I’ve set Street View to the proper location, but the pin icon on the map is still a couple of miles off. The Fox Theatre building is currently occupied by Fakier’s Jewelers. The Fox was just west of Gabasse Street.
Houma, by Thomas Blum Cobb and Mara Currie, says that the Fox was built in 1936, and there’s a photo with the 1938 release Romance on the Run on the marquee (Google Books preview– scroll down past two photos of the Bijou.) The Fox had a bit of simplified Art Deco detailing, and a nice marquee. It has all been stripped away by remodeling.
Thomas Blum Cobb and Mara Currie’s book Houma (from Arcadia’s Images of America series) says that the Bijou was built in 1940. However, a Bijou Theatre was listed at Houma in the 1927 Film Daily Yearbook. The 1940 house might have been a remodel, or perhaps an entirely new building. The Google Books preview of the Arcadia Press book has two photos of the Bijou (scroll down a bit for the second) as well as one of the slightly more decorative Fox (opened in 1936, according to the book.) Both theaters had modern fronts.
Bill Ellzey’s Daily Comet column for June 16, 2012 has a question from a former resident of Houma asking for information about Houma’s movie theaters. Ellzey says that the Bijou, Fox, and Grand were all on the three-block stretch of Main Street between Goode Street and Gabasse Street. That’s a considerable distance southeast of the location where Google Maps has put its pin icon for this theater.
A 1973 source indicates that the Bijou was located where the drive-up area of the First National Bank was located by 1973. If the First National Bank is still in the same location it was then, then the approximate address of the Bijou was 7910 Main, which is the bank’s current address.
The modern address of the New Theatre should have four digits, as the Island Theatre’s address is 4074 Main Street and the address of the building that once housed Powell’s Theatre is 4098 Main Street, and all three theaters were close together.
In a 2006 interview of Anne Lumley Davis, which was part of the Chincoteague Island Library Oral History Project, Ms. Davis says this about the New Theatre:
“ Then we had what they called the New Theater and that was built – it was built in
the ‘40’s. But it seemed like – I don’t really know what happened to it but it was torn down. And it wasn’t old, it wasn’t an old building when it was torn down, but I don’t know whether – I don’t whether the ’62 flood got it or – I don’t know.”
Other sources indicate that the New Theatre was owned by the Powell family, and that they operated both it and Powell’s Theatre until both houses succumbed to competition from the Island Theatre in the 1950s.
The January 1, 1916 issue of The Moving Picture World featured a brief article about the Ditmas Theatre (an exterior view of which is therewith produced.)
The August 30, 1913, issue of The American Contractor said that the Ditmas Theatre had been designed by the local architectural firm of J. N. Pierson & Son. The theater was to be a combination moving picture and vaudeville house. Construction bids were being taken.
In addition to the article Tinseltoes linked to, that issue of Boxoffice features a photo of the foyer and main stairways of the remodeled Valentine used as the cover plate of the magazine’s The Modern Theatre section.
Yes, that’s the Fairmount in the ad, with the wrong location in the caption. The two-page article about the Fairmount in Boxoffice of September 12, 1942, begins at this link. There’s another photo of the auditorium on the second page, showing the opposite wall from the one in the ad, but it’s a bit washed out.
Here is what the NRHP registration form for the Clifton Forge Commercial Historic District has to say about the Ridge Theatre:
“Perhaps the most unusual building built on the street during the period Was the 1929 Ridge Theatre (418 East Ridgeway Street). In 1928 Samuel Sachs sold the Family Theatre to Warner Brothers Theatre Corporation which either remodeled the preexisting building or, more likely, built anew. The Ridge Theatre is a lively rendition of the Spanish Eclectic style. The theater’s facade relies on economical allusions to various stylistic elements for its effect. The parapet is coped with several courses of ceramic or metal mission tiles, suggesting a foreshortened tile roof. The second and third story windows have round-arched heads; the top two windows are connected by a decorative metal grille that projects slightly from the facade and is meant to evoke a balcony. The stuccoed facade is banded with bas-relief decoration suggestive of arched corbeling.”
