This puzzling page (the words are English, but the syntax might as well be Martian) says that the Home Theatre that became the Roxy was at 106/108 West Main Street. I’ve been unable to find anything about a Home Theatre on South Broadway.
Here is a fresh link to the 1951 Boxoffice article about the Ritz Theatre. The impression I get from the article is that the old Ritz was completely razed to make way for the new Ritz. The article doesn’t mention a fire in the Ritz prior to its demolition, though other sources mention a fire in 1931.
This photo shows the Ritz before the 1951 rebuilding. The Boxoffice article says that the adjacent space in the building was occupied by a shoe store and a grocers prior to rebuilding. Doubling the theater’s width would have required at the very least the complete demolition of the interior, and at least the center section of the old facade would have to have come down as well, to provide for the new center entrance. If all that was coming down, then the roof must have been removed too. That adds up to virtually an entirely new building between the old side walls.
The entry for Uzzell S. Branson in the 1956 edition of the AIA’s American Architects Directory lists the Ritz Theatre as a 1951 project. Our description currently says that he designed a 1936 remodeling of the Ritz, but this web page says that the Ritz was severely damaged by fire in 1931, and reopened in October that year after a $30,000 reconstruction job. It’s possible that Branson was the architect for that project as well, as his practice was established in Blytheville in 1923, according to the AIA directory.
Here is a paragraph from a January 16, 1926, article about the proposed Midland Theatre in The Reel Journal:
“T. W. Lamb, a New York architect, and Robert C. Boller, of Boller Bros.,
Kansas City architects, are preparing plans for the big four-story movie palace and office building. Contracts for the construction will be let as soon as
plans are finished, it has been announced.”
As finally built, the theater portion of the project was six floors, rather than four, and the adjacent office tower had twelve floors.
It’s noted in the description on this page that the Midland Theatre cost $4,000,000 to build in 1926-27. The theater was indeed large and lavish, but I don’t think it accounted for the entire budget. The twelve story Midland Building at the back end of the theater has about three times the floor space of the theater portion of the project, and probably consumed at least half of that $4,000,000 construction cost.
Here is a 1927 photo showing the office building and theater under construction, taken from the office building end of the project.
SK: Sorry for the delayed response, but my subscription to this page lapsed and I didn’t see your question until today.
The August 7, 1954, article about the remodeling of the Criterion now begins at this link.
The scans of Boxoffice that used to be at issuu.com have been moved to a section of the magazine’s own web site called The Vault. If you find any more of my old links that I haven’t gotten around to updating, you can (if you have javascript installed, and your browser supports it) find the date of the issue and the page number of the article by hovering your cursor over the obsolete link (it’s 080754/103 for the Criterion article, for example.) Then you can go to The Vault and navigate through it to find the article. Some of the pages at The Vault are one or two numbers off from the page numbers they had at issuu (the Criterion article starts on Vault page 102, not page 103.)
Some issues of the magazine haven’t yet been uploaded to the Vault, and sometimes The Vault has different editions of an issue, and they will be missing a particular article, but most of the Boxoffice stuff I linked to can still be found by this method.
I should add that I’ve found no evidence to show that the theater was opened as part of the hotel project in 1910. It might have been added sometime later, either converted entirely from existing space, or with a new auditorium added behind the hotel and its entrance in former retail space.
The house might also have operated under a different name in its early years. I’ve found references to theaters called the Rialto (1924) and the Gem (1926) operating in Monett in the 1920s, but no details about either of them. So far I haven’t found the Strand mentioned in any of the trade journals.
A book about the Gillioz Theatre in Springfield includes a small illustration of the Monett Gillioz on page 1928 (Google Books preview.)
The book says that Maurice Gillioz also financed and built the Fox Theatre in Joplin, Missouri. The NRHP-listed Fox is still standing, functioning as a church and special events center, with occasional movies.
The Strand Theatre was at one end of the building that was built in 1910 as the Martin Hotel. About 1947, the hotel closed and was converted into a factory for the Vaisey-Bristol Shoe Company. By sometime the 1950s, the factory had taken over the entire building, including the theater space.
At some point the building was expanded along the entire block of Front Street to 5th Street. It’s possible that the auditorium portion of the theater was demolished as part of this expansion, or it might have been incorporated into the expansion, but it’s impossible to tell from the aerial views of the structure.
After the shoe factory moved out, the ground floor of the 4th Street side of the building, which had been extensively altered, was returned to something more closely resembling the row of storefronts it had featured when it was a hotel, but the location of the Strand’s entrance is still closed up. The building now houses a tire retailer and brake repair shop.
