Just a suggestion: these are two separate theaters with different seating, styles and uses, although their histories are intertwined. Perhaps they should each have separate listings.
York is indeed fortunate to have saved these two theaters from the wrecker’s ball. Both had fallen from the heights of popularity to unspooling XXX flicks in the mid-70s. What a pathetic greeting that was for people coming into downtown York on North George Street. When the Strand closed in 1975 in a state of disrepair and the Capitol shuttered a year later, thank the lucky stars for a foreward-thinking mayor, John Krout, who championed the effort to get the city to purchase the properties from RKO Stanley Warner. There were a lot of naysayers. But I think Krout’s vision has been realized. The Strand and Capitol brought suburbanites into the city and sparked an interest in downtown where before there was none.
The recent $18 million renovations were great for the Strand, a theater with excellent accoustics and sightlines. Adding a small balcony and the stage improvements have enabled them to bring in somewhat larger performances. This was a former vaudeville theater turned movie house and is a great place to see a live performance. That said, however…
They should have left the Capitol alone. The recent “improvements,” while well-meaning, have utterly ruined it as a movie theater. When the Capitol was re-opened in the early 80s, little had been done to it beyond a thorough cleaning and reupholstering the downstairs seats. It was the same as it had been since the CinemaScope screen was installed in the 1950s. Keep in mind that the Capitol was built as a movie theater, not a vaudeville house, and had no stage. An elaborate proscenium arch, with a brick wall in between, had been covered for decades by floor to ceiling draperies and the ‘Scope screen, which was wider than the arch. A small stage was built out in front in the late 80s, as there is no room for a traditional stage in back. Part of the renovation was to remove the drapes and the 'Scope screen to uncover the arch, to return the theater to the way it looked originally. When I read that they were going to be using some sort of portable screen instead of a fixed one, I thought “uh oh…” and unfortunately my fears were realized.
I saw Orson Welles' “Touch of Evil” on the new portable screen. They still changeover projectors but must have large-capacity reels, as there was only one changeover, in the middle of the film. For the first half, the image on the left side was in focus, and the right side was not. After the changeover, the right side was in focus and the left side was not. I mean seriously out of focus. The image was dim all the way through. It’s a black and white movie. The whites should have been bright white. They were yellow. And for the first half, there was a loud buzz on the soundtrack. My wife, myself and our friend all had headaches by the end. There was no one to complain to, and what could they have done anyway at that point? We had paid an admission price comparable to commercial theaters and had to suffer through this kind of presentation. I was furious that they had ruined this once-fine movie theater by using a screen that they cannot correctly line-up with the projection booth, from side to side or top to bottom for that matter. I expressed my disappointment in a survey flyer after the movie, but I have never been back and have no intention to, and I used to go there a lot. I’m all for preservation and and historical originality, but they should have kept in mind that in order to uncover a useless decoration, attractive as it may be, they compromised what the Capitol had always been, a great place to see a movie.
I recall the Senate as Harrisburg’s Disney theater. With rare exceptions, the Disneys always played there, and the Senate was probably the first theater a lot of youngsters attended in the 50s and early 60s. I can still remember seeing what might have been my first movie, Disney’s “Snow White†on the big Senate screen in 1958, and many more thereafter until they began to lose the Disneys and the family pictures to suburban theaters. Other popular films that played the Senate during my movie going days were “A Hard Day’s Night,†Hitchcock’s “The Birds†and “Marnie,†“Becket,†“The Graduate†and the first two Bond pictures as well as “You Only Live Twice†and just about all the Jerry Lewis movies. The last picture I recall seeing at the Senate was Joan Crawford’s 1968 circus-of-horrors flick “Berserk.†As the 60s wore on, the Senate began slipping adult-themed films like “I Am Curious (Yellow)†and “Carmen Baby†into the mix, and by 1970 had flipped to X-rated fare entirely. I don’t know why I remember this, but the last mainstream picture to play the Senate was 1970’s “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.†“Deep Throat†played there for months without the protest it incurred in other towns. And to think I’d seen sweet Julie Andrews as “Mary Poppins†on the same screen just a few years before!
Brandt Theaters, which booked the suburban Trans-Lux, took over management of the Senate in the late 60s. They briefly called it the “Trans-Lux Senate†in newspaper ads and I recall seeing a poster at the Trans-Lux promoting a revival of “The African Queen†at the Senate. Brandt was certainly running it when it went all XXX and ran it well into the 70s, but how long they retained management I don’t know, nor do I know who ran the Senate in its later days.