The Family Theatre, which the Ridge Theatre replaced in 1929, had been called the Palace Theatre until the end of 1908. The December 26 issue of The Billboard that year said that new owner A. M. Houff had closed the house, planning to reopen it with movies as the Family Theatre on January 1. This photo depicts the Family Theatre in the 1910s.
Items from The Luddington Daily News indicate that the Pentwater Theatre was indeed the same house as the Miracle Theatre, built in 1930 on the site of the Tower Theatre which had been destroyed by fire.
The Tower Theatre burned in 1928, and again in 1929, according to this article in The Ludington Daily News, May 13, 1929.
This article from the same newspaper’s issue of January 21, 1939, is about the remodeling of the Pentwater Theatre, formerly the Miracle Theatre.
The Miracle Theatre opened in July, 1930, and was closed as the Pentwater Theatre in 1986.
The description says that the Elmwood Theatre was near Gunderson Avenue, which is three blocks east of the location at which Google Maps placed its pin icon. It might not be Google’s fault this time. The address of the theater might have been in the 400 block of Harrison Street, not the 600 block.
Although the following item was in the February 27 issue of Construction News in 1915, not 1913 when the Elmwood is supposed to have opened, I think it could be about the Elmwood Theatre:
“Motion Picture Theatre- 2 stores & 6 flats, $35,000, Oak Park, Ill., Elmwood & Harrison. Mason, W. Pillinger, 118 N. La Salle St. Carpt., Diegley & Campbell, 139 N. Clark St. Archt. Frank O. DeMoney, 19 S. La Salle St. Owner, C. H. Kessler, 725 S. Elmwood Av. Pressed brk. & terra cotta trim, 2 stys. & bsm., 100x125. Excavating.”
Elmwood Avenue is one block east of Gunderson Avenue. As for the 1915 construction date, if there was an Elmwood Theatre as early as 1913, it’s possible that the house opened as a small storefront operation and moved to new quarters two years later.
A Lyric Theatre at Lincoln was on a list of vaudeville houses published in the April 7, 1906, issue of theatrical trade journal The New York Clipper. However, an entry in a timeline of events of 1906 published in Nebraska Blue Book, 1915, said: “Aug. 27—Lincoln opened new Lyric theatre.” Perhaps the item in the Clipper referred to a previous Lyric Theatre.
The Lyric Theatre was in operation as a movie house at least as late as 1924. The operators of the house, Hostettler Bros., published weekly program guides to their theaters, and scans of a few are available from the Nebraska Memory web site. Here is a PDF file of the current and coming attractions published May 19, 1924.
The February, 1906, issue of Engineering World ran this announcement about the proposed Lyric Theatre in Mobile:
“Mobile, Ala.—The Lyric Theater Co., of this city, has incorporated to build a $100,000 opera house. Stone Brothers, Cora Bldg., New Orleans, La., are Architects.”
From 1901 to 1910, the Stone Brothers architectural firm consisted of Guy Stone, Grover C. Stone, and Sam Stone, Jr.
The Sanger Amusements web site offers this page with a brief history of the Lyric, and several illustrations.
The theater at left in this postcard photo could be either the original Grand or the New Grand, built after the fire in 1916. The postcard was mailed in 1919, but the photo could have been taken prior to the destruction of the old Grand.
Most of the buildings in the view from the 1910s are gone, but I’ve updated Street View to the most likely location from which the old photo was taken. The church in the distance on the left is still standing, hidden among the trees in Street View, but I think the theater in the old photo is gone.
However, if that was the original Grand, the new Grand might have been in one of the other buildings still standing on Main Street. The 1916 fire that destroyed the original Grand Theatre also destroyed other buildings on the block. One or more of the buildings at left in Street View might have been among their replacements.
I believe this theatre was most likely in the building that is now the Grace Tabernacle Christian Church, currently using the address 5122 Greenway Avenue. It is probably also the unnamed theater mentioned in the September 16, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“PHILADELPHIA, PA.—John C. Conner has taken title to the one-story brick moving picture theater at 5124-26-28 Greenway avenue. The building is situated on a lot 52 by 140 feet and is assessed at $15,000.”
The current building looks deeper than 140 feet, though, so the theater might have been rebuilt sometime after 1916, but it’s more likely that it was just expanded.
