Loew's Theatre
125 North Main Street,
Dayton,
OH
45402
125 North Main Street,
Dayton,
OH
45402
2 people
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Schenck & Williams designed the Dayton Theatre in a restrained Beaux Arts style, as can be seen from the photographs here, in the August, 1920, issue of the professional journal Architecture. There’s also a floor plan. Scroll down to see a page with four interior photos.
The Internet Archive reader displays the photos as they were published, so some face sideways on the monitor, and there’s no mechanism for turning them right side up. Fortunately, they can be downloaded. Resize the pages using the + sign in the toolbar at lower right, then right click and save as usual. Any decent image viewer program should be able to rotate them. I’d recommend IrfanView for anyone who doesn’t have it. It’s free, and fairly easy to use.
Here’s an item from the trade journal The Ohio Architect, Engineer and Builder, issue of February 6, 1917. Datelined Dayton, it probably refers to this theater:
Taking more than a year to get a theater built in this period would have been unusual, except in 1917-1918, when the entry of the United States into the WWI led to some disruptions in both the labor market and the supply of building materials, especially in the industrial areas of the northeast.Schenck & Williams (Harry I. Schenck and Harry J. Williams) was one of Dayton’s leading architectural firms during the 1910s and 1920s. I haven’t found any other theaters attributed to them, but they designed many other major projects.
The orginal marquee looked very much like the LOEWS PALACE in Washington,D.C.
Photo of the Loew’s Theatre.
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Great picture posted by Zack. The marquee looked great, different from most Loews marquees.
Carl Rogers was manager from 1951 to 1970 and a fantastic celebration/promotion of the 50th anniversary in 1968.
@Chuck1231 I think this is the link you meant to post:
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1967 photo of the Loew’s Theatre.
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I probably saw more movies at this theater when I was growing up than in any other theater in Dayton. It was a very large theater with a large lobby and a huge marquee. WING radio used to do a noontime man-on-the-street broadcast each weekday here. The James Bond movies used to be exclusive here as were most of the MGM films. The Victory across the street got the Disney movies. Everything else seemed to go to the RKO Colonial, RKO Keith, and RKO State.
This is another case of “r” before “e” in the ending to the “t” word: Loew’s Theatre (not Loew’s Theater). Please see documentation to “small photo” link posted above today at 9:40am for proof of this.
How about a larger photo of the Loew’s Dayton Theater.
A small photo of the Loew’s Theater can be seen on this website.
A Moller theater organ opus 2089 was installed in a Majestic (Loew’s Theater) in Dayton, Ohio in 1916. Was this theater known as the Majestic Theater before becoming the Loew’s Theater?
It was a fabulous looking theater inside and had a very large screen. I remember as a kid sneaking into the balcony from the fire escape stairs in the alley next to Rike’s Dept Store to see The 10 Commandments – oh yeah, I was playing hookey from school and needed to dodge the cops on the street cause I was scared of being caunt truant. I sat through an entire showing of that movie and in the following years saw many of the big hollywood movies there. It finally went down to be come a small vacant parking lot!