I think a lot of people were happy to see the Senate closed and demolished for the Hilton Hotel. The entire northeast quadrant of Market Square had become a boarded-up eyesore and the Senate was thought an embarrassment to the Capital City. In the early 70s I worked the night shift at WKBO radio in the same block and frequently parked in front of the Senate. The kind of people who were hanging out downtown when I left work at midnight were pretty scary. Hookers, drug dealers, people looking for hookers and drug dealers, drunks and rowdy kids with nothing to do. I was only 19 or 20 myself. I must have been crazy!
In its day the Senate was a really attractive, modern theater. It had a short lobby with a concession stand, and the rest rooms were downstairs, where there was a spacious lounge. In my memory (which may be faulty but it’s all I have to go on) the auditorium had very comfortably-padded seats of a pale red color with matching curtains covering the screen. The walls were a deep blue with an off-white trim along the bottom. One thing I always thought was cool were the two blue neon clocks over the exits on either side of the screen. Something most people probably didn’t know about the Senate: there was a large pool hall underneath the auditorium, accessible by a small doorway near the back and down a long flight of stairs. My dad walked me through there once when I was a kid, just so I could see it.
I wish I had photos of the Senate, and I wish it could have been retained in some way. Perhaps had it not been running XXX flicks for the last 20 years of its existence, in its own way graphically representing the overall decline of Market Square, the city might have looked on it more favorably as a candidate for renovation and revival as part of the Hilton complex. As it was, they were just happy to be rid of it.
Hi John! No, I never worked at the Trans Lux but I wish I had. Of the theaters built in the Harrisburg area in the 60s and 70s, the Trans Lux was my favorite. Modern design, yet tasteful and elegant. Bright, comfortable and inviting. Projection and sound without equal. I saw “Doctor Zhivago†shortly after it opened in 1966, and later “Grand Prix†and “The Godfather.†I also saw “200l: A Space Odyssey†at the Trans Lux, the most mind-blowing presentation of that film I’ve ever seen. Too bad they had to go ruin it by twinning it in the 70s.
The Union Deposit Twin opened around 1972 as I recall. Saw “The Poseidon Adventure†and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” there. I don’t know what company ran that place before Sameric acquired it. I do recall it fell on hard times, showed XXX flicks and closed for a while before Sameric stepped in.
When I was working at the Eric they were talking about building another Eric just like the one on Derry Street on land adjacent to the Keystone Drive-In, near the Harrisburg East Mall. That never happened, as they twinned the Eric and took over Union Deposit and the Trans Lux at Colonial Park. They were also talking about building an Eric in Lancaster, which they did in 1970. I’ve always wondered if that Eric was similar to the one on Derry Street, before they were both twinned. I had a friend in Philadelphia who had an Eric near him that was a duplicate of the Derry Street theater.
I never worked in a theater again, though I’ve had a lifelong interest in the theater business. I was offered a job as the Assistant Manager of the Eric in 1972, but I had already gone into the Broadcasting field by then and passed it up, probably for the best! I really enjoy this site and have found your comments and those of DennisZ and others about theaters in South Central PA to be quite interesting. I hope to add some thoughts and insight of my own to the discussion.
Just want to add some details and minor corrections to what Dennis and John posted about the Eric. I grew up nearby and worked there in high school as an usher. The Eric was the Sameric Corporation’s hardtop entry into Harrisburg. (They were already operating the Keystone Drive-In, a first-run year-round venue less than a mile away.) The opening feature was indeed “Lawrence of Arabia†in the summer of 1963. Governor William Scranton attended the Grand Opening and dedicated the theater. The Eric was Harrisburg’s first theater with 70mm capability and six-track stereo sound. It was also the area’s first shopping center theater, in the East Park Center.
That “airplane hangar†criticism stuck to the Eric from the start. Even by 1960s standards, the Eric was drab. Gold curtains covered the screen and to the sides and were the only real color the place had. The walls were a sort-of corrugated sheet metal, medium-gray in color, and the carpeting was red with narrow black striping. There was no wall between the lobby and the auditorium, only a short partition with perhaps a foot of framed glass above it. Light streamed into the theater every time the front door was opened, and noise from the lobby was always a problem. The restrooms were ridiculously small for a theater that large. And those preposterous clouds on the ceiling…
I was told that the Eric had 1350 seats, 1250 ordinary gray seats and about 100 larger plush maroon rocking-chairs in the loges on the extreme left and right. You paid more to sit in the loges during reserved-seat shows but your view of the screen was actually worse, since you were seeing it at an angle, and it just got worse the further down you sat.
