1949-50 theatre catalog confirms that Shult designed the Showboat Theatres in Freeport (1942) and Texas City (1941.)
The partial list visible in the snippet also includes the following Shult designs: Palm, Sugarland, Texas (1949); Leon, Pleasanton, Texas (1948); Cole, Richmond, Texas (1947); Palacios, Palacios, Texas (1942); and Plaza, Wharton, Texas, (1941).
Also, a snippet of a March, 1939, issue of Daily Bulletin of the Manufacturers Record shows an item saying that Ernest Shult had drawn the plans for a $25,000 theater and store building at West Columbia, Texas, for Alex Sanbourne.
This photo of Pikes Peak Avenue shows that, around 1921, there was a theater called the Princess on the site that was later occupied by the Rialto and the Ute. I don’t know if the Princess was renamed Rialto or if it was demolished to make way for a new theater. It looks like it occupied exactly the same footprint and was the same height as the Rialto/Ute. The Princess Theatre was in operation at least as early as 1918.
The Liberty Theatre in Colorado Springs was mentioned in the September 7, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World. It was on a list of houses that had booked Goldwyn productions that year.
This photo, dated around 1921, shows the vertical sign of the Liberty Theatre on Pikes Peak Avenue, a few doors down from the Princess Theatre. The Princess was either an earlier name for the house that was later the Rialto and then the Ute Theatre, or was demolished to make way for that later house.
The Liberty appears to have been in the Arrow Hotel building, which was almost directly across the street from the later Pike Theatre. As the Ute was at 126 and the Pike at 115 E. Pikes Peak Avenue, I’d guess the Liberty was at approximately 112 E. Pikes Peak.
This photo of Main Street in Cortez is dated 1940-1950. The Muse-U theater has no attraction board and the posters on the front are too blurry to read, so the photo can’t be dated by a movie.
The top of the theater’s vertical sign has some sort of drawing I can’t make out, but it looks like the area might once have had a large letter A on it, which would have made the theater name Amuse-U, which was a very common theater name during the silent era. The Muse-U might well have dated back to the 1920s or even earlier, though I haven’t yet found it mentioned in trade journals from the period.
The photo shows that the theater was across Main Street from a single-story, rusticated stone building that is still standing at the northeast corner of Main and Market Streets. The theater’s site is currently occupied by a Sears store which uses the address 1 E. Main Street, but the Sears store extends all the way to the corner of Market Street, while there was a drug store on the corner in the old photo. The next building east of Sears has the number 15 E. Main, so I’d guess the theater’s historic address was probably 7 East Main.
Sears appears to occupy two buildings, including the theater and the former drug store. From what can be seen of the backs of the buildings along the alley they are quite old, and are probably the same buildings that were there in the 1940s photo, but now with a unified modern facade tacked on to their street frontage.
The Princess Theatre was showing the movie Man’s Favorite Sport when this photo was taken in 1964. A paragraph about the Princess in this guide to a walking tour of Crested Butte says that the Princess Theatre opened in 1918 and ran its last movie in 1988.
With a bit more digging I’ve found two more photos, and I’m now pretty sure that the Vida Theatre was at the same address as the Star. However, I also believe that the building the theater was in might have been demolished, along with its neighbor, and replaced by the building that has “1991” carved on the small turret atop it. But it’s also possible that the two buildings were just given a new, unified front that year.
This photo probably dates from 1940 (the movies on the marquee came out in 1940 and 1939) and shows the Vida’s marquee attached to the fifth building up from the corner of 2nd Street. In Google’s street view, the sixth building from the corner has the address 220, so the theater must have been at 218.
Also interesting is this photo dated December 17, 1969. The building sports a skeletal marquee that says “Silent Movie” on it. A Rootsweb post I found says that “[i]n the late 1950s to early 1960s, Austin O'Toole operated a silent movie theater and hand-cranked arcade games out of this location.” The post refers to a building across the street, but the photo suggests that Mr. O'Toole might have moved his cinematic venture to the former Star/Vida Theatre later in the 1960s. I haven’t been able to find anything else about it on the Internet, though.
It’s possible that the Star Theatre later operated under the name Vida Theatre. The Vida Theatre, operated by Charles Diller, was mentioned in the March 3, 1937, issue of The Film Daily.
This photoof Bennett Street in the 1930s shows the Vida Theatre on the left, in the same block where the Star had been located. Because the photo was taken with a telephoto lens it’s difficult to tell exactly which building the Vida Theatre was in, though.