There are photos from ca. 1947 and from the 1950s on page 35 of the book Monett, by Elaine L. Orr (Google Books preview.)
Dormont, by the Dormont Historical Society (Google Books preview), says that the Hollywood Theatre opened as Murray’s Theatre in 1922. A few years later, it was bought by RKO-Stanley, remodeled, and renamed the Hollywood.
This comment from 2007 by thespian110, on the Cinema 4 page, says that the original architect of the Hollywood Theatre was Charles R. Geisler, but doesn’t specify if he designed the Murray Theatre of 1922 or if he was the architect of its remodeling a few years later as the Hollywood, or both. The architect of the 1948 remodeling was Victor A. Rigaumont, in any case.
This theater, and the Vogue Theatre in Manistee, Michigan, present a problem. I don’t know the source of the attribution of these houses to both architect Percival Pereira and to the the firm of Pereira & Pereira, but as Percival Pereira was never a member of that firm, one claim or the other has to be wrong.
The firm of Pereira & Pereira was founded in 1931 and lasted until 1943, so William and Hal Pereira could have designed these two theaters. On the other hand, Percival Pereira was based in Detroit (the Pereira brother’s office was in Chicago) and I’ve been unable to discover how long his career lasted. He might well have still been designing theaters in the late 1930s, though he was older than the Pereira brothers- how much older, I don’t know. I’ve been unable to find his year of birth.
In the absence of any reliable source from the period, I honestly can’t say if these two Vogue Theatres in Michigan were designed by Percival Pereira or by Pereira & Pereira. The Streamline Moderne style of the Detroit Vogue in particular certainly resembles the work of the brothers, and if I had to guess I’d be inclined to say that William and Hal designed them both, but I’m just not sure.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1936 remodeling of the Windsor Theatre, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
The RKO Uptown/Six Mile Theatre, built in 1927, had to have been designed by Percival Pereira, who had been practicing architecture in Detroit for many years. Percival Pereira was never a member of the firm of Pereira & Pereira, which was founded in 1931 by brothers William and Hal Pereira. The brothers had nothing to do with the design of this theater.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that designed the 1934 and 1942 remodeling jobs for this theater, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1935 remodeling of the Rialto Theatre, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
The firm of Pereira & Pereira was dissolved in 1943, according to William Pereira’s entry in the AIA’s Directory of American Architects. William Pereira then operated his own firm until forming a partnership with Charles Luckman in 1951.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1936 remodeling of the West Englewood Theatre, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1936 remodeling of the Hamilton Theatre, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
As the East End Theatre was built in 1926, it must have been designed by Percival Pereira alone. Percival Pereira was never a member of the firm of Pereira & Pereira, which was founded in 1931 by brothers William and Hal Pereira.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1934 remodeling of the E.A.R. Theatre, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1935 remodeling of the Des Plaines Theatre, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1934 remodeling of the Covent Theatre, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1936 remodeling of this theater, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
Percival Pereira was not connected with the design of this theater. The principals of the firm of Pereira & Pereira were William Pereira and Hal Pereira.
The architect field is still not right. The principals of the firm of Pereira & Pereira were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never associated with the firm.
The firm was founded in 1931, so any theaters attributed to them that were built prior to 1930 are probably the work of Percival Pereira (except, of course, in the case of theaters that were remodeled by the firm in the 1930s.)
The architect and firm fields for this page don’t match up with most other sources. The caption pages for the Gottscho-Schleisner photos of the Beach Theatre at the Library of Congress (see my previous comment) say that Pereira & Pereira acted as design consultants on the project, but the architects were Weed & Reeder. There’s no mention of Albert Anis.
The Pacific Coast Architecture Database page for Hal (not Percival) Pereira lists him as a consultant to Weed & Reeder on the Beach Theatre project, and cites an article from The Architectural Record, August, 1941, as the source. It is possible that William Pereira was not involved in the project. Although the firm of Pereira & Pereira was not formally dissolved until 1943 (according to the AIA’s Directory of American Architects), William appears to have been very busy in Los Angeles in the early 1940s.
The entry for architect Frank H. Shuflin in the 1956 edition of the AIA’s Directory of American Architects lists the Beach Theatre in Miami Beach as one of his principal works. It lists Shuflin’s positions at the firm of Weed & Reeder as draftsman from 1927 to 1934, and Associate in charge of the office from 1935 to 1941. I’m not sure if that means he was the lead architect on the Beach Theatre or not.
A questionnaire sent to the AIA from architect Edwin T. Reeder in 1946 also lists the Beach Theatre as one of his works. Reeder left the partnership with Robert Law Reed in 1941 and established his own practice, so the Beach must have been one of their last projects together.
