The into definitely needs to be rewritten. It currently isn’t about the theater at all.
And while we’re at it, Modern or Mid-Century Modern (the latter more often referring to interior design, but increasingly used to describe buildings as well) should definitely be added to the choice of architectural styles available when submitting theaters to the site. The more issues of Boxoffice from the 1940s on I look at, full of photos of totally modern theater buildings, the more obvious it becomes to me that hundreds of theaters were built in purely modern styles. It doesn’t make sense to call them At Moderne, because most of them have left every trace of that style behind.
What we should call some of the recent multiplexes and megaplexes that borrow heavily from Art Deco and Art Modern, I don’t know. I guess Neo-Deco or Neo-Moderne might do, but I’ve come to think of them as Mannerist Moderne, since they usually have an exaggerated “referential” quality to their designs, characteristic of Mannerism.
But I don’t think any architecture critic has used that appellation.
In the 1970s, the late critic C. Ray Smith wrote a book called “Supermannerism,” which was mostly about architect Paul Rudolph, but the term appears never to have stuck as a stylistic appellation. I think he was on the right track, though. The works of more recent celebrity architects such as Michael Graves look Mannerist as hell to me.
I’ve searched all the usual sources and can’t find any references to either Roy Chase or R.E. Struve as architects, and few references to them of any sort. The California Index contains one card citing a 1928 L.A. Times article saying that R.E. Struve was financing the construction of a building at Encinitas, and there’s a PDF about the coast highway citing a couple of 1925 Oceanside Blade articles saying that Roy Chase had built a hotel there. As far as I’ve been able to discover, neither Chase nor Struve was an architect, but both were local developers.
Until some convincing evidence turns up, I’m inclined to say that the actual architect of this theater remains unknown.
The Art Deco designation at top is the another result of the confusion between the theater and the auditorium. The auditorium I’d consider Streamline Moderne with some lingering Art Deco elements, so I’d say it would be best classified as Art Moderne. The theater, on the other hand, was a fairly pure Midcentury Modern design, although those split, angled columns certainly have a Googiesque quality. However, this theater was built before there ever was a Googie’s coffee shop.
Some of the moderne and modernist buildings designed for theaters were probably among the inspirations for what became the Googie style. What many theater architects did in their designs was to use the building exterior itself as an advertisement, which is essentially what John Lautner did when he come up with the first Googie’s coffee shop design in 1949. I see Googie not so much a style of its own as I do a modernist-influenced extension of the whole theatrical approach to architecture as something to pull in the customers, which was done even with the earliest big movie houses built in the 1910s.
And if form follows function, and one of the functions of a commercial building is to attract the attention of potential patrons, then I suppose Googieism can be seen as an expression, somewhat bent, of the first modernist credo, even though it’s not entirely within the modernist aesthetic.
I’d go so far as to say that placing as much or more emphasis on architectural effects to attract attention as on functionality of use is one of the primary distinctions between Moderne Modern, just as it was a major distinction between the somewhat eclectic classical revival theater designs of architects such as Thomas Lamb, and the purer classical revival designs of academic architects such as McKim, Mead, and White. It’s also one of the reasons why purist modern architects usually saw the moderne as an example of architectural backsliding, little better than the various revival styles, pure or not, that they wanted to displace.
But I’m sure architecture critics will be arguing about these distinctions for decades to come, so whatever descriptive terms eventually get adopted for these various styles are unlikely to be decided by me. I have fun blathering about it on the Internets, though.
Life Magazine photo of the Marquis, long after it had closed as a regular movie house and had become become the AMPAS Academy Award Theatre. This 1972 photo was taken only a few years before the buildng was demolished.
The Royal Theatre in Hanford was one of three houses taken over by Robert Lippert in 1942. Their former operator, Arthur Fukuda, closed them when, on March 27 that year, a curfew was imposed on Americans of Japanese ancestry.
The other Fukuda houses Lippert took over were in Sanger and in Guadalupe, California.