The poor design extended to the projection booth. The Chief Projectionist was an old guy (to us anyway) named Paul Hipple, who had formerly worked at the old Loew’s Regent downtown. He was one of the best and really knew his craft. He told me that the booth should have been placed about 15 feet further back. He said the short throw distance to the screen made it nearly impossible to focus anamorphic widescreen pictures, although flat 35mm and 70mm were fine. He was right. Panavision etc. always looked blurry but 70mm looked really sharp.
Like many theaters, the Eric struck gold with “The Sound of Music,†which ran for 67 weeks at reserved seats. It left for a couple of months, then came back at general admission prices for another two or three months. They kept on trying to recapture that magic with every Julie Andrews picture that came along. “Star!†showed at reserved seats when I worked there, and while people didn’t hate it exactly, they didn’t come back for a second view. One lady saw “TSOM†73 times! They showed the same print for the entire run, and it was as pristine the day it left as the day it arrived. The Eric ran a lot of road shows but in between showed your ordinary pictures. I think “Fiddler on the Roof†might have been the last reserved seat picture shown there.
The Eric was twinned in the mid-70s which actually improved it. They had to wall-off the theatres from the lobby and the light and noise problems were gone. But typically of Sameric, one of the cheapest outfits I ever saw, the wall between the theatres was not sufficiently soundproof. When Sameric sold out to UA in 1988, the Harrisburg theaters weren’t part of the deal for some reason and went to Creative Entertainment. They ran them for a couple years and eventually sold them to UA. The Eric became shabbier as time went on and UA finally closed it in 1995. They brought in a giant dumpster and stripped the place to the walls in one day. It was used for storage for a decade and continued to deteriorate with large pieces of that curved roof regularly blowing off. Toward the last it was a real eyesore. The Eric was finally, mercifully demolished in 2006.
Just a suggestion: these are two separate theaters with different seating, styles and uses, although their histories are intertwined. Perhaps they should each have separate listings.
York is indeed fortunate to have saved these two theaters from the wrecker’s ball. Both had fallen from the heights of popularity to unspooling XXX flicks in the mid-70s. What a pathetic greeting that was for people coming into downtown York on North George Street. When the Strand closed in 1975 in a state of disrepair and the Capitol shuttered a year later, thank the lucky stars for a foreward-thinking mayor, John Krout, who championed the effort to get the city to purchase the properties from RKO Stanley Warner. There were a lot of naysayers. But I think Krout’s vision has been realized. The Strand and Capitol brought suburbanites into the city and sparked an interest in downtown where before there was none.
The recent $18 million renovations were great for the Strand, a theater with excellent accoustics and sightlines. Adding a small balcony and the stage improvements have enabled them to bring in somewhat larger performances. This was a former vaudeville theater turned movie house and is a great place to see a live performance. That said, however…
They should have left the Capitol alone. The recent “improvements,” while well-meaning, have utterly ruined it as a movie theater. When the Capitol was re-opened in the early 80s, little had been done to it beyond a thorough cleaning and reupholstering the downstairs seats. It was the same as it had been since the CinemaScope screen was installed in the 1950s. Keep in mind that the Capitol was built as a movie theater, not a vaudeville house, and had no stage. An elaborate proscenium arch, with a brick wall in between, had been covered for decades by floor to ceiling draperies and the ‘Scope screen, which was wider than the arch. A small stage was built out in front in the late 80s, as there is no room for a traditional stage in back. Part of the renovation was to remove the drapes and the 'Scope screen to uncover the arch, to return the theater to the way it looked originally. When I read that they were going to be using some sort of portable screen instead of a fixed one, I thought “uh oh…” and unfortunately my fears were realized.
