Cinemalover’s link. The photos of the Park Theatre show that it was indeed at the northeast corner of State Street and Park Street. As the Palace was at 95 Exchange Street, the Palace and the Park were different theaters. 95 Exchange would be two blocks south of State Street.
Once again we have two theaters conflated, and we need a new page for one or the other. An article about Bangor’s theaters in the July 15, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World clarifies the early days of both.
The Palace Theatre at 95 Exchange Street was opened in 1911 by Pope D. McKinnon. It had 400 seats. It was still in operation in 1916 under the direction of the Acme Amusement Company.
The Park Theatre opened as the Star Theatre on December 25, 1913, and was also initially operated Mr. McKinnon. The 1,200-seat house was taken over by the Keith circuit on November 28, 1914, after which it was redecorated and renamed the Park Theatre.
It looks like the original Grove Theatre was replaced by a new house in 1941. The August 29, 1941, issue of The Film Daily had an item about the project:
“Shenker Breaks Ground For a New 500-Seater
“Lorain, O. — George Shenker, who built the Lorain Theater three years ago, has broken ground for a new 500-seat house to be called the New Grove, and which will cost approximately $50,000.
“Plans were prepared by W. S. Ferguson, Cleveland architect, and the building will be completed about the first of November. Shenker has contracted to install RCA sound equipment.”
The architect’s full name was William Stanley Ferguson. He also designed the Avon Lake Theatre in Avon Lake, Ohio, and the Beach Cliff Theatre in Rocky River, Ohio.
The October 25, 1940, issue of The Film Daily said that E. J. Sparks was building a new, 600-seat theater in Lake Wales. It must have been the State, so it probably opened in late 1940 or early 1941.
The Parkside Theatre was remodeled and renamed the Lyons Theatre in 1941. Here’s an item from The Film Daily of August 29:
“T. J. Evans Completes $5,000 Remodeling Job
“Clinton, Ia. — The former Parkside Theater here has been remodeled and modernized under a $5,000 investment by owner T. J. Evans which included changing the name of the house to the Lyons Theater.
“Improvements included a new cooling system, improved projection and sound equipment, new seats, new interior finish and a new marquee.
“The new marquee is in the shape of a V with lighted glass sides and third dimension letters. The interior of the house now is attractively finished in tan, ivory and brown composition material in block pattern, with a checker-board effect trim. Indirect lighting fixtures harmonizing with the color scheme.
“The new seats are tangerine and blue to blend with the interior coloring. A washed-air cooling system and a new heating system also is included.”
This article from the Las Cruces Sun-News has a few lines about the State Theatre, saying that it opened on Christmas Eve, 1941. That date suggests that the State was probably the unnamed theater that was the subject of this item in the August 29, 1941, issue of The Film Daily:
“New $30,000 Theater Under Way in Las Cruces
“Las Cruces, N. M. — One of the last remaining Las Cruces landmarks — an old adobe building on north Main St. — is being razed this week to make way for a modern new theater building being erected by Willis Buckley and Glenn Hamill and leased to the Fox Intermountain Theater Co.
“The building and grounds will entail a cost in excess of $30,000. The structure is to be of hollow tile with seating capacity of 600. The theater is expected to be ready for occupancy in about 90 days.”
R. T. Arnold planned to rebuild the Gem as early as 1941, when the August 29 issue of The Film Daily carried this announcement:
“Gem Adds Balcony
“Mulberry, Fla. — Remodeling work on The Gem will include a balcony. Original plans did not call for this but it is being added in order to increase seating capacity of the small house. R. T. Arnold and Marvin Morris will operate the house when completed.”
I suspect that the project didn’t get under way soon enough to avoid the building restrictions imposed by the War Production Board following the entry of the United States into WWII, and that would account for the new Gem not being opened until 1947.
The Gem Theatre opened on September 25, 1912, according to a 1920 book, A Modern History of Windham County, Connecticut, by Allen B. Lincoln. The owner of the house was Arthur P. Dorman, who had earlier taken over operation of the Scenic Temple, another early Willimantic movie house.
