Ezella Theatre
7007 Superior Avenue,
Cleveland,
OH
44103
7007 Superior Avenue,
Cleveland,
OH
44103
1 person
favorited this theater
The Ezella Theatre was owned by Modern Theatres, Inc., Owners: The Essex Brothers — Jack & Ray — and a rotund little man named Howard Reif. The theatre was almost an exact duplicate of the Vine Theatre in Willoughby, Ohio. My memory is fading, but as best I can recall, it had 1400 seats on one level. Last time I worked there as a stagehand was in 1958.
The place was in good shape — surprisingly so, since it was located in what was even then considered to be a “seedy” part of town. There was nothing very unusual about the Ezella. It had a large projection booth, with two Super-Simplex projectors fitted with Peerless MagnaArc lamphouses; an RCA sound system, and “El Cheapo” anamorphic Cinemascope lenses that were vastly inferior to the Bosch & Lomb lenses that were in wide use at the better theatres around town.
One interesting sidelight: Directly across an alley at the rear of the theatre, was a fairly large, two-story wooden storage building that looked like it had suvived from the last century. I was told that an undertaker used it to store coffins. About three or-so years after I last worked at the Ezella, I learned that the old building had caught fire, and posed a real danger to the theatre building. Newspaper reports credited a young assistant theatre manager with doing a great job of making an announcement from the stage to the people in the audience,instructing them on the proper manner for safely exiting the theatre. I understand that damage to the Ezella building was minimal.
USELESS TRIVIA: The phone number of the Ezella Theatre, back in 1957 was HE-1-2071. (The ‘HE’ stood for HENDERSON). The building is today home to a church.
Contributed by
roger stewart, dave-bronx
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Recent comments (view all 32 comments)
Thanks for the new Ezella information. It is my all-time fave nabe.
According to films101.com
http://www.films101.com/y1946r.htm
there were only 48 pictures released on 1948, not even close to a record. How about 160 films on 2004?
Please post anything else you remember about any of the theatres you mention.
Jim Somich
That films 101 webpage up above lists 62 films for 1946. It lists them as the 62 “most notable” films of the year. There were a lot more than 62 filsm released that year – generally there were considerably more movies per year back then than there are now (many more “B” movies, etc.)
That’s a pretty horrendous remodel by the church. It looks like they covered the marquee with tin and painted it brown. Also some kind of false brick front. I’m sure the theater looked better than this in its day.
Is this still a church? This site lists this address as a grocery store and this link as a convenience store.
Picture of the Ezella asa church from 1985:
View link
another 1985 photo of the Ezella Theatre.
View link
LMI don’t know what it is today but in the 1985 photo it was the Original Glorious Church and 7007 Superior Convention Center.
When google it it comes up the same only now it is called the Original Glorious Church of God in Christ and jut plain Convention Center. They have completely redone the exterior and the marquee.
The Yale would have been at the end of Yale Ave, where it met St. Clair, just past Liberty Blvd/MLK.
The Ezella was part of a small business district that included an A&P and a Kresge (one of the few neigborhood Kresges’s to survive their big store closing round in the early 60s). The A&P survived into the early 1970s.
Here is a 1965 ad:
http://tinyurl.com/ykkocmg
Boxoffice of April 21, 1941, said that Scoville, Essick & Reif would rebuild their Ezella Theatre. Construction was scheduled to begin that spring. An earlier Boxoffice item about the project had given the seating capacity of the original Ezella as 600.
The introduction above and some comments on this page say that the Estella resembled the later Vine Theatre in Willoughby and the Mayland Theatre in Mayfield Heights. Both of those houses were originally built for the same circuit that operated the Ezella, and both were designed by Cleveland architects Paul Matzinger and Rudolph Grosel.
Though not all of the Scoville, Essick & Reif/Modern Theatres circuit houses mentioned in Boxoffice over the years are specifically attributed by the magazine to the firm of Matzinger & Grosel, a 1947 item did say that most of the circuit’s theaters had been designed by them. Given the similarities noted above, the rebuilt Ezella was most likely one of those Matzinger & Grosel designs.
Photos of the Ezella illustrated this article by decorator Hanns Teichert in Boxoffice of August 5, 1950.