The Royal was one of three theaters taken over from Arthur Fukuda by Robert Lippert in April, 1942. Fukuda had closed his three houses when a dusk-to-dawn curfew had been imposed on Americans of Japanese ancestry on March 27 that year.
According to the March 18, 1949, issue of Boxoffice, Lippert had recently bought the Sanger Theatre, formerly operated by Frank Panero. Lippert continued to operate the Royal as well. The Sanger Theatre is not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.
The Southwest Builder and Contractor article I cited in my February 20, 2008, comment above was from May, 1938, but it appears that the construction of the Sierra Theatre was delayed for many years. The opening of the Sierra was announced in the August 17, 1946, issue of Boxoffice Magazine, which said the house had opened on August 6. The opening feature was “Canyon Passage.”
The article did say that completion of the project had been delayed due to shortages of materials, but it seems unlikely that such a delay would have lasted six years. Most likely, construction was not begun until near or shortly after the end of WWII.
The Boxoffice item also gives a much larger seating capacity- 894- than the Southwest Builder & Contractor article had. The theater obviously must have been redesigned between the original announcement and the actual construction.
The article adds that Frank Panero and his sons Ernest and August would continue to operate the Delano Theatre, as well. It also said that in addition to the Delano houses the Panero Theatre Company was then operating two houses in each of the valley towns of West Delano, Shafter, Reedley, and Wasco, and one house each in McFarland and Sanger.
I finally found some more information about the Tiffany. Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of November 7, 1966, said that Robert Lippert and Harold Goldman had opened their new Tiffany Theatre on November 2, with an invitational event that included the American premier of the Greek film “Young Aphrodites.” The architect was Jack Edwards. The stated seating capacity was 400.
The November 2 opening was somewhat later than the projected opening of late May, which had been announced in the April 11, 1966, issue of Boxoffice.
The Lynn and New Lynn Theaters were mentioned in the April 10, 1937, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. Apparently both theaters were in operation simultaneously for a time.
The Boxoffice item reads: “Ronald Vincent has changed the names of his two theatres at Laguna Beach, the Lynn being redubbed the Laguna and the New Lynn being called the Southcoast.”
The only mention of the Royal Theatre under that name that I can find in Boxoffice Magazine comes from the June 25, 1949, issue, which says that Robert L. Lippert had sold the house to Moses Hernandez.
But the April 22, 1942, issue of Boxoffice published an item that said that Robert Lippert was taking over three houses, owned by Arthur Fukuda, which had been closed because of the Japanese curfew. It named the three theaters as the Royal in Hanford, the Royal in Sanger, and the Guadalupe in Guadalupe. I think it’s possible (and even likely) that Boxoffice’s copy writer got the name of the Guadalupe house wrong (they did misspell Hanford as Handford) and that all three of Fukuda’s theaters were called the Royal.
It’s not surprising that a Japanese American would have owned these theaters. Many of the agricultural areas of California had substantial Japanese populations during that era, and American-born Japanese, unlike those who had immigrated, were not prohibited from owning real property. Perhaps Arthur Fukuda has descendants who can tell us something about the Royal Theatre.
The recent opening of the Art Cinema was the subject of a brief article in the January 25, 1965, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The building had housed Aber’s Music Store for the previous nine years, but prior to that it had been the Varsity Theatre, a Fox Intermountain house that had opened in 1941, itself apparently inserted into an existing retail building. According to the caption for this photo at the Boulder Public Library, the address was 1326 Pearl Street. The operators of the Art were a pair of exhibitors from Denver named Bill Ramsay and Dick Martin.
Boxoffice gave the original seating capacity of the Varsity as 650. The building in the photo looks too small to have contained so large a theater, but Google Maps satellite view shows that the back half of the building is twice as wide as the front, so maybe there were that many seats, if they were very close together. Still, I’d imagine that as the Art it had far fewer.
Judging from the satellite view, it seems possible that the building held a theater even before the Varsity was opened, and had perhaps already been converted to retail use once before. Boxoffice gives no information on this, though.
