After forty years in a private dwelling, the State Theatre’s Wurlitzer organ was installed in the ballroom of Baltimore’s Garrett-Jacobs mansion in 2012. Donated by former owner Ray Wagner with the stipulation that the instrument be available for public performances, the organ is now used for concerts and to accompany silent films about once a month (see the “Events” link on the organ page.)
Now owned by the Engineering Society of Baltimore, The Garrett-Jacobs mansion is also the home of an artists-in-residence program for four musical groups. The ballroom, 30x70 feet, was adapted from existing space in the early 20th century, and was designed by noted architect John Russell Pope. The room has been mostly restored, with only the ceiling coffers and surrounds remaining to be dome. The restoration and refurbishment was handled by Henry Johnson of Johnson/Berman Architecture and Interior Design.
The Uptown Cinema history page lostmemory linked to on December 3, 2007, has gone missing, but this might be the same page at a new url. Updated as of October 16, 2013, it now says that the theater has been closed for about two years. The theater’s Facebook page was last updated on February 12, 2012, and the page now carries the notation “Permanently Closed.”
The theater is currently listed for sale by Lakeshore Realtors at $199,000.
Back in 1916, Frost had two movie theaters. E. E. Belcia’s article “Touring Texas Small Towns” in the September 30 issue of The Moving Picture World had this paragraph about Frost:
“I next visited the little town of Frost. This is a dandy little show town, probably due to the fact that at one time W. M. Byrd and his brother were exhibitors there. M. C. Connor and his brother own the old Byrd Theatre and also a theatre in Dawson. They run an up-to-date show in both places. L. Morphew is also an exhibitor in Frost, having only recently opened the Lyric there.”
Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find any other mentions of either the Byrd or Lyric in the trade journals, and none of the Frost Theatre.
Here is another photo of Main Street with the Orpheum. It shows that the theater was a couple of doors farther down that I thought it was. The building to its right is still standing. The Orpheum was partly on the site of the grassy space next door to that building and partly on the site of the retro-styled brick building with Henriksen’s optometry offices in it. Henriksen’s is at 212 W. Main, and the Liberty Pawn Shop in the old building is at 224, so the address of the Orpheum was most likely 216 W. Main.
An article about the opening of the Quarry Twin Theatre in the May 17, 1979, issue of the Pipestone County Star said that the town had been without an indoor theater since the Orpheum had closed in 1973.
Pipestone had another another theater, opened in 1931 as the Alo and renamed the State in 1937. I’m not sure when it closed, but the building was reportedly demolished in 1962 to make way for a Skelly gas station. It was on East Main Street, but I’ve been unable to find the address.
The Thursday, May 17, 1979, issue of the Pipestone County Star reported that the Quarry Twin Theatre would open on Wednesday. I’d presume that would have been the following Wednesday, May 23. The new house seated “…about 225 persons in each auditorium.”
In Google Street View, the marquee of the Quarry Twin Theatre says “Closed” and “For Sale.” The web site lists no upcoming events. The last movies on their calendar were shown in August, 2012, and they were listed as free events. The last regular movie was shown on July 11, 2012, so this theater has been closed for a long time.
Pipestone Star Online said on September 5, 2012, that the Quarry Twin would be closed for two months, but the projected reopening has never taken place. My guess would be that the cost of converting to digital projection would have been beyond the means of the operator in any case, so the house probably would have closed by now even had it reopened last year.
Here is the real estate listing. The building is currently for sale at $39,900, and includes an apartment on the second floor. But it would probably cost at least four of five times that to install digital projection on two screens, so it’s not the bargain it appears to be.
The real estate listing says that the building was erected in 1914, but I don’t know if the theater is that old or not.
This house opened in 1893 as the Empire Theatre and was later renamed the Hippodrome, then became the Empire Hippodrome, and apparently went back to just the Empire Theatre during its last years. An item in the June 21, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World told of the first change of name and policy for the theater:
“The Empire Theater, at Quincy, has forsaken the dramatic field, it is reported, and will reopen August 25, as the Hippodrome, featuring vaudeville and moving pictures. All seats will be ten cents, seven days a week. It is announced that the highest class attractions have been booked in Quincy, but have not been profitable.”
Here is an early interior photo of the Empire Theater. The description, which does not mention the name change, says that the house closed in 1926.
The same source has an advertisement for the inaugural performance at the Empire Theatre, which took place on December 21, 1893.
This advertisement for a performance at the Empire Hippodrome Theatre dates from January, 1915.