This puzzling page (the words are English, but the syntax might as well be Martian) says that the Home Theatre that became the Roxy was at 106/108 West Main Street. I’ve been unable to find anything about a Home Theatre on South Broadway.
Here is a fresh link to the 1951 Boxoffice article about the Ritz Theatre. The impression I get from the article is that the old Ritz was completely razed to make way for the new Ritz. The article doesn’t mention a fire in the Ritz prior to its demolition, though other sources mention a fire in 1931.
This photo shows the Ritz before the 1951 rebuilding. The Boxoffice article says that the adjacent space in the building was occupied by a shoe store and a grocers prior to rebuilding. Doubling the theater’s width would have required at the very least the complete demolition of the interior, and at least the center section of the old facade would have to have come down as well, to provide for the new center entrance. If all that was coming down, then the roof must have been removed too. That adds up to virtually an entirely new building between the old side walls.
The entry for Uzzell S. Branson in the 1956 edition of the AIA’s American Architects Directory lists the Ritz Theatre as a 1951 project. Our description currently says that he designed a 1936 remodeling of the Ritz, but this web page says that the Ritz was severely damaged by fire in 1931, and reopened in October that year after a $30,000 reconstruction job. It’s possible that Branson was the architect for that project as well, as his practice was established in Blytheville in 1923, according to the AIA directory.
Here is a paragraph from a January 16, 1926, article about the proposed Midland Theatre in The Reel Journal:
As finally built, the theater portion of the project was six floors, rather than four, and the adjacent office tower had twelve floors.It’s noted in the description on this page that the Midland Theatre cost $4,000,000 to build in 1926-27. The theater was indeed large and lavish, but I don’t think it accounted for the entire budget. The twelve story Midland Building at the back end of the theater has about three times the floor space of the theater portion of the project, and probably consumed at least half of that $4,000,000 construction cost.
Here is a 1927 photo showing the office building and theater under construction, taken from the office building end of the project.
SK: Sorry for the delayed response, but my subscription to this page lapsed and I didn’t see your question until today.
The August 7, 1954, article about the remodeling of the Criterion now begins at this link.
The scans of Boxoffice that used to be at issuu.com have been moved to a section of the magazine’s own web site called The Vault. If you find any more of my old links that I haven’t gotten around to updating, you can (if you have javascript installed, and your browser supports it) find the date of the issue and the page number of the article by hovering your cursor over the obsolete link (it’s 080754/103 for the Criterion article, for example.) Then you can go to The Vault and navigate through it to find the article. Some of the pages at The Vault are one or two numbers off from the page numbers they had at issuu (the Criterion article starts on Vault page 102, not page 103.)
Some issues of the magazine haven’t yet been uploaded to the Vault, and sometimes The Vault has different editions of an issue, and they will be missing a particular article, but most of the Boxoffice stuff I linked to can still be found by this method.
I should add that I’ve found no evidence to show that the theater was opened as part of the hotel project in 1910. It might have been added sometime later, either converted entirely from existing space, or with a new auditorium added behind the hotel and its entrance in former retail space.
The house might also have operated under a different name in its early years. I’ve found references to theaters called the Rialto (1924) and the Gem (1926) operating in Monett in the 1920s, but no details about either of them. So far I haven’t found the Strand mentioned in any of the trade journals.
A book about the Gillioz Theatre in Springfield includes a small illustration of the Monett Gillioz on page 1928 (Google Books preview.)
The book says that Maurice Gillioz also financed and built the Fox Theatre in Joplin, Missouri. The NRHP-listed Fox is still standing, functioning as a church and special events center, with occasional movies.
The Strand Theatre was at one end of the building that was built in 1910 as the Martin Hotel. About 1947, the hotel closed and was converted into a factory for the Vaisey-Bristol Shoe Company. By sometime the 1950s, the factory had taken over the entire building, including the theater space.
At some point the building was expanded along the entire block of Front Street to 5th Street. It’s possible that the auditorium portion of the theater was demolished as part of this expansion, or it might have been incorporated into the expansion, but it’s impossible to tell from the aerial views of the structure.
After the shoe factory moved out, the ground floor of the 4th Street side of the building, which had been extensively altered, was returned to something more closely resembling the row of storefronts it had featured when it was a hotel, but the location of the Strand’s entrance is still closed up. The building now houses a tire retailer and brake repair shop.
There are photos from ca. 1947 and from the 1950s on page 35 of the book Monett, by Elaine L. Orr (Google Books preview.)
This comment from 2007 by thespian110 says that the architect of the Harris South Hills Theatre was Charles R. Geisler.