The August 29, 1941, issue of The Film Daily had this item about the Gem Theatre:
“Warners Start Project For Modernizing Gem
“New Haven — Warner Bros. Circuit Management Corp. will start renovation of the 750-seat Gem, Willimantic, dark for several years, to be opened some time in October. Warner’s will operate the Gem, in conjunction with the Capitol in the same town, recently renovated.”
There is no Main Street in Starke. If you compare the photo of the Ritz above with this photo of the Florida Theatre, you can see that the Florida was built right next door to the Ritz. The Florida is at 101 W. Call, so the Ritz was probably at 103 or 105, depending on how fast the numbers climb in Starke.
The Florida Theatre is now a twin theater. I don’t know if its own auditorium was split or if it took over the auditorium of the Ritz for its second screen. The front of the Ritz building had an office in it when Google’s camera car went by in 2011, but there’s no indication from Street View how deep the office was. The auditorium might still be intact and part of the Florida Twin, or it might not be. Somebody who has been to the theater will have to let us know.
The July 3, 1941, issue of The Film Daily ran this item about the Florida Theatre:
“Stageburg [sic] Completes Plans
“Starke, Fla.— 0. C. R. Stageburg, of Gainsville, has completed plans for the new Florida Theater, being built for the Manassa family, owners and operators of several Florida houses. Building contract has been awarded R. H. Mathe & Son.”
Stageburg is probably not the correct spelling of the architect’s name. A 1939 issue of the FAA Bulletin (Florida Association of Architects) spells it Stageberg, and as he was an officer of the organization they probably spelled it right.
Another theater was planned for Starke in 1940, but I’ve been unable to discover if it was built or not. Noted in the October 11, 1940, issue of The Film Daily, it was to be a 1000-seat house designed by Roy Benjamin for the Sparks chain, and would have been built at Call and Court Streets. Court Street is not on the map, but Google Maps puts a pin icon for it anyway, down the block west of the Florida’s site. Court Street appears to have been absorbed into a parking lot since then.
The Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to says that Ted Mason, not George Mason, was the architect of the Sunset Theatre. The Internet provides several references to a Ted Mason who was practicing architecture in Wichita in the 1950s, but I can’t find any references at all to a Kansas architect named George Mason (except this page, of course.) Boxoffice probably got the name right.
A photo of the entrance of the Burlington Mall cinemas illustrates this brief article in Boxoffice of April 21, 1969. The architects of the house were Freedman, Petroff & Jeruzalski.
The design of the Strand was unusual, but not unique. There have been more than a dozen reverse theaters, designed so that audiences enter at the screen end of the auditorium. The only one I ever attended myself was the Hastings Theatre in Pasadena, California, but I have come across several Cinema Treasures pages for theaters with this rare configuration. There have probably been quite a few more that have not yet been listed here.
Regarding this paragraph in my comment of December 5, 2010:
“An advertisement for Philadelphia building contractors R.C. Ballinger & Co. in a 1907 edition of Sweet’s Catalog of Building Construction listed the Alvin Theatre among the projects the company had built, and said that the house was designed by an Indianapolis architectural firm called Reed Brothers. I’ve been unable to find any other references to that firm on the Internet.”
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but “Reed Brothers” might have been an error by whoever put together the ad in Sweet’s Catalog. Before establishing their practice in San Francisco, that city’s noted theater architects James and Merritt Reid had operated an office in Evansville, Indiana, along with their younger brother Watson Reid. The Evansville office was sold in 1891, the same year the Alvin Theatre was built. The Reids then moved to California, though Watson eventually returned to their native Canada to practice architecture there.
This is probably not enough information to establish that San Francisco’s Reid Brothers designed the Alvin Theatre, but, if the Sweet’s ad got both the name and the city wrong, it opens the tantalizing possibility that they did. It would be interesting if their first theater design turned out to have been in Pittsburgh, and not in that other hill town where they became famous.
