Gem Theatre
160 South State Street,
Salt Lake City,
UT
84111
160 South State Street,
Salt Lake City,
UT
84111
3 people
favorited this theater
The Gem Theatre in downtown Salt Lake City, was built in 1911 as the Liberty Theatre.
Contributed by
Grant Smith
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Recent comments (view all 17 comments)
This was one of the most beautiful small theaters I ever saw.They managed to stuff a lot of features into a small house.
Two vintage photos of the Gem Theater are here.
The marquee shot of The Valient and Sword of the COnqueror would be circa 1962; the IMDB date for both films. Useless but interesting information. j
It appears the Gem Theatre was part of a small chain of 14 theatres scattered thru out Utah. They were all under the name of GEM. I wonder if a Gem Theatre still operates today??
Here is a photo of the Liberty Theater at 162 South State Street. Date given for photo is March 15, 1912. Was it named the Liberty Theater because of the figure of the Statue of Liberty mounted on the facade?
This was the Liberty in 1916.
It was a real GEM of a theatre.
I was noticing the pagoda-like boxoffice in that 1912 photo. It’s an interesting bit of Chinoiserie set amid the European classical details of the facade. It looks like there might have been some Art Nouveau stained glass in the arch, the doors, and the upper floor windows as well. I wonder if there are any surviving photos of the interior?
By the sixties it was showing Grade C films.“REFORM SCHOOL GIRLS” and “DRAGSTRIP GIRL” were playing together on Oct.2 1959.
The Salt Lake Tribune on August 4, 1951 said that Consolidated Theatres had recently purchased the Gem for $100,000 from W.E. Shipley, who had owned it for more than 25 years. Architect Slack Winburn was hired to redesign the Gem. Consolidated Theatres was a branch of Intermountain Theatres (not to be confused with Fox Intermountain), which operated the Capitol, Utah and Centre theaters. Consolidated’s second run theaters in Salt Lake were the Gem, Crest, Halladay, Cinema Art, Auditorium, and the Redwood and Hyland drive-ins. For marketing purposes their newspaper ads were kept under separate banners so the general public probably didn’t know the relationship. A 1929 Tribune article said William Fox of Fox Theatres had once owned Consolidated Theatres, but this was before Fox’s bankruptcy.