I saw Orson Welles' “Touch of Evil” on the new portable screen. They still changeover projectors but must have large-capacity reels, as there was only one changeover, in the middle of the film. For the first half, the image on the left side was in focus, and the right side was not. After the changeover, the right side was in focus and the left side was not. I mean seriously out of focus. The image was dim all the way through. It’s a black and white movie. The whites should have been bright white. They were yellow. And for the first half, there was a loud buzz on the soundtrack. My wife, myself and our friend all had headaches by the end. There was no one to complain to, and what could they have done anyway at that point? We had paid an admission price comparable to commercial theaters and had to suffer through this kind of presentation. I was furious that they had ruined this once-fine movie theater by using a screen that they cannot correctly line-up with the projection booth, from side to side or top to bottom for that matter. I expressed my disappointment in a survey flyer after the movie, but I have never been back and have no intention to, and I used to go there a lot. I’m all for preservation and and historical originality, but they should have kept in mind that in order to uncover a useless decoration, attractive as it may be, they compromised what the Capitol had always been, a great place to see a movie.
I recall the Senate as Harrisburg’s Disney theater. With rare exceptions, the Disneys always played there, and the Senate was probably the first theater a lot of youngsters attended in the 50s and early 60s. I can still remember seeing what might have been my first movie, Disney’s “Snow White†on the big Senate screen in 1958, and many more thereafter until they began to lose the Disneys and the family pictures to suburban theaters. Other popular films that played the Senate during my movie going days were “A Hard Day’s Night,†Hitchcock’s “The Birds†and “Marnie,†“Becket,†“The Graduate†and the first two Bond pictures as well as “You Only Live Twice†and just about all the Jerry Lewis movies. The last picture I recall seeing at the Senate was Joan Crawford’s 1968 circus-of-horrors flick “Berserk.†As the 60s wore on, the Senate began slipping adult-themed films like “I Am Curious (Yellow)†and “Carmen Baby†into the mix, and by 1970 had flipped to X-rated fare entirely. I don’t know why I remember this, but the last mainstream picture to play the Senate was 1970’s “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.†“Deep Throat†played there for months without the protest it incurred in other towns. And to think I’d seen sweet Julie Andrews as “Mary Poppins†on the same screen just a few years before!
Brandt Theaters, which booked the suburban Trans-Lux, took over management of the Senate in the late 60s. They briefly called it the “Trans-Lux Senate†in newspaper ads and I recall seeing a poster at the Trans-Lux promoting a revival of “The African Queen†at the Senate. Brandt was certainly running it when it went all XXX and ran it well into the 70s, but how long they retained management I don’t know, nor do I know who ran the Senate in its later days.
I think a lot of people were happy to see the Senate closed and demolished for the Hilton Hotel. The entire northeast quadrant of Market Square had become a boarded-up eyesore and the Senate was thought an embarrassment to the Capital City. In the early 70s I worked the night shift at WKBO radio in the same block and frequently parked in front of the Senate. The kind of people who were hanging out downtown when I left work at midnight were pretty scary. Hookers, drug dealers, people looking for hookers and drug dealers, drunks and rowdy kids with nothing to do. I was only 19 or 20 myself. I must have been crazy!
In its day the Senate was a really attractive, modern theater. It had a short lobby with a concession stand, and the rest rooms were downstairs, where there was a spacious lounge. In my memory (which may be faulty but it’s all I have to go on) the auditorium had very comfortably-padded seats of a pale red color with matching curtains covering the screen. The walls were a deep blue with an off-white trim along the bottom. One thing I always thought was cool were the two blue neon clocks over the exits on either side of the screen. Something most people probably didn’t know about the Senate: there was a large pool hall underneath the auditorium, accessible by a small doorway near the back and down a long flight of stairs. My dad walked me through there once when I was a kid, just so I could see it.
I wish I had photos of the Senate, and I wish it could have been retained in some way. Perhaps had it not been running XXX flicks for the last 20 years of its existence, in its own way graphically representing the overall decline of Market Square, the city might have looked on it more favorably as a candidate for renovation and revival as part of the Hilton complex. As it was, they were just happy to be rid of it.
Hi John! No, I never worked at the Trans Lux but I wish I had. Of the theaters built in the Harrisburg area in the 60s and 70s, the Trans Lux was my favorite. Modern design, yet tasteful and elegant. Bright, comfortable and inviting. Projection and sound without equal. I saw “Doctor Zhivago†shortly after it opened in 1966, and later “Grand Prix†and “The Godfather.†I also saw “200l: A Space Odyssey†at the Trans Lux, the most mind-blowing presentation of that film I’ve ever seen. Too bad they had to go ruin it by twinning it in the 70s.