StarryGreen: Yes, the description now states that the Warner opened as the Grand Theatre, but it didn’t say that at the time I asked the question. When I first visited Cinema Treasures I wondered why so many comments just repeated things that were already stated in the theater descriptions, but it turned out to be the other way around.
The descriptions are periodically updated by the site’s editor with new information that is posted in comments, such as K2’s reply to my question, confirming my suspicion that this house was once the Grand. Be sure to check back now and then to see if something new has been discovered about the theater.
The Hub was San Francisco’s oldest operating movie theater when Boxoffice of March 25, 1968, noted that the venerable house had recently celebrated its 59th anniversary week (bottom of center column.)
The auction ended months ago, but for now the listing is still on display for this vintage postcard showing the Grand Theatre in Rutland, which the seller dated 1911 (if you scroll down you might see a larger version- you might have to click “view original listing” first.) The building is easily recognizable, despite the alterations which have been made to it since then.
Around 1915, the Samuel Lewis Store next door to the Grand became the location of an early nickelodeon, the Colonial Theatre. There used to be a photo of it available, too, but it has vanished from the Internet.
Partial linkrot repair: The cable channel Planet Green is no longer in operation, and the URL of its web site now redirects to a web site called the Mother Nature Network. It has several items about Greensburg (use the site’s internal search) but none of them are about the theater.
The City of Greesnburg web site,however, has several pages mentioning the Twilight (internal search again), including pages with the two pre-tornado photos and the rendering of the new building.
Also, here is Silicon Sam’s Google Street View link in clickable form.
Those views both date from 2012, and there has been progress since then. The Twilight Theatre now has its own web site, and more recent photos can be seen there in the “Construction” section. In addition, there are a couple more vintage photos of the Twilight at the “History” link, under the “About” section. The new Twilight will have a 27' x 55' screen, so it will rival those in much larger cities.
The new Twilight Theatre was designed by Spangenberg Phillips Tice Architecture, the Wichita firm that has designed projects for Warren Theatres. The firm donated the plans for the new house.
The Spring, 2009 newsletter of the Rutland Food Co-op (PDF here) has a brief history of their building. It was built by the local Shriners, with construction beginning in 1909, and the house opened as the Shrine Theatre on January 9, 1913. The article says that the Strand opened in the former lobby of the Shrine Theatre in 1920, but I don’t think the part of the Wales Street building that the lobby occupied was anywhere big enough for the theater, so it must have been in the Shrine Theatre auditorium.
The auditorium, however, was quite large, with far more than the 600 seats we have listed for the Strand. The 1913-1914 Cahn-Leighton guide lists the Shrine Theatre with 1,400 seats, 900 on the main floor and 500 in the balcony. In the 1937 city directory, the Strand’s listing caries the notation “road shows”, an indication that it must have been a large house with stage facilities.
The carved “Ray Beane” over the food co-op entrance was added quite some time after the building was built, when Mr. Beane operated a tire store in the space. The theater entrance was where there is now a blank wall with some bulletin boards on it. The auditorium is now the winter home of the Rutland farmers market.
The Grand was the smaller of two theaters listed for Rutland in the 1913-1914 edition of the Cahn-Leighton guide. It was a ground-floor house with 1,221 seats; 519 on the main floor, 402 in the balcony, and 300 in the gallery. Roger Flint was the resident manager of the Grand and of the 1,400-seat Shrine Theatre.
The Grand was not listed in the 1909-1910 Cahn guide, so it must have been built between 1910 and 1913. I think the top of the auditorium has been removed, though. The building as it is now isn’t tall enough to have housed a 400-seat balcony, let alone a gallery above that. There’s no stage house, either, though the Cahn guide described the Grand as having a large stage. In short, the front of the theater is still there, and the lower walls of the auditorium might still exist, but everything else is gone.
Usually, when a duplicate shows up the older page gets to stay, but I think that’s because whoever submitted the first one might be miffed if theirs was the one eliminated. As Chuck submitted both of these pages that won’t be a problem here.
According to Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi, by Jerry Dallas, the Amite Theatre was in the same building which had earlier housed the second Alamo Theatre. Like its predecessor, the Amite was an African American house.
