RKO Albee Theatre
12 E. 5th Street,
Cincinnati,
OH
45202
12 E. 5th Street,
Cincinnati,
OH
45202
5 people
favorited this theater
Additional Info
Previously operated by: RKO, Stanley-Warner Theatres
Architects: Thomas White Lamb
Styles: French Renaissance
Previous Names: E.F. Albee Photoplays Theatre
Nearby Theaters
At a cost of $4 million, the 3,500-seat E.F. Albee Photoplays Theatre was considered Cincinnati’s finest movie palace. Opened on December 24, 1927 with Clara Bow in “Get Your Man” plus 5-acts of vaudeville on the stage. This Thomas W. Lamb designed palace was named after its builder, E. F. Albee, noted vaudeville theatre owner and a relative of famous playwright Edward Albee. The exterior facade was almost identical to the Thomas W. Lamb designed Empire Theatre, London, England which opened in November 1928. The E.F. Albee Photo Plays Theatre was equipped with a Wurlitzer 3 manual 19ranks organ with the console located on the left hand side of the orchestra pit. It was opened by organist Hy C. Geis The E.F. Albee Theatre was taken over by RKO in 1930.
Until 1960, the theatre booked stage show acts in addition to showing movies. Another source says the stage shows stopped as early as 1957. In the late-1960’s RKO donated the Wurlitzer organ to the Emory Auditorium of the Ohio Mechanics Institute. In late-1999 it was removed and put into storage. It was restored in 2007 and installed in the ballroom of the Music Hall. RKO closed the Albee Theatre on September 17, 1974 with Angie Dickinson in “Big Bad Mama. It stood boarded up until demolition which began on March 9, 1977 and was completed in December 1977.
The Westin Hotel was constructed in its place. Some portions of the theatre were saved and are now located in other buildings including Music Hall and the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.
The facade was one of the saved sections of the building and now sits on the 5th Street side of the Albert B. Sabin Convention Center – about 3 blocks from where the original theater once stood.
Contributed by
Ray Martinez, Anna Horton, John Ryan
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Recent comments (view all 53 comments)
when I would visit relatives in Cincinnati as a youngster from Chicago in the 50’s, there was definitely de facto segregation in public places, like movie theaters and the Coney Island amusement park.
No surprises here. In his autobiography, the comedian Dick Gregory wrote about having to sit in the segregated balcony of a Carbondale Illinois movie theater. Illinois and Ohio did not have Jim Crow laws on the books, but they existed in unofficial practice,nonetheless.
All 8 of our RKO first run houses downtown escaped the water damage from Ohio’s 1937 flood as they were all above the waters peak by 69 feet.
CORRECTION: the above states that “The facade was also later duplicated on the 5th Street side of the Albert B. Sabin Convention Center — about 3 blocks from where the original theater once stood.” My father worked in Urban Renewal and I clearly remember when the Convention Center was built and the Albee town down. The Albee theatre facade was NOT DUPLICATED, it is the ORIGINAL facade that was saved and placed on one of the Convention Center’s entrances. Yes, the Albee facade was saved!!!
Removal of the splendid Albee Theatre on fifth street was Cincinnati’s most stupid theater loss.
December 24th, 1927 grand opening ad in photo section
That roof sign atop this venue only lasted 3 years until RKO took over!!!
October 1962 marquee photo added courtesy of Rose Taylor. JFK attended the groundbreaking of the Federal Building at 5th & Walnut.
Here is Melissa Kramer’s March 4, 2010 article on the Albee.
http://melissakramerscincinnati.com/?page_id=151
Closed by RKO with “Big Bad Mama” on September 17, 1974 and was boarded up. demolition began March 9, 1977 and took more than eight months to complete due to how well constructed the building was.
From The Vault: Grand Albee Theater was a downtown treasure for 50 years (by Greg Noble, Feb 25, 2016) For all of Cincinnati’s architectural treasures – Music Hall and Union Terminal included – the Albee Theater may have been the grandest.
Karl Topie, retired cellist with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was on the Albee stage when it opened on Christmas Eve, 1927. And he was there for the liquidation sale 50 years later, before the wrecker’s ball turned it into dust.
“It’s terrible to see it go,” he said. “It’s the most beautiful theater ever built.”
That’s what the original owners called it: the most magnificent theater in the world. It was certainly as opulent as any.
Outside, beckoning visitors through its double brass doors, was a majestic, two-story marble façade. Younger generations don’t have to imagine how that looked. Many see it whenever they come downtown, hanging on the Duke Energy Convention Center, at the side entrance at Fifth and Plum.
The five-story main lobby had lavish white Vermont marble walls, two grand marble staircases, six etched-border mirrors and a two-story stained-glass window. The three-story grand lobby was lit by nine brass and crystal chandeliers.
The ceilings were decorated with lavish rococo plasterwork accented in gold. Bet your home doesn’t have that.
The five-story, 4,000-seat auditorium had a proscenium arch, Corinthian columns and red swag drapery.
It was a theater fit for a king and it cost a king’s ransom - $4 million. Besides being one of the largest moving picture houses in the world, it had a full stage for live entertainment and hosted such greats as Fred Astaire, Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason and Ben Burnie, a renowned jazz violinist and bandleader.
Besides the façade, other theater treasures were also preserved. The Wurlitzer organ was moved to the Emery Theater on Walnut Street, then to the Music Hall Ballroom. Other pieces went to Music Hall, too. The brass doors went to the Ohio Theater in Columbus, along with some ornate, wrought-iron benches with red-velvet seats and even a porcelain drinking fountain. Nostalgic theater lovers took home hundreds of seats for $15 to $20 apiece or bought prisms from the chandeliers for $10 each.
While Columbus preservationists won their battle to save the Ohio Theater from downtown redevelopment, a handful of Cincinnatians who formed a group called Save The Albee could not.
The head of that group, Frances Vitali, operated a laundry in Corryville with her husband. The first threat came in 1972 when a Dallas group announced plans to buy the property at Fifth and Vine and build a 50-story office building and shopping arcade. Fearing that the tower would block out the sun – or at least keep Fountain Square in the dark much of the day – Vitali and others pulled together and rebuffed the threat.
But City Hall, city planners and developers were determined to rebuild the area around Fountain Square into a Central Business District. Other downtown theaters had already closed, unable to compete with the multiplex movie theaters springing up in the suburbs. The Albee’s days were numbered.
Vitali made a final appeal. She proposed a “Theater on the Square” concept open all year for the opera, ballet, touring shows, school graduations and youth programs.
“I see its value for bringing life back to the square,” she said, and at the time, the square needed it. “I’m only working on this because I think of the youth of tomorrow.”
But Vitali couldn’t block progress – or the bulldozers. In 1976, city council voted to tear down Fifth Street between Vine and Walnut for the Westin Hotel and Fountain Square South project.
The Albee was demolished in March, 1977 and that would be the end of the story, except for the marble façade. The city, which bought the building for $2 million so it could tear it down, didn’t have a use for the façade, and nobody else wanted it. So the city took it apart and stuck it away in storage for three years.
When the three-year contract was up, the city moved it to a highway maintenance lot under the Brent Spence Bridge in Queensgate. Six years passed, and the facade was no worse for no wear. It finally found a home at the Convention Center in 1986, soon to be joined by the Union Terminal murals getting evicted from CVG.