Dreamland Theatre
Ninth Street and Broad Street,
Augusta,
GA
30901
Ninth Street and Broad Street,
Augusta,
GA
30901
1 person
favorited this theater
Augusta’s Dreamland Theatre was sorta like a step-child. Not as jazzy as the Imperial Theatre or Miller Theatre. In fact, to look at it with the Dreamland marquee…very plain. It could pass for a drug store or clothing store. Nonetheless it was one of Augusta’s first theatres showing one and two reelers.
The vertical lettering of Dreamland Theatre was above the marquee with one-sheet standees on the side walk showing folks who were walking Broad Street what was playing. Along with the Modjeska Theatre it lacked the big movie experience playing a lot of B-movies while the Imperial Theatre and Miller Theatre would show the bigger epics.
In the early-1940’s, the Dreamland Theatre theatre was operated by Paramount Pictures Inc., throught their subsidiary Lucas & Jenkins. The Dreamland Theatre held a lot of memories for many young boys. Projectionist Albert Peters remembered in a 1974 conversation with me, "like so many youngsters we enjoyed the Dreamland Theatre and Lakeview Theatre, and sadly both are long gone."
Yep, Mr. Pete, all my theatres in Augusta that I have great memories of are gone. Long gone!
Contributed by
Mike Rogers
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Recent comments (view all 47 comments)
According to “Entertainment in Augusta,” the address of the Dreamland Theatre was 879 Broad Street. That address is currently listed on the Internet as the location of Wheels Corner Pub, a bicycle-themed bar. There’s a mural featuring bicycles on the 9th Street side of the building.
I found the correct location, but only after I had updated Street View to the wrong corner. Now the Update button will have to be reset.
Thanks for fixing my mistake in updating Street View. So far, this is the only one I’ve updated to the wrong location, but it was still a dumb move.
I found a second mention of the Superba Theatre in The Moving Picture World, this from the issue of September 19, 1908:
I’ve found a couple of references to Frank and Hubert Bandy, as operators of the Liberty Theatre in Savannah and the Lyric Theatre in Macon. Presumably the Mr. Bandy operating the Superba was one or the other of them.Thanks Joe.
When I was growing up in Augusta in the 1940s, it was my dad who told me that the burned out empty shell at the corner of 9th and Broad had been a theater, long before my time (b. 1941). For as long as I can remember, into the ‘50s at least and maybe into the '60s as well, those empty walls stood there, on the same side of Broad as Bowen Bros. hardware in the next block.
I remember other aspects of an earlier time in Augusta, for example, the streetcar tracks that ran in the middle of Broad St. and along 13th to Walton Way and up the Hill, past the Arsenal and onto Monte Sano Ave. (no rails there, but the scars in the brick, at that time, paving showed where they had run). The streetcars last ran in Augusta in 1937, so I never saw them, but I lived in New Orleans in the mid-‘50s and rode them there many times. I think that all evidence of the streetcar system has now been erased or covered over in Augusta.
I remember those street car tracks, too.(born 1940). My church had a retired one which was used as a Sunday school room.
That Sunday School must have been an “electrifying” experience! (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Where was this church located? There were a couple of other retired trolley cars I remember, one used as a diner and the other at a private club outside of town. I think that the only car to survive today is in the Augusta Museum; it’s been heavily (and inauthentically) restored, of a type known to us trolley nuts as a single-truck Birney car.
The car was at the Crawford Ave. Baptist Church off of Broad St. in the Harrisburg mill section of town. If I remember correctly the Augusta transit system was run at that time by Georgia Power Co. with garages on 15th St. near the canal. At some point it was taken over by Augusta Coach Co. My grandfather told me that much of the streetcar tracks were taken up and scrapped for WW2 production.
Aha, yes, I know where that is. Harrisburg GA not PA! There were trolley tracks still in upper Broad St. in that section of town, and all the way almost to Milledge Rd. at Lake Olmstead Park, where they turned into the curbing and disappeared. And yes, Georgia Power did run the bus system after the streetcars went out, and the garage was located as you said, near the head of Greene St. and the Archibald Butt Memorial Bridge. When I got a little older, but still a young lad, I would ride those busses on the Walton Way route from the Hill to the Broad St. business district to go to the Miller on Saturdays. And I used to pass by the bus garage when I rode with my grandparents in their ‘41 Ford Super Deluxe V8 coupe to take my Grandpa to work on Reynolds St. He was the bookkeeper for a cotton factor. I remember the cotton bales lining the curb on Reynolds in those years (late '40s-early '50s). (My g-parents lived at 2504 Helen St., which was unpaved then; their house stood where the Methodist Church parking lot is today, across the street from St. Mary’s-on-the-Hill school.) BTW, I can’t believe how Greene St. is messed up today with that dumb expressway!
It was great growing up in Augusta during the forties and fifties and I can remember in extreme detail much of it, but can hardly remember now what I am going into the next room for!