This photo, dated 1939, has slightly better perspective, and the Vida Theatre is more easily seen as it has acquired a modern marquee, but I’m still not sure it was at the Star’s address. Cripple Creek had at least two other movie theaters, both mentioned in issues of The Billboard in 1908: The Ideal Theatre, which was in operation by spring that year, and the Nickelodeon, opened by Taylor & Ford on August 1. I haven’t found addresses for either of them, so they might or might not have been close to the Star.
A 1915 item in The Moving Picture World mentioned two movie theaters being in operation at Cripple Creek, but no names were given. One must have been the Star, though.
Here is an item from the July 1, 1922, issue of The American Contractor about Harry Vonderschmidt’s proposed theater in Bloomington:
“BLOOMINGTON, IND. Theatre (M. P.): $50,000. 1 sty., bal. & bas. 64x130. Bloomington. Archt. Shourds Stoner Co., 511 Tribune bldg., Terre Haute, Ind. Owner H. L Vonderschmitt, Washington, Ind. Brk., steel & semi-frpf., brk. walls, stone trim. Archt. will take bids abt. July 5, 1922. Drawing plans.”
The Shourds-Stoner Company was a design, planning, and engineering firm headed by architect D. B. Shourds and civil engineer George J. Stoner. The firm designed everything from single houses to major projects such as dams, highways, and sewerage systems.
I haven’t yet discovered the architect of the 1934 rebuilding, but the facade of the theater remains very much as Shourds-Stoner designed it in 1922.
This house actually opened in 1925 as the Rainbow Theatre. The August 24, 1925, issue of The Film Daily said under the headline “New Seattle House” that “E. H. Habrocuk recently opened his new 500 seater Rainbow Theater at 140 N. 85th Street.”
The Grand Theatre that was designed by E. W. Houghton, mentioned in the 1909 Seattle Star article I cited earlier, was not this theater, but the Grand Opera House, built in 1898-1900. It was renamed the Hippodrome Theatre in 1915. It was gutted by a fire in 1917 and was later converted into a parking garage. I don’t know if it ever operated as a movie theater.
The remodeling of the LaGrange Theatre by Roy B. Blass in 1948 occasioned a three page article by decorator Hanns R. Teichert in the January 8, 1949, issue of Boxoffice. There are several photos.
Architect Giles P. Greene died in 1941, and his obituary revealed why there is so little about him on the Internet. He practiced architecture only briefly, from 1916 to 1918. Following military service in WWI, he took to designing monuments and mausoleums. As far as I’ve been able to discover, he designed no regular buildings after 1918.
Most of the references to Greene on the Internet concern the Lyric Theatre. An article in the May 5, 1917, issue of The Record, the local newspaper for Endicott, Johnson City, and Union, said that Greene had arrived in Endicott and would remain through the construction of the Lyric, which was expected to open in early August.
The Plaza Theatre in Columbus was another of the theaters based on the prototype Ultra-Vison house (in Charleston, South Carolina) designed by William B. McGehee of the Asheville firm Six Associates. None of the early Ultra-Vision projects departed significantly from his original design.
The Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to mentions “…architect Bill Murphy, starting with the plans of Bill McGehee, architect of the Charleston project….” The Charleston project was the Ultra-Vision Theatre there, the first of its kind, designed by William B. McGehee of the firm Six Associates. I’ve been unable to find anything more about Bill Murphy, but it seems likely that he was either another member of the firm (though neither McGehee nor Murphy was among the founding members, one of whom was theater architect Erle G. Stillwell) or a Florida architect who supervised the project in Ocala.
bilpatrick: Street View has been updated to the correct location since I posted my comment of June 7, 2011. Unfortunately, I can’t edit the comment to remove that part, and I don’t want to remove the whole comment because other information in it is still pertinent.
Also unfortunate, the link I posted in the comment no longer fetches the same page it did two years ago, and I can’t find another copy of the photo it featured. The perils of the ever-changing Internet.
Cinema Treasures also has a page for the Ro-Na Theatre, in case you’d like to comment there. It has only one comment from anyone who has actually seen the theater, and could use more.
Google’s camera car has returned to Ironton since my earlier comment, and there are now views of 3rd Street, so our Street View can be reset closer to the theater.
Linkrot repair: The 1957 Boxoffice article about the remodeling of the Dover Theatre is now at this link (the text continues on this page, but the only photos are at the first link.)
A larger version of the “before” photo of the auditorium appears at bottom right of this page of Boxoffice of January 8, 1949.
