Dade Theatre
1657 NW 36th Street,
Miami,
FL
33142
1657 NW 36th Street,
Miami,
FL
33142
1 person
favorited this theater
Additional Info
Previously operated by: Paramount Pictures Inc.
Styles: Streamline Moderne
Nearby Theaters
The Dade Theatre opened on November 28, 1940 with Gene Autry in “Melody Ranch”. It was operated by Paramount Pictures Inc. through their subsidiary S.A. Lynch. It was closed in 1954 and was demolished in 1955.
Contributed by
Louis of Pompano Beach
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Recent comments (view all 24 comments)
I’m pretty sure it did. As I said, I won a Halloween costume contest there so we must have been up high enough for people to see us. But, since I was only six or so at the time, I could be mistaken.
This theatre appears in the Miami Herald ads from 1940 to 1955.
Wow, who got the pic? AWESOME!!!!!
Who was the architect and in what style was the Dade Theatre designed? When did it close and when was it demolished?
Why are all of these other theaters discussed here? The topic here is the Dade Theatre. Please, these other theaters have their own pages!
I haven’t been able to discover the architect of the Dade Theatre, but according to the January 3, 1941, issue of The Film Daily the contractors were the A. G. Witters Company. The Internet says there is still a Witters Construction Company operating in Hialeah, but I can’t find a web site for it. I don’t know if it’s the same company, but even if it is it seems unlikely they’d still have the records of a project built 75 years ago.
As for the style, from the one photo we have it appears to have been the basic Streamline Modern typical of most of the theaters built in 1940.
The Dade was in operation at least as late as 1954, when the October 2 issue of Boxoffice reported that it was getting a new manager, Allen Armstrong, formerly of the San Marco Theatre in Jacksonville. However, the house didn’t last much longer. The May 28, 1955, issue of Boxoffice reported that the Dade Theatre was being razed and would be replaced by a store and office building. The replacement building has apparently been demolished as well, and replaced by an apartment house called Friendship Tower.
TheAlan,
Those comments were never posted on this page. I think that when they re-designed the site, some of the comments were mixed during the upload. The comments you see under the Strand theatre were posted there. I was just perusing the Strand due to a new comment, and saw that the Dade had a lot more comments than the last time I visited the site, I was surprised to see that they are comments which were originally made under the Strand. Glitch I guess.
Ref: Joe Vogel’s comment on April 3, 2015
Thanks for your search Joe! Sorry it took so long for my response.
The Dade theatre opened with “Melody Ranch” on November 28th, 1940. Grand opening ad posted.
Just for the heck of it, I’d like to posit that the Dade wasn’t actually demolished: If you look up the address on Google Street View and tilt it to the 3D view, you’ll see that the store-fixture business now at the above address has a bump-up a few yards back from the sidewalk, making it tall enough to have been a movie theater. The general architecture of the entire block–which appears to have been built as a single project–is very consistent with the streamline-moderne style popular in 1940 when the Dade was built (check out the curved corners). The taller volume at the back of the block–which is also part of the fixture business–looks even more consistent with movie-theater massing of that era, with a few windows added later, but I’ll concede that if that was indeed the auditorium, the lobby would have been ridiculously long.