The Gem Theatre began showing movies in 1916, according to this item in the August 12 issue of The Moving Picture World:
“Billings, Mont.—Arthur Mann, proprietor of the Gem theater here, has succumbed to the lure of pictures. He shortly will reopen his playhouse with a regular offering for film fans.
Mann had only recently acquired the house, as noted in the September 16 issue of the same publication. The item also says that he had changed the name of the house to the American Theatre:
"BILLINGS, MONT.—The Gem theater, recently taken over by Arthur Mann, has been overhauled, the interior redecorated, and renamed the American.”
The original architect of the Symphony Theatre was William G. Massarene, according to an item in the April 26, 1919, issue of The Film Daily. The conversion of the existing building into a theater had cost $44,000.
this card in the Denver Public Library’s Western History Subject Index says that when the State Theatre was closed and demolished in 1953, its owners bought the Isis Theatre and changed its name to the New State Theatre.
Another card from the Index cites a January 1, 1955, item in the Rocky Mountain News saying that the Isis Theatre building was to be demolished. The Isis must have had the aka New State for less than two years.
Seating capacity is usually given by the person who submitted the theater. I suspect that some of them just guess at it. If the submitter doesn’t provide a seat count, theater editor Ken Roe sometimes adds it. For American and Canadian theaters I think he usually uses the capacity listings in The Film Daily Yearbook.
The yearbook doesn’t always give accurate seat counts. It relied on owners and managers to provide the numbers, and they would sometimes falsify them, usually under-reporting in order to beat the projectionist’s union’s rule that houses with more than 1,000 seats had to hire two projectionists. There were also cases of simple careless editing that would lead to an under-report.
It’s also the case that some theaters actually were greatly reduced in capacity over the years because, as business declined, balconies and galleries would be closed to the public to save on maintenance and insurance costs. Some old houses that had the greater part of their seats on upper levels would end up reporting nothing but the orchestra floor capacity, which was sometimes quite small.
There were other, lesser factors leading to reduced seating capacity. Operators of aging theaters would often cannibalize working seats from the front of the house to replace seats in other parts of the auditorium that had been broken. That would lead to a creeping decline in capacity. Old theaters also lost some capacity when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, forcing them to remove some seats to provide space and access for patrons in wheelchairs.
There have also been a few cases where operators would remove every other row of seats, in order to provide more leg room for today’s taller patrons. It’s much cheaper than completely re-seating a theater, and can buy a house with declining patronage a couple of extra years of operation.
No doubt many of the theater pages at Cinema Treasures do seriously under-report seating capacity, but there are also many cases where the capacity of a fairly large theater has actually been significantly reduced, and the numbers given are accurate even though they seem too small.
Here is a photo of the Rex Theatre.
I’ve set Street View to the proper location, but the pin icon on the map is still a couple of miles off. The Fox Theatre building is currently occupied by Fakier’s Jewelers. The Fox was just west of Gabasse Street.
Houma, by Thomas Blum Cobb and Mara Currie, says that the Fox was built in 1936, and there’s a photo with the 1938 release Romance on the Run on the marquee (Google Books preview– scroll down past two photos of the Bijou.) The Fox had a bit of simplified Art Deco detailing, and a nice marquee. It has all been stripped away by remodeling.
Thomas Blum Cobb and Mara Currie’s book Houma (from Arcadia’s Images of America series) says that the Bijou was built in 1940. However, a Bijou Theatre was listed at Houma in the 1927 Film Daily Yearbook. The 1940 house might have been a remodel, or perhaps an entirely new building. The Google Books preview of the Arcadia Press book has two photos of the Bijou (scroll down a bit for the second) as well as one of the slightly more decorative Fox (opened in 1936, according to the book.) Both theaters had modern fronts.
Bill Ellzey’s Daily Comet column for June 16, 2012 has a question from a former resident of Houma asking for information about Houma’s movie theaters. Ellzey says that the Bijou, Fox, and Grand were all on the three-block stretch of Main Street between Goode Street and Gabasse Street. That’s a considerable distance southeast of the location where Google Maps has put its pin icon for this theater.