Unfortunately for Google Street View, Pearl Street has been converted to pedestrian use, and the Google camera truck was unable to get a current photo of the facade. There’s a Google Street view of the alley side of the building, though, and it features what look like a pair of small exit doors at each end such as a building built as a theater would have had.
CapnRob’s comment of January 5, 2009, on the Cinema Treasures Fox Theatre page has a bit more information about the Art and other Boulder houses, and is the source of the link to the Boulder Public Library photo above.
The December 21, 1964, issue of Boxoffice said that the Capri was in the old Uptown business district, across the street from an Uptown Shopping Center which was then under construction. It also said that the theater had long been “a bright spot” in the neighborhood, though it didn’t mention the house having had a previous name.
Hunt Theatre Enterprises intended to build their new Strand Theatre on the same site as their previous Strand, according to an item in Boxoffice Magazine of October 13, 1945. The architect’s rendering of the facade of the proposed house published in the magazine matches the photos linked above quite closely. The architect of the new Strand was William H. Lee, of Philadelphia.
Originally built for Metropolitan Theatres, the Larwin opened as a single screen house in late 1965, two years after the same circuit had opened the Simi Drive-In. The Larwin was the company’s first shopping center theater.
Plans to convert the Larwin into a twin were announced in the April 16, 1973, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. Work was to begin shortly, and Metropolitan’s head, Bruce Corwin, said the project was expected to be completed by mid-June. The conversion would give the Larwin auditoriums with 500 and 300 seats. The house had originally seated 850.
The Simi Drive-In was opened by Metropolitan Theatres in September, 1963. The announcement was published in the September 9 issue of Boxoffice Magazine.
The Fairmount was featured in an ad for the American Seating Company’s Bodiform Theatre Chairs in the June 19, 1948 issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The caption to the photo of the auditorium identified the architect of the theater as George H. Burrows, of Cleveland.
The Theatre Division of the F&Y Building Service apparently designed quite a few theaters in the Ohio Valley. I’ve only been able to find the names of a small handful of them so far, but the company ran an ad featuring the Geauga Theatre in the June 24, 1939, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. One line reads “Go see the Geauga or any of the many other F&Y designed and built theatres.”
The company was operating at least as late as 1959, headed by Leo Yassenoff. He was also interested in the Academy Theatres Circuit, later the Academy-Neff Circuit, run by Frank Yassenoff and then by Milton Yassenoff. It seems likely that theaters built for this circuit during the era would have been designed and built by the family company.
If the Geauga is typical of the quality of F&Y’s design, the company surely qualifies as a significant regional design firm.
The Geauga Theatre was the subject of an article in the June 24, 1939, issue of Boxoffice Magazine, a few months after it opened. The house was built for Mr. L.M. Smith, who was also the owner of the old Chardon Theatre. The design, construction, and outfitting of the Geauga Theatre were all handled by the F&Y Building Service of Columbus, Ohio.
The Art Moderne design featured such amenities as chrome and leatherette furniture in the lobby and rest rooms, velour wall panels in lobby and auditorium, and steel-backed theater seats upholstered in mohair and maroon leather. The exits flanking the stage were surmounted by velour panels featuring decorative oil paintings in black, white, and scarlet, lit by up-lights concealed in troughs.
The facade featured tangerine face brick and buff terra cotta and glass brick. The vestibule had terrazzo flooring. The entire house was air conditioned.
Patsy, there were at least five other walk-in theaters in Ocala, not including the current Regal Hollywood 16 and Ocala Center Six. Various issues of Boxoffice Magazine provide the following information.
The Dixie Theatre opened in 1923, closed about 1941, reopened in 1946. I don’t know how long it operated after that. It had about 400 seats.
The Ritz opened as the Etta Theatre about 1927, in a remodeled building that was formerly a garage. The name Ritz appears in Boxoffice as early as 1938. In 1957, when the street was widened and ten feet were taken off the front of the building, the Ritz got a $90,000 renovation and redecoration. One Boxoffice item said that the name of the Ritz would be changed to the Florida Theatre after the remodeling, but the only reference I can find to a Florida Theatre in Ocala comes from 1975. In fact I can’t find references to either the Ritz or the Florida between 1957 and 1975, so I don’t know of they are the same theater or not.
