Criterion Theater
118 W. Main Street,
Oklahoma City,
OK
73102
118 W. Main Street,
Oklahoma City,
OK
73102
2 people
favorited this theater
The Criterion Theatre had a lovely 3 manual, 16 rank Wurlitzer theatre pipe organ. In 1972 the organ was sold to organ man Paul Haggard who kept it running until 1974, when he installed it in a nice French restaurant named ‘The Showplace’ on the sixth floor of the Meridian Tower on South Meridian Street, Oklahoma City. It was a nice idea, but the sound of the instrument at its softest was too loud for conversation and the restaurant closed, and the organ was sold and enlarged by a pizza parlor in Galveston, Texas. Sadly, it was ruined in the flood of 2009.
Contributed by
Wallace Brown
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Recent comments (view all 33 comments)
Various interior/exterior views of the Criterion Theatre can be viewed here.
A member of the powerful Paramound Theatre Chain showed, as this house remained first class up to the very end!
http://www.roadsideoklahoma.com/node/555
Doug Loudenback’s great web pages offers this fun photo of the Criterion Theatre,
View link
A 1948 look at the Criterion stage house and Mondo Adult Cinema can be seen on this site by typing
“only chevrolet is first"
For fantastic interior shots type in
"criterion theatre"
View link
1920’s picture
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1935 photo of Milton Slosser playing the Criterion pipe organ,
View link
In the mid-1970s I saw, of all things, Ken Russell’s film “Tommy” in a veru large, traditional downtown movie palace in Oklahoma City. I now believe it was the Criterion. About three of us were at the showing of the film (which was about right).
@ pugpapaokc pugpapaokc – I would be interested in the paper you wrote – my email is
@ Joe Vogel
I would love to see the article but can’t get to it from the link – do you have it where you could send it to me? My email is
Does anyone have any info on the giant Marilyn Monroe displayed in front of the Criterion when they showed Niagra in 1953? I see multiple copies of the image on line but nothing stating if it was a display from the movie company, or something local, etc. Thanks!
SK: Sorry for the delayed response, but my subscription to this page lapsed and I didn’t see your question until today.
The August 7, 1954, article about the remodeling of the Criterion now begins at this link.
The scans of Boxoffice that used to be at issuu.com have been moved to a section of the magazine’s own web site called The Vault. If you find any more of my old links that I haven’t gotten around to updating, you can (if you have javascript installed, and your browser supports it) find the date of the issue and the page number of the article by hovering your cursor over the obsolete link (it’s 080754/103 for the Criterion article, for example.) Then you can go to The Vault and navigate through it to find the article. Some of the pages at The Vault are one or two numbers off from the page numbers they had at issuu (the Criterion article starts on Vault page 102, not page 103.)
Some issues of the magazine haven’t yet been uploaded to the Vault, and sometimes The Vault has different editions of an issue, and they will be missing a particular article, but most of the Boxoffice stuff I linked to can still be found by this method.