It also looks like the Hippodrome era was over by 1921. The Empire Theatre in Quincy, Illinois, is listed in the 1921 Cahn guide. I’ve come across a few references to events at the Empire Theatre in the early 1920s, but no more mentions of the name Hippodrome.
This article from the April 28, 1912, issue of the Pittsburgh Gazette Times says that bids were being taken for construction of this house, which had been designed by architect M. Nirdlinger (Maximilian Nirdlinger.) The theater had already been leased to Thomas Kenyon in advance of construction, and the name Kenyon Opera House chosen.
The house did not keep its original name long after opening on December 23, 1912. An item about the renaming of the Kenyon Theatre on Federal Street that appeared in the June 21, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World noted that the Kenyon Opera House had also been renamed the Penn Street Theatre, though it appears that Thomas Kenyon was still in control of both houses.
The name Penn Street Theatre must have had an even shorter life, considering Will Dunklin’s earlier comment saying that a Wurlitzer organ was installed in the Pitt Theatre in August, 1913. The name Miles Theatre was probably short-lived as well. A guide book to Pittsburgh published in 1916 noted that the house had gone back to the name Pitt Theatre in January that year. I still haven’t been able to confirm that the name was changed to Barry Theatre in 1936, when the house was remodeled to plans by Victor Rigaumont, but it does seem likely.
According to the November 18, 1922, issue of The American Contractor, the Philip Halbach Company was the construction firm that built this theater. The item said that the theater was designed by H. C. Hodgons, Inc., 130 S. 15th st., but I can’t find any references to such a company on the Internet, nor any variant of the name Hodgons (Hodgson, Hodgdon, Hodgins.) It might have been a mistake. The item did give the name of the owner as Marcus A. Bonn instead of the correct Marcus Benn. Those old trade journals were full of typos.
The October 21, 1922, issue of The American Contractor said that architect Eugene DeRosa was taking bids on the general contract for a theater and store building to be built at the northeast corner of Burnside and Walton Avenues. John J. Dunnigan was the associate architect for the $150,000 project.
This house must have opened in 1923. lostmemory said that’s when the organ was installed.
An item in the October 21, 1922, issue of The American Contractor said that bids were being taken for construction of a theater, store, and apartment building to be built on Willis Avenue between 138th and 139th Streets. The architect was Eugene DeRosa. It must have been the Casino.
A brochure with a walking tour of Omro (PDF here) has this to say about the Omro Theatre:
“205 S. Webster Avenue Omro Theater Building, 1937. One of the few buildings in Omro’s downtown built during the Depression years was this fine late Art Deco-style movie theater, which was built using federal W.P.A. funds. Although simple in design, the massive buttresses that line its sides give it a monumentality that is unusual for such a small building. During World War II shell casings were manufactured in the basement by the Speed Queen Corp. while movies were being shown in the theater. Later a ladder factory occupied the basement”
There is a small photo of the theater, with the marquee that has since been removed.
Prior to the opening of this house, citizens of Omro could see movies at a house called the High School Annex Theatre, which was located in a multi-purpose building built at the high school in 1934. In 1937, the January 14 issue of The Film Daily reported that the name had been changed simply to Annex Theatre. I don’t know if it continued to operate once the new Omro Tehatre was opened.
Before the Annex was built, there was another house called the Omro Theatre, operated by Donald Jones, which was mentioned in the January 23, 1933, issue of The Film Daily. Even earlier, Omro had a theater called the Gem, mentioned in the January 3, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World.
Their Facebook page hasn’t been updated in over a year, but the website is still live and listing show times for the next two weeks. Nothing is listed on the second-party web sites, though.
Eugene Mathewson was actually involved in two remodeling jobs at this theater. The 1914 work on the Theater Fresno included new dressing rooms, fire escapes, a heating and ventilation system, and fireproofing. This project cost $20,000.
Mathewson was also the architect of the 1917 remodeling for the Hippodrome circuit, though on this job he was joined by San Francisco architects Weeks & Day, acting as consultants, as reported in the September issue of The Architect & Engineer of California.
The major remodeling of this theater was done in 1914. Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer of July 11 reported that Eugene Mathewson was the architect for a major remodeling of the Fresno Theatre. Mathewson would later serve as architect for the T&D circuit’s State Theater, which replaced the Barton/Fresno/Hippodrome in 1928.
If comments are removed by members, the number in the “view all comments” field is automatically reduced. I found a page (I can’t remember which one it was now) that was displaying six comments, but had a “view all 12 comments” link at the top. Clicking on the link, the new page displayed only the same six comments that were on the first page. That has to be a technical issue.