There was a theater called the Roxy which operated as a black-only house during the era when Ocala’s theaters were segregated. It was on West Broadway. I don’t have opening or closing dates, but it was in operation during at least part of the 1940s.
The Ocala Twin Theatre opened in December of 1971, in the Ocala Shopping Center. I have no details about it, but it might have (and most likely did) become the three-screener called the Ocala Triple Theatre that was closed in 1990 when the operator, Wometco, opened a new multiplex called the Boulevard Six in the same shopping center.
The Boulevard Six itself was later operated by Regal, then bought by SunStar Cinemas in 2001 and renamed the Ocala Center Six, which is now open again after having been shut down for 14 months when it was almost swallowed by a sinkhole in February, 2007.
A luxury house called the Springs was in operation in the 1970s. Originally a single-screen, it had a second auditorium of 350 seats added (new construction, not a split) in early 1975. It was on Silver Springs Boulevard. As the Springs Theatre was operated by ABC Florida State Theatres, it might have been (and probably was) the 900-seat house ABC got permission to build late in 1968.
There was also supposed to have been a second drive-in in or near Ocala, called the Skylark, under construction in June, 1952, and expected to open by mid-July that year.
Anybody who can come up with addresses for any or all of these theaters, please do add them to Cinema Treasures. The Regal and Ocala Center Six should be easy enough to add as their information is on the Internet, but as they are open it’s best of somebody who has actually seen them and can give descriptions adds them.
The Carver was opened in late 1949, according to various items in Boxoffice Magazine that year. The November 19 issue mistakenly stated the location as Ocala, Florida, but a correction was printed in the following issue. The Carver was built by a local celery grower named Charles T. Niblack, and was operated for him by Harry Gordon, formerly of Florida State Theatres.
Like many other southern theaters built for black patrons during the era of segregation, this house was named for African American scientist and inventor George Washington Carver.
I have noticed that the seating capacities Boxoffice gives are sometimes way off. They are probably the least reliable figures the magazine published. Sometimes a photo of an auditorium published with an article about a theater will show that there are obviously many fewer seats than the article itself claims there are. The magazine is very useful for such things as opening and closing dates, though, and a lot of other information.
If its Cinema Treasures page is correct, James Poro’s East Islip Theatre had already been open for a decade when he is supposed to have begun building the mystery theater in Islip itself. I can’t find any evidence that Poro’s theater on Main Street ever opened.
I’ve found that Boxoffice has quite a few misspellings and typos, and sometimes has dumb mistakes, such as items datelined to the wrong location (several instances of Lodi, California, for a Lodi Theatre in Lodi, Ohio, for example), but overall it is pretty reliable. Much of the content appears to have been compiled by the magazine’s copy editors from notes or press releases by theater owners themselves.
The editors probably worked in haste, and many of the notes were probably hand written, accounting for the frequent minor errors. Harry Hart was one of their regional corespondents, though, and did a regular column for a few years, often going out to interview people in the industry, as well as doing the same sort of compiling that the staffers in Hollywood probably did, but for territory with which he was personally familiar, so he was less likely than them to make mistakes. I think he was based in Charlotte.
The new Sun Theatre was opened on June 28, 1946, according to Boxoffice Magazine of July 13 that year. The item said that the new Sun replaced the old theater in Williamston, owned by the same operator, B.W. Montgomery.
The July 20 issue of Boxoffice said “Equipment from their old Sun Theatre was removed to the new house.” It sounds like the old theater might have continued operating up until the time the new one was completed, so would have had a different address.
The July 20 item names the owners as S.A. and R.J. Montgomery. I wonder what became of B.W. during that few weeks? The July 13, 1964, issue of Boxoffice mentions a Dick Montgomery being the operator of the Sun. They had an abundance of Montgomerys in Williamston, I guess.