The second Alamo had opened as the New Alamo Theatre around 1927, and occupied the building on Amite Street for more than twenty years. Arthur Lehman leased the building from the Orkin family, and when his lease ran out Ad and Andrew Orkin renovated the house and reopened it as the Amite Theatre in January, 1949, a few weeks before the Alamo reopened in its new location on Farish Street.
The Amite Theater survived for less than a decade, closing in 1958. The new Alamo outlasted it by more than twenty years.
The well-researched paper Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi, by Jerry Dallas (PDF here), says that the third Alamo Theatre opened on February 26, 1949. Arthur Lehman’s new, 750-seat Alamo had been designed to present live performances as well as movies, and for many years brought big-name African American entertainers to Jackson audiences.
The Alamo actually outlived all of downtown Jackson’s white theaters, lasting into the early 1980s, but it had closed by 1983.
Jerry Dallas’s Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi gives the sequence of names this theater had as follows: Opened by the summer of 1941 as the Ray Theatre; renamed the Joy Theatre by 1943; renamed the Park Theatre from July 18, 1948, until closing in 1950.
The New Joy was a different theater, at 215 West Capitol Street, which had previously been called the Buck and the Gay. The operations of the Joy and the New Joy actually overlapped for about two and a half years.
Cinemalover’s link. The photos of the Park Theatre show that it was indeed at the northeast corner of State Street and Park Street. As the Palace was at 95 Exchange Street, the Palace and the Park were different theaters. 95 Exchange would be two blocks south of State Street.
Once again we have two theaters conflated, and we need a new page for one or the other. An article about Bangor’s theaters in the July 15, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World clarifies the early days of both.
The Palace Theatre at 95 Exchange Street was opened in 1911 by Pope D. McKinnon. It had 400 seats. It was still in operation in 1916 under the direction of the Acme Amusement Company.
The Park Theatre opened as the Star Theatre on December 25, 1913, and was also initially operated Mr. McKinnon. The 1,200-seat house was taken over by the Keith circuit on November 28, 1914, after which it was redecorated and renamed the Park Theatre.
It looks like the original Grove Theatre was replaced by a new house in 1941. The August 29, 1941, issue of The Film Daily had an item about the project:
The architect’s full name was William Stanley Ferguson. He also designed the Avon Lake Theatre in Avon Lake, Ohio, and the Beach Cliff Theatre in Rocky River, Ohio.The October 25, 1940, issue of The Film Daily said that E. J. Sparks was building a new, 600-seat theater in Lake Wales. It must have been the State, so it probably opened in late 1940 or early 1941.
The Parkside Theatre was remodeled and renamed the Lyons Theatre in 1941. Here’s an item from The Film Daily of August 29:
This article from the Las Cruces Sun-News has a few lines about the State Theatre, saying that it opened on Christmas Eve, 1941. That date suggests that the State was probably the unnamed theater that was the subject of this item in the August 29, 1941, issue of The Film Daily:
The Strand opened on Wednesday, August 27, 1941, according to the August 29 issue of The Film Daily.
R. T. Arnold planned to rebuild the Gem as early as 1941, when the August 29 issue of The Film Daily carried this announcement:
I suspect that the project didn’t get under way soon enough to avoid the building restrictions imposed by the War Production Board following the entry of the United States into WWII, and that would account for the new Gem not being opened until 1947.The Gem Theatre opened on September 25, 1912, according to a 1920 book, A Modern History of Windham County, Connecticut, by Allen B. Lincoln. The owner of the house was Arthur P. Dorman, who had earlier taken over operation of the Scenic Temple, another early Willimantic movie house.
The August 29, 1941, issue of The Film Daily had this item about the Gem Theatre:
There is no Main Street in Starke. If you compare the photo of the Ritz above with this photo of the Florida Theatre, you can see that the Florida was built right next door to the Ritz. The Florida is at 101 W. Call, so the Ritz was probably at 103 or 105, depending on how fast the numbers climb in Starke.