It is likely, though, that the comment on the State Theatre in Tempe that I found in the Google cache but not on the CT page itself was one that had been removed by a member. Google’s cache usually lags a bit behind changes in the pages that have been cached. But probably not all of those comments have vanished entirely from the Internet. At least some of them are bound to have been preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
This PDF from the Waseca County Historical Society has an article about the theaters in the area, and it features two photos of the Princess, one of the front and one of the auditorium.
The text says that the building housing the Princess was remodeled to accommodate the theater in 1933, but the style of the theater indicates that it was operating much earlier than that. In fact, the same exterior photo appears in a book called As We Were: American Photographic Postcards, 1905-1930, by Rosamond B. Vaule (Google Books preview), and Vaule dates the photo to 1913. As the caption has the message that was written on the postcard, I would imagine that the date comes from the postmark. The message refers to the “new” Princess Theatre, so 1913 is probably when it opened.
It’s possible that the Princess Theatre was the same house that was listed in the 1909-1910 Cahn guide as the Opera House, managed by C.F. Strunk. The first digit of the seating capacity given in the guide is unreadable, but the number was only three digits, and it was a ground-floor house. 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World reported that the Opera House at Janesville had been leased by H. G. Karzbein and Louy Bartelmhs (the second guy’s names were probably both misspelled.) The fact that MPW mentioned the event suggests that the Opera House was probably already running movies by that time.
Well, I should have known that it was Google Maps that had gotten the numbers wrong, but the Historical Society newsletter saying that the Star was on South Main threw me off. I should probably remove that comment, to avoid perpetuating the confusion.
It does sound as though the Princess was reseated in the 1920s, renamed the Star in the 1930s, and then the Star name was moved to a new location in the 1940s.
The Fall, 2007, issue of the Waseca County Historical Society’s newsletter (PDF here) has an article about Waseca County’s movie theaters, and it says that the Star Theatre was at 113 South Main Street. It also says that, in 2007, the building was occupied by Jethro’s Soda Shop. Jethro’s Soda Shop has gone out of business, but it still shows up in Google Street View.
Google shows Jethro’s on South Main, but Internet search results list the Janesville Community Food Shelf as being located in Jethro’s Soda Shop at 113 North Main. For now, I’m going with Google and the Historical Society, and I’ve set Street View to Jethro’s at 113 South Main. The newsletter cites as its source Ruth Walther, presumably related to Sully Walther, who operated the Star with his sons Curt and Vern during the 1940s and 1950s, so I guess she would know where the theater had been located.
The Sun Theatre was in the area that is now the parking lot for the church. The photo I linked to in my previous comment shows its entrance one lot up from the corner of 89th Street. Views at Historic Aerials show that the building was still there in 1962, but gone by 1970.
After forty years in a private dwelling, the State Theatre’s Wurlitzer organ was installed in the ballroom of Baltimore’s Garrett-Jacobs mansion in 2012. Donated by former owner Ray Wagner with the stipulation that the instrument be available for public performances, the organ is now used for concerts and to accompany silent films about once a month (see the “Events” link on the organ page.)
Now owned by the Engineering Society of Baltimore, The Garrett-Jacobs mansion is also the home of an artists-in-residence program for four musical groups. The ballroom, 30x70 feet, was adapted from existing space in the early 20th century, and was designed by noted architect John Russell Pope. The room has been mostly restored, with only the ceiling coffers and surrounds remaining to be dome. The restoration and refurbishment was handled by Henry Johnson of Johnson/Berman Architecture and Interior Design.
The Uptown Cinema history page lostmemory linked to on December 3, 2007, has gone missing, but this might be the same page at a new url. Updated as of October 16, 2013, it now says that the theater has been closed for about two years. The theater’s Facebook page was last updated on February 12, 2012, and the page now carries the notation “Permanently Closed.”
The theater is currently listed for sale by Lakeshore Realtors at $199,000.
Back in 1916, Frost had two movie theaters. E. E. Belcia’s article “Touring Texas Small Towns” in the September 30 issue of The Moving Picture World had this paragraph about Frost:
Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find any other mentions of either the Byrd or Lyric in the trade journals, and none of the Frost Theatre.Here is another photo of Main Street with the Orpheum. It shows that the theater was a couple of doors farther down that I thought it was. The building to its right is still standing. The Orpheum was partly on the site of the grassy space next door to that building and partly on the site of the retro-styled brick building with Henriksen’s optometry offices in it. Henriksen’s is at 212 W. Main, and the Liberty Pawn Shop in the old building is at 224, so the address of the Orpheum was most likely 216 W. Main.
An article about the opening of the Quarry Twin Theatre in the May 17, 1979, issue of the Pipestone County Star said that the town had been without an indoor theater since the Orpheum had closed in 1973.
