Bluebird Theatre

Joe Vogel on January 2, 2013 at 3:55 pm

For some reason, Google has put the Street View for this address on Watts Street, at the back of the building. If Street View is moved around to Broad Street, you can see the fairly well preserved Gothic upper facade of the Bluebird Theatre. The ground floor has been covered in what looks like a rusticated fake stone of the sort that was popular in the 1950s.

The “New Construction Work” column of the August 5, 1914, issue of Paint, Oil and Drug Review has an item about a new movie theater to be built at 2209-2211 N. Broad Street:

“Philadelphia, Pa.—Film theater, 2209-11 North Broad Street, to Harry Gill, Jr., 2515 Germantown Avenue, for Kahn & Greenberg; cost $18,000; Mahlon H. Dickinson, Architect; permit granted.”

Architect Mahlon Dickinson is also supposed to have designed a 499-seat theater called the Owl, which Irvin Glazer’s Philadelphia Theatres, A-Z says operated from August, 1913, to 1928. Web site Philadelphia Architects and Buildings gives the address of the Owl Theatre as 2300-2302 Grays Ferry Avenue, but as near as I can tell, that address was part of the grounds of the Naval Home, which was established in the 19th century and operated there until the 1970s.

It makes me wonder if the Owl’s reported address might be mistaken. There’s a building in the 2200 block of Grays Ferry Avenue that looks as though it might have been a theater at one time (Google Street View.) I wonder if that could have been the Owl? The Glazer collection is supposed to have a photo of the Owl, but it doesn’t appear to be available on the Internet.

lostmemory on October 1, 2005 at 5:15 pm

A Haskell organ was installed in the Bluebird Theater in 1915.

lostmemory on February 27, 2005 at 2:05 pm

Mahlon H. Dickinson is listed as the original architect in 1914. Hoffman-Henon are listed as doing alterations to this theater around 1920. This raises a question. When you add a theater that lists multiple architects, which name do you enter? Is it the original architect or the last one listed?