The into definitely needs to be rewritten. It currently isn’t about the theater at all.
And while we’re at it, Modern or Mid-Century Modern (the latter more often referring to interior design, but increasingly used to describe buildings as well) should definitely be added to the choice of architectural styles available when submitting theaters to the site. The more issues of Boxoffice from the 1940s on I look at, full of photos of totally modern theater buildings, the more obvious it becomes to me that hundreds of theaters were built in purely modern styles. It doesn’t make sense to call them At Moderne, because most of them have left every trace of that style behind.
What we should call some of the recent multiplexes and megaplexes that borrow heavily from Art Deco and Art Modern, I don’t know. I guess Neo-Deco or Neo-Moderne might do, but I’ve come to think of them as Mannerist Moderne, since they usually have an exaggerated “referential” quality to their designs, characteristic of Mannerism.
But I don’t think any architecture critic has used that appellation.
In the 1970s, the late critic C. Ray Smith wrote a book called “Supermannerism,” which was mostly about architect Paul Rudolph, but the term appears never to have stuck as a stylistic appellation. I think he was on the right track, though. The works of more recent celebrity architects such as Michael Graves look Mannerist as hell to me.
I’ve searched all the usual sources and can’t find any references to either Roy Chase or R.E. Struve as architects, and few references to them of any sort. The California Index contains one card citing a 1928 L.A. Times article saying that R.E. Struve was financing the construction of a building at Encinitas, and there’s a PDF about the coast highway citing a couple of 1925 Oceanside Blade articles saying that Roy Chase had built a hotel there. As far as I’ve been able to discover, neither Chase nor Struve was an architect, but both were local developers.
Until some convincing evidence turns up, I’m inclined to say that the actual architect of this theater remains unknown.
The Art Deco designation at top is the another result of the confusion between the theater and the auditorium. The auditorium I’d consider Streamline Moderne with some lingering Art Deco elements, so I’d say it would be best classified as Art Moderne. The theater, on the other hand, was a fairly pure Midcentury Modern design, although those split, angled columns certainly have a Googiesque quality. However, this theater was built before there ever was a Googie’s coffee shop.
Some of the moderne and modernist buildings designed for theaters were probably among the inspirations for what became the Googie style. What many theater architects did in their designs was to use the building exterior itself as an advertisement, which is essentially what John Lautner did when he come up with the first Googie’s coffee shop design in 1949. I see Googie not so much a style of its own as I do a modernist-influenced extension of the whole theatrical approach to architecture as something to pull in the customers, which was done even with the earliest big movie houses built in the 1910s.
And if form follows function, and one of the functions of a commercial building is to attract the attention of potential patrons, then I suppose Googieism can be seen as an expression, somewhat bent, of the first modernist credo, even though it’s not entirely within the modernist aesthetic.
I’d go so far as to say that placing as much or more emphasis on architectural effects to attract attention as on functionality of use is one of the primary distinctions between Moderne Modern, just as it was a major distinction between the somewhat eclectic classical revival theater designs of architects such as Thomas Lamb, and the purer classical revival designs of academic architects such as McKim, Mead, and White. It’s also one of the reasons why purist modern architects usually saw the moderne as an example of architectural backsliding, little better than the various revival styles, pure or not, that they wanted to displace.
But I’m sure architecture critics will be arguing about these distinctions for decades to come, so whatever descriptive terms eventually get adopted for these various styles are unlikely to be decided by me. I have fun blathering about it on the Internets, though.
Life Magazine photo of the Marquis, long after it had closed as a regular movie house and had become become the AMPAS Academy Award Theatre. This 1972 photo was taken only a few years before the buildng was demolished.
The Royal Theatre in Hanford was one of three houses taken over by Robert Lippert in 1942. Their former operator, Arthur Fukuda, closed them when, on March 27 that year, a curfew was imposed on Americans of Japanese ancestry.
The other Fukuda houses Lippert took over were in Sanger and in Guadalupe, California.