Pipestone had another another theater, opened in 1931 as the Alo and renamed the State in 1937. I’m not sure when it closed, but the building was reportedly demolished in 1962 to make way for a Skelly gas station. It was on East Main Street, but I’ve been unable to find the address.
The Thursday, May 17, 1979, issue of the Pipestone County Star reported that the Quarry Twin Theatre would open on Wednesday. I’d presume that would have been the following Wednesday, May 23. The new house seated “…about 225 persons in each auditorium.”
In Google Street View, the marquee of the Quarry Twin Theatre says “Closed” and “For Sale.” The web site lists no upcoming events. The last movies on their calendar were shown in August, 2012, and they were listed as free events. The last regular movie was shown on July 11, 2012, so this theater has been closed for a long time.
Pipestone Star Online said on September 5, 2012, that the Quarry Twin would be closed for two months, but the projected reopening has never taken place. My guess would be that the cost of converting to digital projection would have been beyond the means of the operator in any case, so the house probably would have closed by now even had it reopened last year.
Here is the real estate listing. The building is currently for sale at $39,900, and includes an apartment on the second floor. But it would probably cost at least four of five times that to install digital projection on two screens, so it’s not the bargain it appears to be.
The real estate listing says that the building was erected in 1914, but I don’t know if the theater is that old or not.
This house opened in 1893 as the Empire Theatre and was later renamed the Hippodrome, then became the Empire Hippodrome, and apparently went back to just the Empire Theatre during its last years. An item in the June 21, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World told of the first change of name and policy for the theater:
Here is an early interior photo of the Empire Theater. The description, which does not mention the name change, says that the house closed in 1926.The same source has an advertisement for the inaugural performance at the Empire Theatre, which took place on December 21, 1893.
This advertisement for a performance at the Empire Hippodrome Theatre dates from January, 1915.
It also looks like the Hippodrome era was over by 1921. The Empire Theatre in Quincy, Illinois, is listed in the 1921 Cahn guide. I’ve come across a few references to events at the Empire Theatre in the early 1920s, but no more mentions of the name Hippodrome.
This article from the April 28, 1912, issue of the Pittsburgh Gazette Times says that bids were being taken for construction of this house, which had been designed by architect M. Nirdlinger (Maximilian Nirdlinger.) The theater had already been leased to Thomas Kenyon in advance of construction, and the name Kenyon Opera House chosen.
The house did not keep its original name long after opening on December 23, 1912. An item about the renaming of the Kenyon Theatre on Federal Street that appeared in the June 21, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World noted that the Kenyon Opera House had also been renamed the Penn Street Theatre, though it appears that Thomas Kenyon was still in control of both houses.
The name Penn Street Theatre must have had an even shorter life, considering Will Dunklin’s earlier comment saying that a Wurlitzer organ was installed in the Pitt Theatre in August, 1913. The name Miles Theatre was probably short-lived as well. A guide book to Pittsburgh published in 1916 noted that the house had gone back to the name Pitt Theatre in January that year. I still haven’t been able to confirm that the name was changed to Barry Theatre in 1936, when the house was remodeled to plans by Victor Rigaumont, but it does seem likely.
According to Philadelphia Architects and Buildings, Anderson & Haupt were the original architects of the Globe Theatre.
According to the November 18, 1922, issue of The American Contractor, the Philip Halbach Company was the construction firm that built this theater. The item said that the theater was designed by H. C. Hodgons, Inc., 130 S. 15th st., but I can’t find any references to such a company on the Internet, nor any variant of the name Hodgons (Hodgson, Hodgdon, Hodgins.) It might have been a mistake. The item did give the name of the owner as Marcus A. Bonn instead of the correct Marcus Benn. Those old trade journals were full of typos.
The October 21, 1922, issue of The American Contractor said that architect Eugene DeRosa was taking bids on the general contract for a theater and store building to be built at the northeast corner of Burnside and Walton Avenues. John J. Dunnigan was the associate architect for the $150,000 project.
This house must have opened in 1923. lostmemory said that’s when the organ was installed.
An item in the October 21, 1922, issue of The American Contractor said that bids were being taken for construction of a theater, store, and apartment building to be built on Willis Avenue between 138th and 139th Streets. The architect was Eugene DeRosa. It must have been the Casino.
A brochure with a walking tour of Omro (PDF here) has this to say about the Omro Theatre:
There is a small photo of the theater, with the marquee that has since been removed.Prior to the opening of this house, citizens of Omro could see movies at a house called the High School Annex Theatre, which was located in a multi-purpose building built at the high school in 1934. In 1937, the January 14 issue of The Film Daily reported that the name had been changed simply to Annex Theatre. I don’t know if it continued to operate once the new Omro Tehatre was opened.