A 1973 source indicates that the Bijou was located where the drive-up area of the First National Bank was located by 1973. If the First National Bank is still in the same location it was then, then the approximate address of the Bijou was 7910 Main, which is the bank’s current address.
Here is a fresh link to the 1949 Boxoffice item with the photo of the Park Theatre’s collapsed ceiling.
The modern address of the New Theatre should have four digits, as the Island Theatre’s address is 4074 Main Street and the address of the building that once housed Powell’s Theatre is 4098 Main Street, and all three theaters were close together.
In a 2006 interview of Anne Lumley Davis, which was part of the Chincoteague Island Library Oral History Project, Ms. Davis says this about the New Theatre:
Other sources indicate that the New Theatre was owned by the Powell family, and that they operated both it and Powell’s Theatre until both houses succumbed to competition from the Island Theatre in the 1950s.The January 1, 1916 issue of The Moving Picture World featured a brief article about the Ditmas Theatre (an exterior view of which is therewith produced.)
The August 30, 1913, issue of The American Contractor said that the Ditmas Theatre had been designed by the local architectural firm of J. N. Pierson & Son. The theater was to be a combination moving picture and vaudeville house. Construction bids were being taken.
In addition to the article Tinseltoes linked to, that issue of Boxoffice features a photo of the foyer and main stairways of the remodeled Valentine used as the cover plate of the magazine’s The Modern Theatre section.
The original look of the Shaker Theatre’s auditorium can be seen in the photo at upper left of this page of Boxoffice, November 14, 1936.
Here is a 1959 photo showing the Shaker Theatre during a major flood on June 1. The name of the movie featured on the marquee is interesting.
Yes, that’s the Fairmount in the ad, with the wrong location in the caption. The two-page article about the Fairmount in Boxoffice of September 12, 1942, begins at this link. There’s another photo of the auditorium on the second page, showing the opposite wall from the one in the ad, but it’s a bit washed out.
Here is an updated link to the 1965 photo of the Squire Theatre in Boxoffice.
Here is what the NRHP registration form for the Clifton Forge Commercial Historic District has to say about the Ridge Theatre:
The Family Theatre, which the Ridge Theatre replaced in 1929, had been called the Palace Theatre until the end of 1908. The December 26 issue of The Billboard that year said that new owner A. M. Houff had closed the house, planning to reopen it with movies as the Family Theatre on January 1. This photo depicts the Family Theatre in the 1910s.Items from The Luddington Daily News indicate that the Pentwater Theatre was indeed the same house as the Miracle Theatre, built in 1930 on the site of the Tower Theatre which had been destroyed by fire.
The Tower Theatre burned in 1928, and again in 1929, according to this article in The Ludington Daily News, May 13, 1929.
This article from the same newspaper’s issue of January 21, 1939, is about the remodeling of the Pentwater Theatre, formerly the Miracle Theatre.
The Miracle Theatre opened in July, 1930, and was closed as the Pentwater Theatre in 1986.
A photo of the lobby of the Harper Theatre appeared in Boxoffice of December 2, 1950.
The description says that the Elmwood Theatre was near Gunderson Avenue, which is three blocks east of the location at which Google Maps placed its pin icon. It might not be Google’s fault this time. The address of the theater might have been in the 400 block of Harrison Street, not the 600 block.
Although the following item was in the February 27 issue of Construction News in 1915, not 1913 when the Elmwood is supposed to have opened, I think it could be about the Elmwood Theatre:
Elmwood Avenue is one block east of Gunderson Avenue. As for the 1915 construction date, if there was an Elmwood Theatre as early as 1913, it’s possible that the house opened as a small storefront operation and moved to new quarters two years later.The obituary of W. J. Hartwig (quoted here) said that he had built the Hartwig Theatre in 1917.
A Lyric Theatre at Lincoln was on a list of vaudeville houses published in the April 7, 1906, issue of theatrical trade journal The New York Clipper. However, an entry in a timeline of events of 1906 published in Nebraska Blue Book, 1915, said: “Aug. 27—Lincoln opened new Lyric theatre.” Perhaps the item in the Clipper referred to a previous Lyric Theatre.