The Royal was one of three theaters taken over from Arthur Fukuda by Robert Lippert in April, 1942. Fukuda had closed his three houses when a dusk-to-dawn curfew had been imposed on Americans of Japanese ancestry on March 27 that year.
According to the March 18, 1949, issue of Boxoffice, Lippert had recently bought the Sanger Theatre, formerly operated by Frank Panero. Lippert continued to operate the Royal as well. The Sanger Theatre is not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.
The Southwest Builder and Contractor article I cited in my February 20, 2008, comment above was from May, 1938, but it appears that the construction of the Sierra Theatre was delayed for many years. The opening of the Sierra was announced in the August 17, 1946, issue of Boxoffice Magazine, which said the house had opened on August 6. The opening feature was “Canyon Passage.”
The article did say that completion of the project had been delayed due to shortages of materials, but it seems unlikely that such a delay would have lasted six years. Most likely, construction was not begun until near or shortly after the end of WWII.
The Boxoffice item also gives a much larger seating capacity- 894- than the Southwest Builder & Contractor article had. The theater obviously must have been redesigned between the original announcement and the actual construction.
The article adds that Frank Panero and his sons Ernest and August would continue to operate the Delano Theatre, as well. It also said that in addition to the Delano houses the Panero Theatre Company was then operating two houses in each of the valley towns of West Delano, Shafter, Reedley, and Wasco, and one house each in McFarland and Sanger.
I finally found some more information about the Tiffany. Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of November 7, 1966, said that Robert Lippert and Harold Goldman had opened their new Tiffany Theatre on November 2, with an invitational event that included the American premier of the Greek film “Young Aphrodites.” The architect was Jack Edwards. The stated seating capacity was 400.
The November 2 opening was somewhat later than the projected opening of late May, which had been announced in the April 11, 1966, issue of Boxoffice.
The Lynn and New Lynn Theaters were mentioned in the April 10, 1937, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. Apparently both theaters were in operation simultaneously for a time.
The Boxoffice item reads: “Ronald Vincent has changed the names of his two theatres at Laguna Beach, the Lynn being redubbed the Laguna and the New Lynn being called the Southcoast.”
The only mention of the Royal Theatre under that name that I can find in Boxoffice Magazine comes from the June 25, 1949, issue, which says that Robert L. Lippert had sold the house to Moses Hernandez.
But the April 22, 1942, issue of Boxoffice published an item that said that Robert Lippert was taking over three houses, owned by Arthur Fukuda, which had been closed because of the Japanese curfew. It named the three theaters as the Royal in Hanford, the Royal in Sanger, and the Guadalupe in Guadalupe. I think it’s possible (and even likely) that Boxoffice’s copy writer got the name of the Guadalupe house wrong (they did misspell Hanford as Handford) and that all three of Fukuda’s theaters were called the Royal.
It’s not surprising that a Japanese American would have owned these theaters. Many of the agricultural areas of California had substantial Japanese populations during that era, and American-born Japanese, unlike those who had immigrated, were not prohibited from owning real property. Perhaps Arthur Fukuda has descendants who can tell us something about the Royal Theatre.
Thanks for the photo links, CapnRob. They do help clear things up.
The recent opening of the Art Cinema was the subject of a brief article in the January 25, 1965, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The building had housed Aber’s Music Store for the previous nine years, but prior to that it had been the Varsity Theatre, a Fox Intermountain house that had opened in 1941, itself apparently inserted into an existing retail building. According to the caption for this photo at the Boulder Public Library, the address was 1326 Pearl Street. The operators of the Art were a pair of exhibitors from Denver named Bill Ramsay and Dick Martin.
Boxoffice gave the original seating capacity of the Varsity as 650. The building in the photo looks too small to have contained so large a theater, but Google Maps satellite view shows that the back half of the building is twice as wide as the front, so maybe there were that many seats, if they were very close together. Still, I’d imagine that as the Art it had far fewer.
Judging from the satellite view, it seems possible that the building held a theater even before the Varsity was opened, and had perhaps already been converted to retail use once before. Boxoffice gives no information on this, though.