The Union Deposit Twin opened around 1972 as I recall. Saw “The Poseidon Adventure†and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” there. I don’t know what company ran that place before Sameric acquired it. I do recall it fell on hard times, showed XXX flicks and closed for a while before Sameric stepped in.
When I was working at the Eric they were talking about building another Eric just like the one on Derry Street on land adjacent to the Keystone Drive-In, near the Harrisburg East Mall. That never happened, as they twinned the Eric and took over Union Deposit and the Trans Lux at Colonial Park. They were also talking about building an Eric in Lancaster, which they did in 1970. I’ve always wondered if that Eric was similar to the one on Derry Street, before they were both twinned. I had a friend in Philadelphia who had an Eric near him that was a duplicate of the Derry Street theater.
I never worked in a theater again, though I’ve had a lifelong interest in the theater business. I was offered a job as the Assistant Manager of the Eric in 1972, but I had already gone into the Broadcasting field by then and passed it up, probably for the best! I really enjoy this site and have found your comments and those of DennisZ and others about theaters in South Central PA to be quite interesting. I hope to add some thoughts and insight of my own to the discussion.
Just want to add some details and minor corrections to what Dennis and John posted about the Eric. I grew up nearby and worked there in high school as an usher. The Eric was the Sameric Corporation’s hardtop entry into Harrisburg. (They were already operating the Keystone Drive-In, a first-run year-round venue less than a mile away.) The opening feature was indeed “Lawrence of Arabia†in the summer of 1963. Governor William Scranton attended the Grand Opening and dedicated the theater. The Eric was Harrisburg’s first theater with 70mm capability and six-track stereo sound. It was also the area’s first shopping center theater, in the East Park Center.
That “airplane hangar†criticism stuck to the Eric from the start. Even by 1960s standards, the Eric was drab. Gold curtains covered the screen and to the sides and were the only real color the place had. The walls were a sort-of corrugated sheet metal, medium-gray in color, and the carpeting was red with narrow black striping. There was no wall between the lobby and the auditorium, only a short partition with perhaps a foot of framed glass above it. Light streamed into the theater every time the front door was opened, and noise from the lobby was always a problem. The restrooms were ridiculously small for a theater that large. And those preposterous clouds on the ceiling…
I was told that the Eric had 1350 seats, 1250 ordinary gray seats and about 100 larger plush maroon rocking-chairs in the loges on the extreme left and right. You paid more to sit in the loges during reserved-seat shows but your view of the screen was actually worse, since you were seeing it at an angle, and it just got worse the further down you sat.
The poor design extended to the projection booth. The Chief Projectionist was an old guy (to us anyway) named Paul Hipple, who had formerly worked at the old Loew’s Regent downtown. He was one of the best and really knew his craft. He told me that the booth should have been placed about 15 feet further back. He said the short throw distance to the screen made it nearly impossible to focus anamorphic widescreen pictures, although flat 35mm and 70mm were fine. He was right. Panavision etc. always looked blurry but 70mm looked really sharp.
Like many theaters, the Eric struck gold with “The Sound of Music,†which ran for 67 weeks at reserved seats. It left for a couple of months, then came back at general admission prices for another two or three months. They kept on trying to recapture that magic with every Julie Andrews picture that came along. “Star!†showed at reserved seats when I worked there, and while people didn’t hate it exactly, they didn’t come back for a second view. One lady saw “TSOM†73 times! They showed the same print for the entire run, and it was as pristine the day it left as the day it arrived. The Eric ran a lot of road shows but in between showed your ordinary pictures. I think “Fiddler on the Roof†might have been the last reserved seat picture shown there.
The Eric was twinned in the mid-70s which actually improved it. They had to wall-off the theatres from the lobby and the light and noise problems were gone. But typically of Sameric, one of the cheapest outfits I ever saw, the wall between the theatres was not sufficiently soundproof. When Sameric sold out to UA in 1988, the Harrisburg theaters weren’t part of the deal for some reason and went to Creative Entertainment. They ran them for a couple years and eventually sold them to UA. The Eric became shabbier as time went on and UA finally closed it in 1995. They brought in a giant dumpster and stripped the place to the walls in one day. It was used for storage for a decade and continued to deteriorate with large pieces of that curved roof regularly blowing off. Toward the last it was a real eyesore. The Eric was finally, mercifully demolished in 2006.
John S. in York