The Florida Theatre is now a twin theater. I don’t know if its own auditorium was split or if it took over the auditorium of the Ritz for its second screen. The front of the Ritz building had an office in it when Google’s camera car went by in 2011, but there’s no indication from Street View how deep the office was. The auditorium might still be intact and part of the Florida Twin, or it might not be. Somebody who has been to the theater will have to let us know.
The July 3, 1941, issue of The Film Daily ran this item about the Florida Theatre:
Stageburg is probably not the correct spelling of the architect’s name. A 1939 issue of the FAA Bulletin (Florida Association of Architects) spells it Stageberg, and as he was an officer of the organization they probably spelled it right.Another theater was planned for Starke in 1940, but I’ve been unable to discover if it was built or not. Noted in the October 11, 1940, issue of The Film Daily, it was to be a 1000-seat house designed by Roy Benjamin for the Sparks chain, and would have been built at Call and Court Streets. Court Street is not on the map, but Google Maps puts a pin icon for it anyway, down the block west of the Florida’s site. Court Street appears to have been absorbed into a parking lot since then.
The Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to says that Ted Mason, not George Mason, was the architect of the Sunset Theatre. The Internet provides several references to a Ted Mason who was practicing architecture in Wichita in the 1950s, but I can’t find any references at all to a Kansas architect named George Mason (except this page, of course.) Boxoffice probably got the name right.
A photo of the entrance of the Burlington Mall cinemas illustrates this brief article in Boxoffice of April 21, 1969. The architects of the house were Freedman, Petroff & Jeruzalski.
The design of the Strand was unusual, but not unique. There have been more than a dozen reverse theaters, designed so that audiences enter at the screen end of the auditorium. The only one I ever attended myself was the Hastings Theatre in Pasadena, California, but I have come across several Cinema Treasures pages for theaters with this rare configuration. There have probably been quite a few more that have not yet been listed here.
Regarding this paragraph in my comment of December 5, 2010:
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but “Reed Brothers” might have been an error by whoever put together the ad in Sweet’s Catalog. Before establishing their practice in San Francisco, that city’s noted theater architects James and Merritt Reid had operated an office in Evansville, Indiana, along with their younger brother Watson Reid. The Evansville office was sold in 1891, the same year the Alvin Theatre was built. The Reids then moved to California, though Watson eventually returned to their native Canada to practice architecture there.This is probably not enough information to establish that San Francisco’s Reid Brothers designed the Alvin Theatre, but, if the Sweet’s ad got both the name and the city wrong, it opens the tantalizing possibility that they did. It would be interesting if their first theater design turned out to have been in Pittsburgh, and not in that other hill town where they became famous.
StarryGreen: Yes, the description now states that the Warner opened as the Grand Theatre, but it didn’t say that at the time I asked the question. When I first visited Cinema Treasures I wondered why so many comments just repeated things that were already stated in the theater descriptions, but it turned out to be the other way around.
The descriptions are periodically updated by the site’s editor with new information that is posted in comments, such as K2’s reply to my question, confirming my suspicion that this house was once the Grand. Be sure to check back now and then to see if something new has been discovered about the theater.
The Hub was San Francisco’s oldest operating movie theater when Boxoffice of March 25, 1968, noted that the venerable house had recently celebrated its 59th anniversary week (bottom of center column.)
The auction ended months ago, but for now the listing is still on display for this vintage postcard showing the Grand Theatre in Rutland, which the seller dated 1911 (if you scroll down you might see a larger version- you might have to click “view original listing” first.) The building is easily recognizable, despite the alterations which have been made to it since then.
Around 1915, the Samuel Lewis Store next door to the Grand became the location of an early nickelodeon, the Colonial Theatre. There used to be a photo of it available, too, but it has vanished from the Internet.
Partial linkrot repair: The cable channel Planet Green is no longer in operation, and the URL of its web site now redirects to a web site called the Mother Nature Network. It has several items about Greensburg (use the site’s internal search) but none of them are about the theater.
The City of Greesnburg web site,however, has several pages mentioning the Twilight (internal search again), including pages with the two pre-tornado photos and the rendering of the new building.