Clickable link to the Boxoffice article KenLayton cited. The article says that the architect for the remodeling was Paul Carlsen. Though it calls him a “nationally known theatre architect” I can find nothing else about him on the Internet.
The page also needs a credit for the original architect, A. J. Russell. Ambrose J. Russell had an interesting life and career. Born to missionary parents in India, he studied architecture at the University of Glasgow and at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris. On emigrating to America, he worked in the office of H. H. Richardson, then in Worcester, Massachusetts, Kansas City, and St. Louis. He practiced in partnership with his former schoolmate Bernard Maybeck for a while before settling in Tacoma in 1892. Alone or in various partnerships he designed a number of notable buildings in the northwest, including the Governor’s mansion in Olympia, Washington.
The Campus Drive-In rated this page in Boxoffice of February 3, 1949. There are four photos. The Campus was designed by San Diego architect George Lykos.
The Rubidoux Drive-In was the subject of a two-page article in Boxoffice of February 5, 1949. There are five photos and a floor plan of the concession-rest room building.
According to the section on Bly in a rider’s handbook published by Cycle Oregon, Bly’s movie house “…was
built in 1948 as the Arch Theater but is now called the Star.” It also says that “…a couple part-time
residents, Paul and Ruby Dorris, have converted the building to a combination meeting space/antique gallery . The stage and screen are still up, the floor still slopes like a theater, and the venue has hosted potlucks, old-time fiddlers and more.” The Handbook was published in 2012 (PDF here) and is the most recent information about the Star Theatre that I can find on the web. I can’t find a web site for the Dorrises' operation itself, so I assume they don’t have one.
Michael J. DeAngelis planned a complete remodeling of the Strand Theatre in Endicott in 1945. In the absence of any photos of the theater I can’t say the project was carried out as planned, but there is a drawing at lower left on this page of Boxoffice, December 8, 1945. Maybe somebody who saw the theater will recognize it.
Here is the page with Robert Boller’s drawing of the Colonial Theatre in Boxoffice of December 8, 1945. Despite the long delay in construction, the drawing looks very much the same as later photographs of the theater as actually built.
The Saturday, May 2, 1936, issue of The Film Daily had this item:
I don’t have any theater catalogs myself, and as far as I know the few editions at drive-ins.com are the only ones available on the Internet. They are fairly rare books, and the 1949-50 edition is probably the one most in demand. I’ve seen copies advertised for sale but they are out of my price range. Google Books has a scan of it but displays only snippet views, as it is apparently still under copyright.
It’s been so long that I don’t remember for sure, but I probably did get the information about Shult from Google snippets, and it probably was the 8th (1949-50) edition of the catalog. See my recent comment on the Freeport Showboat Theatre page for more information.
A Google Books snippet view of the listing of architect Ernest Shult in the 1949-50 theatre catalog confirms that Shult designed the Showboat Theatres in Freeport (1942) and Texas City (1941.)
The partial list visible in the snippet also includes the following Shult designs: Palm, Sugarland, Texas (1949); Leon, Pleasanton, Texas (1948); Cole, Richmond, Texas (1947); Palacios, Palacios, Texas (1942); and Plaza, Wharton, Texas, (1941).
Also, a snippet of a March, 1939, issue of Daily Bulletin of the Manufacturers Record shows an item saying that Ernest Shult had drawn the plans for a $25,000 theater and store building at West Columbia, Texas, for Alex Sanbourne.
This photo of Pikes Peak Avenue shows that, around 1921, there was a theater called the Princess on the site that was later occupied by the Rialto and the Ute. I don’t know if the Princess was renamed Rialto or if it was demolished to make way for a new theater. It looks like it occupied exactly the same footprint and was the same height as the Rialto/Ute. The Princess Theatre was in operation at least as early as 1918.
The Liberty Theatre in Colorado Springs was mentioned in the September 7, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World. It was on a list of houses that had booked Goldwyn productions that year.
This photo, dated around 1921, shows the vertical sign of the Liberty Theatre on Pikes Peak Avenue, a few doors down from the Princess Theatre. The Princess was either an earlier name for the house that was later the Rialto and then the Ute Theatre, or was demolished to make way for that later house.
The Liberty appears to have been in the Arrow Hotel building, which was almost directly across the street from the later Pike Theatre. As the Ute was at 126 and the Pike at 115 E. Pikes Peak Avenue, I’d guess the Liberty was at approximately 112 E. Pikes Peak.
This photo of Main Street in Cortez is dated 1940-1950. The Muse-U theater has no attraction board and the posters on the front are too blurry to read, so the photo can’t be dated by a movie.