Dormont, by the Dormont Historical Society (Google Books preview), says that the Hollywood Theatre opened as Murray’s Theatre in 1922. A few years later, it was bought by RKO-Stanley, remodeled, and renamed the Hollywood.
This comment from 2007 by thespian110, on the Cinema 4 page, says that the original architect of the Hollywood Theatre was Charles R. Geisler, but doesn’t specify if he designed the Murray Theatre of 1922 or if he was the architect of its remodeling a few years later as the Hollywood, or both. The architect of the 1948 remodeling was Victor A. Rigaumont, in any case.
This theater, and the Vogue Theatre in Manistee, Michigan, present a problem. I don’t know the source of the attribution of these houses to both architect Percival Pereira and to the the firm of Pereira & Pereira, but as Percival Pereira was never a member of that firm, one claim or the other has to be wrong.
The firm of Pereira & Pereira was founded in 1931 and lasted until 1943, so William and Hal Pereira could have designed these two theaters. On the other hand, Percival Pereira was based in Detroit (the Pereira brother’s office was in Chicago) and I’ve been unable to discover how long his career lasted. He might well have still been designing theaters in the late 1930s, though he was older than the Pereira brothers- how much older, I don’t know. I’ve been unable to find his year of birth.
In the absence of any reliable source from the period, I honestly can’t say if these two Vogue Theatres in Michigan were designed by Percival Pereira or by Pereira & Pereira. The Streamline Moderne style of the Detroit Vogue in particular certainly resembles the work of the brothers, and if I had to guess I’d be inclined to say that William and Hal designed them both, but I’m just not sure.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1936 remodeling of the Windsor Theatre, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
The RKO Uptown/Six Mile Theatre, built in 1927, had to have been designed by Percival Pereira, who had been practicing architecture in Detroit for many years. Percival Pereira was never a member of the firm of Pereira & Pereira, which was founded in 1931 by brothers William and Hal Pereira. The brothers had nothing to do with the design of this theater.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that designed the 1934 and 1942 remodeling jobs for this theater, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1935 remodeling of the Rialto Theatre, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
The firm of Pereira & Pereira was dissolved in 1943, according to William Pereira’s entry in the AIA’s Directory of American Architects. William Pereira then operated his own firm until forming a partnership with Charles Luckman in 1951.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1936 remodeling of the West Englewood Theatre, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1936 remodeling of the Hamilton Theatre, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
As the East End Theatre was built in 1926, it must have been designed by Percival Pereira alone. Percival Pereira was never a member of the firm of Pereira & Pereira, which was founded in 1931 by brothers William and Hal Pereira.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1934 remodeling of the E.A.R. Theatre, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1935 remodeling of the Des Plaines Theatre, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1934 remodeling of the Covent Theatre, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
The principals of Pereira & Pereira, the firm that did the 1936 remodeling of this theater, were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never a member of this firm.
Percival Pereira was not connected with the design of this theater. The principals of the firm of Pereira & Pereira were William Pereira and Hal Pereira.
The architect field is still not right. The principals of the firm of Pereira & Pereira were William Pereira and Hal Pereira. Percival Pereira was an older architect who was never associated with the firm.
The firm was founded in 1931, so any theaters attributed to them that were built prior to 1930 are probably the work of Percival Pereira (except, of course, in the case of theaters that were remodeled by the firm in the 1930s.)
The architect and firm fields for this page don’t match up with most other sources. The caption pages for the Gottscho-Schleisner photos of the Beach Theatre at the Library of Congress (see my previous comment) say that Pereira & Pereira acted as design consultants on the project, but the architects were Weed & Reeder. There’s no mention of Albert Anis.
The Pacific Coast Architecture Database page for Hal (not Percival) Pereira lists him as a consultant to Weed & Reeder on the Beach Theatre project, and cites an article from The Architectural Record, August, 1941, as the source. It is possible that William Pereira was not involved in the project. Although the firm of Pereira & Pereira was not formally dissolved until 1943 (according to the AIA’s Directory of American Architects), William appears to have been very busy in Los Angeles in the early 1940s.
The entry for architect Frank H. Shuflin in the 1956 edition of the AIA’s Directory of American Architects lists the Beach Theatre in Miami Beach as one of his principal works. It lists Shuflin’s positions at the firm of Weed & Reeder as draftsman from 1927 to 1934, and Associate in charge of the office from 1935 to 1941. I’m not sure if that means he was the lead architect on the Beach Theatre or not.
A questionnaire sent to the AIA from architect Edwin T. Reeder in 1946 also lists the Beach Theatre as one of his works. Reeder left the partnership with Robert Law Reed in 1941 and established his own practice, so the Beach must have been one of their last projects together.