Unfortunately for Google Street View, Pearl Street has been converted to pedestrian use, and the Google camera truck was unable to get a current photo of the facade. There’s a Google Street view of the alley side of the building, though, and it features what look like a pair of small exit doors at each end such as a building built as a theater would have had.
CapnRob’s comment of January 5, 2009, on the Cinema Treasures Fox Theatre page has a bit more information about the Art and other Boulder houses, and is the source of the link to the Boulder Public Library photo above.
The December 21, 1964, issue of Boxoffice said that the Capri was in the old Uptown business district, across the street from an Uptown Shopping Center which was then under construction. It also said that the theater had long been “a bright spot” in the neighborhood, though it didn’t mention the house having had a previous name.
Hunt Theatre Enterprises intended to build their new Strand Theatre on the same site as their previous Strand, according to an item in Boxoffice Magazine of October 13, 1945. The architect’s rendering of the facade of the proposed house published in the magazine matches the photos linked above quite closely. The architect of the new Strand was William H. Lee, of Philadelphia.
Originally built for Metropolitan Theatres, the Larwin opened as a single screen house in late 1965, two years after the same circuit had opened the Simi Drive-In. The Larwin was the company’s first shopping center theater.
Plans to convert the Larwin into a twin were announced in the April 16, 1973, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. Work was to begin shortly, and Metropolitan’s head, Bruce Corwin, said the project was expected to be completed by mid-June. The conversion would give the Larwin auditoriums with 500 and 300 seats. The house had originally seated 850.
The Simi Drive-In was opened by Metropolitan Theatres in September, 1963. The announcement was published in the September 9 issue of Boxoffice Magazine.
The Fairmount was featured in an ad for the American Seating Company’s Bodiform Theatre Chairs in the June 19, 1948 issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The caption to the photo of the auditorium identified the architect of the theater as George H. Burrows, of Cleveland.
The Theatre Division of the F&Y Building Service apparently designed quite a few theaters in the Ohio Valley. I’ve only been able to find the names of a small handful of them so far, but the company ran an ad featuring the Geauga Theatre in the June 24, 1939, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. One line reads “Go see the Geauga or any of the many other F&Y designed and built theatres.”
The company was operating at least as late as 1959, headed by Leo Yassenoff. He was also interested in the Academy Theatres Circuit, later the Academy-Neff Circuit, run by Frank Yassenoff and then by Milton Yassenoff. It seems likely that theaters built for this circuit during the era would have been designed and built by the family company.
If the Geauga is typical of the quality of F&Y’s design, the company surely qualifies as a significant regional design firm.
The Geauga Theatre was the subject of an article in the June 24, 1939, issue of Boxoffice Magazine, a few months after it opened. The house was built for Mr. L.M. Smith, who was also the owner of the old Chardon Theatre. The design, construction, and outfitting of the Geauga Theatre were all handled by the F&Y Building Service of Columbus, Ohio.
The Art Moderne design featured such amenities as chrome and leatherette furniture in the lobby and rest rooms, velour wall panels in lobby and auditorium, and steel-backed theater seats upholstered in mohair and maroon leather. The exits flanking the stage were surmounted by velour panels featuring decorative oil paintings in black, white, and scarlet, lit by up-lights concealed in troughs.
The facade featured tangerine face brick and buff terra cotta and glass brick. The vestibule had terrazzo flooring. The entire house was air conditioned.
Patsy, there were at least five other walk-in theaters in Ocala, not including the current Regal Hollywood 16 and Ocala Center Six. Various issues of Boxoffice Magazine provide the following information.
The Dixie Theatre opened in 1923, closed about 1941, reopened in 1946. I don’t know how long it operated after that. It had about 400 seats.
The Ritz opened as the Etta Theatre about 1927, in a remodeled building that was formerly a garage. The name Ritz appears in Boxoffice as early as 1938. In 1957, when the street was widened and ten feet were taken off the front of the building, the Ritz got a $90,000 renovation and redecoration. One Boxoffice item said that the name of the Ritz would be changed to the Florida Theatre after the remodeling, but the only reference I can find to a Florida Theatre in Ocala comes from 1975. In fact I can’t find references to either the Ritz or the Florida between 1957 and 1975, so I don’t know of they are the same theater or not.