Also, here is Silicon Sam’s Google Street View link in clickable form.
Plus here is a clickable link to Keith Wondra’s photo of the theater under construction.
Those views both date from 2012, and there has been progress since then. The Twilight Theatre now has its own web site, and more recent photos can be seen there in the “Construction” section. In addition, there are a couple more vintage photos of the Twilight at the “History” link, under the “About” section. The new Twilight will have a 27' x 55' screen, so it will rival those in much larger cities.
The new Twilight Theatre was designed by Spangenberg Phillips Tice Architecture, the Wichita firm that has designed projects for Warren Theatres. The firm donated the plans for the new house.
The Spring, 2009 newsletter of the Rutland Food Co-op (PDF here) has a brief history of their building. It was built by the local Shriners, with construction beginning in 1909, and the house opened as the Shrine Theatre on January 9, 1913. The article says that the Strand opened in the former lobby of the Shrine Theatre in 1920, but I don’t think the part of the Wales Street building that the lobby occupied was anywhere big enough for the theater, so it must have been in the Shrine Theatre auditorium.
The auditorium, however, was quite large, with far more than the 600 seats we have listed for the Strand. The 1913-1914 Cahn-Leighton guide lists the Shrine Theatre with 1,400 seats, 900 on the main floor and 500 in the balcony. In the 1937 city directory, the Strand’s listing caries the notation “road shows”, an indication that it must have been a large house with stage facilities.
The carved “Ray Beane” over the food co-op entrance was added quite some time after the building was built, when Mr. Beane operated a tire store in the space. The theater entrance was where there is now a blank wall with some bulletin boards on it. The auditorium is now the winter home of the Rutland farmers market.
The Grand was the smaller of two theaters listed for Rutland in the 1913-1914 edition of the Cahn-Leighton guide. It was a ground-floor house with 1,221 seats; 519 on the main floor, 402 in the balcony, and 300 in the gallery. Roger Flint was the resident manager of the Grand and of the 1,400-seat Shrine Theatre.
The Grand was not listed in the 1909-1910 Cahn guide, so it must have been built between 1910 and 1913. I think the top of the auditorium has been removed, though. The building as it is now isn’t tall enough to have housed a 400-seat balcony, let alone a gallery above that. There’s no stage house, either, though the Cahn guide described the Grand as having a large stage. In short, the front of the theater is still there, and the lower walls of the auditorium might still exist, but everything else is gone.
Usually, when a duplicate shows up the older page gets to stay, but I think that’s because whoever submitted the first one might be miffed if theirs was the one eliminated. As Chuck submitted both of these pages that won’t be a problem here.
According to Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi, by Jerry Dallas, the Amite Theatre was in the same building which had earlier housed the second Alamo Theatre. Like its predecessor, the Amite was an African American house.
The second Alamo had opened as the New Alamo Theatre around 1927, and occupied the building on Amite Street for more than twenty years. Arthur Lehman leased the building from the Orkin family, and when his lease ran out Ad and Andrew Orkin renovated the house and reopened it as the Amite Theatre in January, 1949, a few weeks before the Alamo reopened in its new location on Farish Street.
The Amite Theater survived for less than a decade, closing in 1958. The new Alamo outlasted it by more than twenty years.
The well-researched paper Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi, by Jerry Dallas (PDF here), says that the third Alamo Theatre opened on February 26, 1949. Arthur Lehman’s new, 750-seat Alamo had been designed to present live performances as well as movies, and for many years brought big-name African American entertainers to Jackson audiences.
The Alamo actually outlived all of downtown Jackson’s white theaters, lasting into the early 1980s, but it had closed by 1983.
Jerry Dallas’s Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi gives the sequence of names this theater had as follows: Opened by the summer of 1941 as the Ray Theatre; renamed the Joy Theatre by 1943; renamed the Park Theatre from July 18, 1948, until closing in 1950.
The New Joy was a different theater, at 215 West Capitol Street, which had previously been called the Buck and the Gay. The operations of the Joy and the New Joy actually overlapped for about two and a half years.