Before the Annex was built, there was another house called the Omro Theatre, operated by Donald Jones, which was mentioned in the January 23, 1933, issue of The Film Daily. Even earlier, Omro had a theater called the Gem, mentioned in the January 3, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World.
Their Facebook page hasn’t been updated in over a year, but the website is still live and listing show times for the next two weeks. Nothing is listed on the second-party web sites, though.
A photo of the new facade of the Esquire Theatre, recently remodeled for Robert Lippert, can be seen on this page of Boxoffice, May 22, 1948.
Eugene Mathewson was actually involved in two remodeling jobs at this theater. The 1914 work on the Theater Fresno included new dressing rooms, fire escapes, a heating and ventilation system, and fireproofing. This project cost $20,000.
Mathewson was also the architect of the 1917 remodeling for the Hippodrome circuit, though on this job he was joined by San Francisco architects Weeks & Day, acting as consultants, as reported in the September issue of The Architect & Engineer of California.
The major remodeling of this theater was done in 1914. Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer of July 11 reported that Eugene Mathewson was the architect for a major remodeling of the Fresno Theatre. Mathewson would later serve as architect for the T&D circuit’s State Theater, which replaced the Barton/Fresno/Hippodrome in 1928.
If comments are removed by members, the number in the “view all comments” field is automatically reduced. I found a page (I can’t remember which one it was now) that was displaying six comments, but had a “view all 12 comments” link at the top. Clicking on the link, the new page displayed only the same six comments that were on the first page. That has to be a technical issue.
It is likely, though, that the comment on the State Theatre in Tempe that I found in the Google cache but not on the CT page itself was one that had been removed by a member. Google’s cache usually lags a bit behind changes in the pages that have been cached. But probably not all of those comments have vanished entirely from the Internet. At least some of them are bound to have been preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
This PDF from the Waseca County Historical Society has an article about the theaters in the area, and it features two photos of the Princess, one of the front and one of the auditorium.
The text says that the building housing the Princess was remodeled to accommodate the theater in 1933, but the style of the theater indicates that it was operating much earlier than that. In fact, the same exterior photo appears in a book called As We Were: American Photographic Postcards, 1905-1930, by Rosamond B. Vaule (Google Books preview), and Vaule dates the photo to 1913. As the caption has the message that was written on the postcard, I would imagine that the date comes from the postmark. The message refers to the “new” Princess Theatre, so 1913 is probably when it opened.
It’s possible that the Princess Theatre was the same house that was listed in the 1909-1910 Cahn guide as the Opera House, managed by C.F. Strunk. The first digit of the seating capacity given in the guide is unreadable, but the number was only three digits, and it was a ground-floor house. 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World reported that the Opera House at Janesville had been leased by H. G. Karzbein and Louy Bartelmhs (the second guy’s names were probably both misspelled.) The fact that MPW mentioned the event suggests that the Opera House was probably already running movies by that time.
Well, I should have known that it was Google Maps that had gotten the numbers wrong, but the Historical Society newsletter saying that the Star was on South Main threw me off. I should probably remove that comment, to avoid perpetuating the confusion.
It does sound as though the Princess was reseated in the 1920s, renamed the Star in the 1930s, and then the Star name was moved to a new location in the 1940s.
The Fall, 2007, issue of the Waseca County Historical Society’s newsletter (PDF here) has an article about Waseca County’s movie theaters, and it says that the Star Theatre was at 113 South Main Street. It also says that, in 2007, the building was occupied by Jethro’s Soda Shop. Jethro’s Soda Shop has gone out of business, but it still shows up in Google Street View.
Google shows Jethro’s on South Main, but Internet search results list the Janesville Community Food Shelf as being located in Jethro’s Soda Shop at 113 North Main. For now, I’m going with Google and the Historical Society, and I’ve set Street View to Jethro’s at 113 South Main. The newsletter cites as its source Ruth Walther, presumably related to Sully Walther, who operated the Star with his sons Curt and Vern during the 1940s and 1950s, so I guess she would know where the theater had been located.
The most recent entry on their Facebook page is from December, 2011. I’d guess closed. Digital is going to kill off a lot of small town theaters.
It’s open from May to December, according to the description. You probably just missed the last show of the year.
The Sun Theatre was in the area that is now the parking lot for the church. The photo I linked to in my previous comment shows its entrance one lot up from the corner of 89th Street. Views at Historic Aerials show that the building was still there in 1962, but gone by 1970.