The top of the theater’s vertical sign has some sort of drawing I can’t make out, but it looks like the area might once have had a large letter A on it, which would have made the theater name Amuse-U, which was a very common theater name during the silent era. The Muse-U might well have dated back to the 1920s or even earlier, though I haven’t yet found it mentioned in trade journals from the period.
The photo shows that the theater was across Main Street from a single-story, rusticated stone building that is still standing at the northeast corner of Main and Market Streets. The theater’s site is currently occupied by a Sears store which uses the address 1 E. Main Street, but the Sears store extends all the way to the corner of Market Street, while there was a drug store on the corner in the old photo. The next building east of Sears has the number 15 E. Main, so I’d guess the theater’s historic address was probably 7 East Main.
Sears appears to occupy two buildings, including the theater and the former drug store. From what can be seen of the backs of the buildings along the alley they are quite old, and are probably the same buildings that were there in the 1940s photo, but now with a unified modern facade tacked on to their street frontage.
The Princess Theatre was showing the movie Man’s Favorite Sport when this photo was taken in 1964. A paragraph about the Princess in this guide to a walking tour of Crested Butte says that the Princess Theatre opened in 1918 and ran its last movie in 1988.
With a bit more digging I’ve found two more photos, and I’m now pretty sure that the Vida Theatre was at the same address as the Star. However, I also believe that the building the theater was in might have been demolished, along with its neighbor, and replaced by the building that has “1991” carved on the small turret atop it. But it’s also possible that the two buildings were just given a new, unified front that year.
This photo probably dates from 1940 (the movies on the marquee came out in 1940 and 1939) and shows the Vida’s marquee attached to the fifth building up from the corner of 2nd Street. In Google’s street view, the sixth building from the corner has the address 220, so the theater must have been at 218.
Also interesting is this photo dated December 17, 1969. The building sports a skeletal marquee that says “Silent Movie” on it. A Rootsweb post I found says that “[i]n the late 1950s to early 1960s, Austin O'Toole operated a silent movie theater and hand-cranked arcade games out of this location.” The post refers to a building across the street, but the photo suggests that Mr. O'Toole might have moved his cinematic venture to the former Star/Vida Theatre later in the 1960s. I haven’t been able to find anything else about it on the Internet, though.
It’s possible that the Star Theatre later operated under the name Vida Theatre. The Vida Theatre, operated by Charles Diller, was mentioned in the March 3, 1937, issue of The Film Daily.
This photoof Bennett Street in the 1930s shows the Vida Theatre on the left, in the same block where the Star had been located. Because the photo was taken with a telephoto lens it’s difficult to tell exactly which building the Vida Theatre was in, though.
This photo, dated 1939, has slightly better perspective, and the Vida Theatre is more easily seen as it has acquired a modern marquee, but I’m still not sure it was at the Star’s address. Cripple Creek had at least two other movie theaters, both mentioned in issues of The Billboard in 1908: The Ideal Theatre, which was in operation by spring that year, and the Nickelodeon, opened by Taylor & Ford on August 1. I haven’t found addresses for either of them, so they might or might not have been close to the Star.
A 1915 item in The Moving Picture World mentioned two movie theaters being in operation at Cripple Creek, but no names were given. One must have been the Star, though.
Here is an item from the July 1, 1922, issue of The American Contractor about Harry Vonderschmidt’s proposed theater in Bloomington:
The Shourds-Stoner Company was a design, planning, and engineering firm headed by architect D. B. Shourds and civil engineer George J. Stoner. The firm designed everything from single houses to major projects such as dams, highways, and sewerage systems.I haven’t yet discovered the architect of the 1934 rebuilding, but the facade of the theater remains very much as Shourds-Stoner designed it in 1922.
This house actually opened in 1925 as the Rainbow Theatre. The August 24, 1925, issue of The Film Daily said under the headline “New Seattle House” that “E. H. Habrocuk recently opened his new 500 seater Rainbow Theater at 140 N. 85th Street.”
The Grand Theatre that was designed by E. W. Houghton, mentioned in the 1909 Seattle Star article I cited earlier, was not this theater, but the Grand Opera House, built in 1898-1900. It was renamed the Hippodrome Theatre in 1915. It was gutted by a fire in 1917 and was later converted into a parking garage. I don’t know if it ever operated as a movie theater.
The remodeling of the LaGrange Theatre by Roy B. Blass in 1948 occasioned a three page article by decorator Hanns R. Teichert in the January 8, 1949, issue of Boxoffice. There are several photos.