The Lyric Theatre was in operation as a movie house at least as late as 1924. The operators of the house, Hostettler Bros., published weekly program guides to their theaters, and scans of a few are available from the Nebraska Memory web site. Here is a PDF file of the current and coming attractions published May 19, 1924.
The February, 1906, issue of Engineering World ran this announcement about the proposed Lyric Theatre in Mobile:
From 1901 to 1910, the Stone Brothers architectural firm consisted of Guy Stone, Grover C. Stone, and Sam Stone, Jr.The Sanger Amusements web site offers this page with a brief history of the Lyric, and several illustrations.
The theater at left in this postcard photo could be either the original Grand or the New Grand, built after the fire in 1916. The postcard was mailed in 1919, but the photo could have been taken prior to the destruction of the old Grand.
Most of the buildings in the view from the 1910s are gone, but I’ve updated Street View to the most likely location from which the old photo was taken. The church in the distance on the left is still standing, hidden among the trees in Street View, but I think the theater in the old photo is gone.
However, if that was the original Grand, the new Grand might have been in one of the other buildings still standing on Main Street. The 1916 fire that destroyed the original Grand Theatre also destroyed other buildings on the block. One or more of the buildings at left in Street View might have been among their replacements.
I believe this theatre was most likely in the building that is now the Grace Tabernacle Christian Church, currently using the address 5122 Greenway Avenue. It is probably also the unnamed theater mentioned in the September 16, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
The current building looks deeper than 140 feet, though, so the theater might have been rebuilt sometime after 1916, but it’s more likely that it was just expanded.The Gem Theatre began showing movies in 1916, according to this item in the August 12 issue of The Moving Picture World:
Mann had only recently acquired the house, as noted in the September 16 issue of the same publication. The item also says that he had changed the name of the house to the American Theatre:The original architect of the Symphony Theatre was William G. Massarene, according to an item in the April 26, 1919, issue of The Film Daily. The conversion of the existing building into a theater had cost $44,000.
CinemaTour gives the address of the Ritz as 250 E. Main, which is definitely in the block where drewcjm placed it.
I’ve updated Street View to roughly match the location of this photo by Flickr user drewcjm, who says this is where the Ritz was.
this card in the Denver Public Library’s Western History Subject Index says that when the State Theatre was closed and demolished in 1953, its owners bought the Isis Theatre and changed its name to the New State Theatre.
Another card from the Index cites a January 1, 1955, item in the Rocky Mountain News saying that the Isis Theatre building was to be demolished. The Isis must have had the aka New State for less than two years.
Seating capacity is usually given by the person who submitted the theater. I suspect that some of them just guess at it. If the submitter doesn’t provide a seat count, theater editor Ken Roe sometimes adds it. For American and Canadian theaters I think he usually uses the capacity listings in The Film Daily Yearbook.
The yearbook doesn’t always give accurate seat counts. It relied on owners and managers to provide the numbers, and they would sometimes falsify them, usually under-reporting in order to beat the projectionist’s union’s rule that houses with more than 1,000 seats had to hire two projectionists. There were also cases of simple careless editing that would lead to an under-report.
It’s also the case that some theaters actually were greatly reduced in capacity over the years because, as business declined, balconies and galleries would be closed to the public to save on maintenance and insurance costs. Some old houses that had the greater part of their seats on upper levels would end up reporting nothing but the orchestra floor capacity, which was sometimes quite small.
There were other, lesser factors leading to reduced seating capacity. Operators of aging theaters would often cannibalize working seats from the front of the house to replace seats in other parts of the auditorium that had been broken. That would lead to a creeping decline in capacity. Old theaters also lost some capacity when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, forcing them to remove some seats to provide space and access for patrons in wheelchairs.
There have also been a few cases where operators would remove every other row of seats, in order to provide more leg room for today’s taller patrons. It’s much cheaper than completely re-seating a theater, and can buy a house with declining patronage a couple of extra years of operation.
No doubt many of the theater pages at Cinema Treasures do seriously under-report seating capacity, but there are also many cases where the capacity of a fairly large theater has actually been significantly reduced, and the numbers given are accurate even though they seem too small.