There was a theater called the Roxy which operated as a black-only house during the era when Ocala’s theaters were segregated. It was on West Broadway. I don’t have opening or closing dates, but it was in operation during at least part of the 1940s.
The Ocala Twin Theatre opened in December of 1971, in the Ocala Shopping Center. I have no details about it, but it might have (and most likely did) become the three-screener called the Ocala Triple Theatre that was closed in 1990 when the operator, Wometco, opened a new multiplex called the Boulevard Six in the same shopping center.
The Boulevard Six itself was later operated by Regal, then bought by SunStar Cinemas in 2001 and renamed the Ocala Center Six, which is now open again after having been shut down for 14 months when it was almost swallowed by a sinkhole in February, 2007.
A luxury house called the Springs was in operation in the 1970s. Originally a single-screen, it had a second auditorium of 350 seats added (new construction, not a split) in early 1975. It was on Silver Springs Boulevard. As the Springs Theatre was operated by ABC Florida State Theatres, it might have been (and probably was) the 900-seat house ABC got permission to build late in 1968.
There was also supposed to have been a second drive-in in or near Ocala, called the Skylark, under construction in June, 1952, and expected to open by mid-July that year.
Anybody who can come up with addresses for any or all of these theaters, please do add them to Cinema Treasures. The Regal and Ocala Center Six should be easy enough to add as their information is on the Internet, but as they are open it’s best of somebody who has actually seen them and can give descriptions adds them.
The Carver was opened in late 1949, according to various items in Boxoffice Magazine that year. The November 19 issue mistakenly stated the location as Ocala, Florida, but a correction was printed in the following issue. The Carver was built by a local celery grower named Charles T. Niblack, and was operated for him by Harry Gordon, formerly of Florida State Theatres.
Like many other southern theaters built for black patrons during the era of segregation, this house was named for African American scientist and inventor George Washington Carver.
I have noticed that the seating capacities Boxoffice gives are sometimes way off. They are probably the least reliable figures the magazine published. Sometimes a photo of an auditorium published with an article about a theater will show that there are obviously many fewer seats than the article itself claims there are. The magazine is very useful for such things as opening and closing dates, though, and a lot of other information.
If its Cinema Treasures page is correct, James Poro’s East Islip Theatre had already been open for a decade when he is supposed to have begun building the mystery theater in Islip itself. I can’t find any evidence that Poro’s theater on Main Street ever opened.
I’ve found that Boxoffice has quite a few misspellings and typos, and sometimes has dumb mistakes, such as items datelined to the wrong location (several instances of Lodi, California, for a Lodi Theatre in Lodi, Ohio, for example), but overall it is pretty reliable. Much of the content appears to have been compiled by the magazine’s copy editors from notes or press releases by theater owners themselves.
The editors probably worked in haste, and many of the notes were probably hand written, accounting for the frequent minor errors. Harry Hart was one of their regional corespondents, though, and did a regular column for a few years, often going out to interview people in the industry, as well as doing the same sort of compiling that the staffers in Hollywood probably did, but for territory with which he was personally familiar, so he was less likely than them to make mistakes. I think he was based in Charlotte.
The new Sun Theatre was opened on June 28, 1946, according to Boxoffice Magazine of July 13 that year. The item said that the new Sun replaced the old theater in Williamston, owned by the same operator, B.W. Montgomery.
The July 20 issue of Boxoffice said “Equipment from their old Sun Theatre was removed to the new house.” It sounds like the old theater might have continued operating up until the time the new one was completed, so would have had a different address.
The July 20 item names the owners as S.A. and R.J. Montgomery. I wonder what became of B.W. during that few weeks? The July 13, 1964, issue of Boxoffice mentions a Dick Montgomery being the operator of the Sun. They had an abundance of Montgomerys in Williamston, I guess.