Architect Giles P. Greene died in 1941, and his obituary revealed why there is so little about him on the Internet. He practiced architecture only briefly, from 1916 to 1918. Following military service in WWI, he took to designing monuments and mausoleums. As far as I’ve been able to discover, he designed no regular buildings after 1918.
Most of the references to Greene on the Internet concern the Lyric Theatre. An article in the May 5, 1917, issue of The Record, the local newspaper for Endicott, Johnson City, and Union, said that Greene had arrived in Endicott and would remain through the construction of the Lyric, which was expected to open in early August.
The Plaza Theatre in Columbus was another of the theaters based on the prototype Ultra-Vison house (in Charleston, South Carolina) designed by William B. McGehee of the Asheville firm Six Associates. None of the early Ultra-Vision projects departed significantly from his original design.
The Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to mentions “…architect Bill Murphy, starting with the plans of Bill McGehee, architect of the Charleston project….” The Charleston project was the Ultra-Vision Theatre there, the first of its kind, designed by William B. McGehee of the firm Six Associates. I’ve been unable to find anything more about Bill Murphy, but it seems likely that he was either another member of the firm (though neither McGehee nor Murphy was among the founding members, one of whom was theater architect Erle G. Stillwell) or a Florida architect who supervised the project in Ocala.
bilpatrick: Street View has been updated to the correct location since I posted my comment of June 7, 2011. Unfortunately, I can’t edit the comment to remove that part, and I don’t want to remove the whole comment because other information in it is still pertinent.
Also unfortunate, the link I posted in the comment no longer fetches the same page it did two years ago, and I can’t find another copy of the photo it featured. The perils of the ever-changing Internet.
Cinema Treasures also has a page for the Ro-Na Theatre, in case you’d like to comment there. It has only one comment from anyone who has actually seen the theater, and could use more.
Google’s camera car has returned to Ironton since my earlier comment, and there are now views of 3rd Street, so our Street View can be reset closer to the theater.
Linkrot repair: The 1957 Boxoffice article about the remodeling of the Dover Theatre is now at this link (the text continues on this page, but the only photos are at the first link.)
A larger version of the “before” photo of the auditorium appears at bottom right of this page of Boxoffice of January 8, 1949.
Clickable link to the Boxoffice article KenLayton cited. The article says that the architect for the remodeling was Paul Carlsen. Though it calls him a “nationally known theatre architect” I can find nothing else about him on the Internet.
The page also needs a credit for the original architect, A. J. Russell. Ambrose J. Russell had an interesting life and career. Born to missionary parents in India, he studied architecture at the University of Glasgow and at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris. On emigrating to America, he worked in the office of H. H. Richardson, then in Worcester, Massachusetts, Kansas City, and St. Louis. He practiced in partnership with his former schoolmate Bernard Maybeck for a while before settling in Tacoma in 1892. Alone or in various partnerships he designed a number of notable buildings in the northwest, including the Governor’s mansion in Olympia, Washington.
Here is a 1947 view of the Auditorium before its modernization.
This 1964 view shows the later, simplified design.
The Campus Drive-In rated this page in Boxoffice of February 3, 1949. There are four photos. The Campus was designed by San Diego architect George Lykos.
The Rubidoux Drive-In was the subject of a two-page article in Boxoffice of February 5, 1949. There are five photos and a floor plan of the concession-rest room building.
Linkrot repair: The 1949 Gullistan Carpet ad with the photo of the Stamm Theatre’s lobby is now at this link.
According to the section on Bly in a rider’s handbook published by Cycle Oregon, Bly’s movie house “…was built in 1948 as the Arch Theater but is now called the Star.” It also says that “…a couple part-time residents, Paul and Ruby Dorris, have converted the building to a combination meeting space/antique gallery . The stage and screen are still up, the floor still slopes like a theater, and the venue has hosted potlucks, old-time fiddlers and more.” The Handbook was published in 2012 (PDF here) and is the most recent information about the Star Theatre that I can find on the web. I can’t find a web site for the Dorrises' operation itself, so I assume they don’t have one.
Michael J. DeAngelis planned a complete remodeling of the Strand Theatre in Endicott in 1945. In the absence of any photos of the theater I can’t say the project was carried out as planned, but there is a drawing at lower left on this page of Boxoffice, December 8, 1945. Maybe somebody who saw the theater will recognize it.
Here is the page with Robert Boller’s drawing of the Colonial Theatre in Boxoffice of December 8, 1945. Despite the long delay in construction, the drawing looks very much the same as later photographs of the theater as actually built.