Capitol Theatre
1 E. 7th Street,
Cincinnati,
OH
45202
1 E. 7th Street,
Cincinnati,
OH
45202
2 people
favorited this theater
Opened in 1921, this old movie palace later became a Cinerama theater, closed in 1967 and was torn down in 1970 to make way for a parking lot and office development.
Contributed by
Lowell Koger, Anna Horton, Ray Martinez
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Recent comments (view all 17 comments)
Sorry about the egregious spelling. I hit submit instead of preview.
hi Scott to answer your question of April 5,2005 the Capitol Th. in Cinnati was located at the corner of 7th and Vine Street, the northeast corner which is today a parking lot.
The ,“Capitol Th.”, was built in 1921 by the Wurlitzer family of organ fame on land owned by the Provident Bank. In later years that land was purchased by Barney Kroger founder of the present Grocery Empire. The Capitol Th. was leased to the Asher Brothers of Chicago who ran it for a few years until R.K.O. bought it from the Libson chain of theaters.The interior house had an orchestra pit and two small prologue stages for early silent movie entertainment purposes.The Capitol was a Cinerama house in its final stage and remained in superb condition until it was demolished.
Here is a photo, circa 1940:
http://tinyurl.com/acc6sw
Sadly the former site of the Capitol theater remains a parking lot since 1976. This means there aren’t any downtown movie theaters for urban residents to enjoy, unless you count the movies which are shown on a huge video screen on Fountain Square and these usually fall into the classic catagory.
Film Daily of 1927 lists this cinema as having 1,200 seats.
I saw my first Cinerama films at the Capitol, “How the West Was Won” Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm" and “The Best of Cinerama” in three strip. The last film I saw there was the 70mm Cinerama film of “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World” Had the pleasure of being shown the projection booths and the separate sound player up in the old projection room. I believe the manager was named Beman Richey, and he invited me into the Cincinnati home movie club.
My parents took me to see “Ben Hur” a dozen times first run at the Capitol. No one has pictures of the inside of the place? No one?
The Cincinnati Enquirer did an article Nov. 13 of last year entitled “Taft theater sole survivor of bygone era. In that article, they included a set of photos which showed many of that cities old palaces, including this one. Also, you can get a good idea of what the exterior of the Capitol looked like, by viewing the South Bend, Ind. State theater, here on Cinema Treasures. The 2 are so similar,they could almost be twins. I Accessed the article by using Cincinnati.com, and then typed in Keith Albee theater in the site’s search engine. If it works o.k., you should find a nice set of historical shots of a number of this city’s lost movie palaces. Happy New Year! == Sam ==
The architect of the Capitol theater may have been Henry Newhouse of Chicago, as he designed the South Bend State (orig. Blackstone) theater.You can see some period and current photos of the State theater at :dtsbpitch.com