Hippodrome Theatre

I was in senior in high school going to the Cleveland area to check out John Carroll University. I lived in Philadelphia. We (my mom was with me) checked into the Sheraton Terminal Tower the night before my appointment. After dinner, looking for something to do, we decided to see Hitchcock’s The Birds which had just opened (Mar/Apr 1963). Like another poster mentioned, I never saw the interior with the lights on, but you got the impression that it was big…really big. The projection and sound was first rate. Whenever, I saw The Birds later in life, I always thought of that trip to Cleveland. The only other thing I remember that was kind of odd, before the feature they ran a short which was like a music video of Acker Bilk (the English clarinetist) playing his big hit Stranger on the Shore.

I vividly remember watching “Goldfinger” on New Years Day the year of its release…I was a pre-teen, and I believe Mom picked me up after the show…But, sitting there when he gets his introduction to Honor Blackman, and utters her name, POOOSIE,and a wave, a tsunami, of unbridled and hysterical laughter swept over the entire audience……Later by a few years, a few of us ‘creatively cut school’(Cathedral Latin on 107th and Euclid)and ‘visited’ the pool hall located beneath the movie theater proper….Boy, was that adventurous !

There are two pictures of the inside of the Hipp(Inside lobby and auditorium) in the book “Euclid Avenue, Cleveland’s Sophisticated Lady, 1920-1970” by Karberg and Toman, published by Cleveland Landmarks Press. Pictures of other downtown theaters are also in the book. Maybe someone can get permission to have these pictures scanned for inclusion in Cinema Treasures.

“I’d Rather Be Rich” 1964 Biggest Wednesday Opening in the History of the Theatre.BOXOFFICE Sept.7 1964.

I visited it right before demolition and it was a huge and complex place. The upper balcony looked across to a flat wall way above the proscenium. There was a stairway for the top balcony balcony that had a railing down the middle for crowd safety and winded up many flights of steps with no other doors until you actually got to the balcony. The rehearsal hall had been used by a radio station and was huge as well with South facing windows, so there was natural light, the West wall of that room was the wall the upper balcony faced since it was over the auditorium. I need to look at my pictures again which shows it was similar gargantuan size like the Philadelphia Met and the Auditorium chicago.

I’m not sure, but it seems likely. Most of the downtown buildings used steam purchased from Muni Light for heat, and I remember a mad scramble to install boilers when the sales were cut off. Adding a steam plant to an old office building that was constructed without provision for a boiler room was obviously pretty expensive, presuming you could find a place to put it, and were willing to spend the money. Sometimes they just closed the building and sold the land.

The steam pipes ran in a vault just under the sidewalks, which had a side benefit of keeping the sidewalks warm enough in the winter that the snow tended to melt off them.

I did wonder if at least part of the reason for shutting down the office buildings, and then the theater, was the need to install a heating plant after Muni Light stopped selling steam. For a time I lived in the little apartment building on Prospect behind the theater and I believe that came down at the same time as the theater. The last time I was there was a couple years ago and the place was still a parking lot. At the time I lived there (early ‘70s), it was one of only a couple places you could live downtown. Most of what are apartments now still had stores and offices in them back then.

A far better fate for the Hipp would have been conversion to an opera house. An acquaintance in New York (I can’t remember his name, but he ran the Palace) once mentioned that the American Society of Architects once included the Hipp on a list of the ten most acoustically perfect theatres in the world, and some old accounts suggest that Caruso, who appeared there with the Met, absolutely loved the place. One problem they had, aside from not being on Playhouse Square, was that the stage was too big for most straight plays or even musicals, even after it was cut back. I did a number of shows for Dennis Zack back in the ‘70s, and he used one of the big rehearsal halls built over the auditorium to prepare his shows (he presented them at the Little Theatre in Public Auditorium), and you could look down onto the stage from the rehearsal halls. The rehearsal halls were the same size as the original stage; we used a little space in the middle of one to rehearse.

I last visited the Hipp as a teenager in ‘70 or '71. Rumors of its closing circulated for years, so it was almost a surprise when it finally happened. The place was a dump in its closing days, but the huge screen and the size of the (closed) balconies were evident. the seats functional but very old and the clientele had become fairly marginal. In its last years, it played mostly drive-in type fare and blaxploitation films.

As for the location, the Euclid/Prospect split was the most profound. The Playhouse Square theatres were surrounded by upscale retail like Halle’s, Bonwit-Teller, Sterling Linder, Peck & Peck, Milgrim, etc. there were a few theatres on E 9th, which was a marginal area until the Erieview urban renewal program of the 1960s. There was at least one near Public Square, which i believe became retail. I think it was an S&H Green Stamp redemption center for most of the 60s. Near the Hipp were the upscale Taylor department store (converted to offices in 1962) and a lot of midrange retail like Bond’s, Richman Bros, Burrows (blooks & stationary), along with the Euclid, Colonial, & Taylor arcades which had service oriented businesses. prospect was always low end retail including pawn shops, credit jewelers, furniture stores (Bing’s, later used as the downscale Bailey’s department store), Kay’s huge used book store (the stock was sold to Powell’s in Portland), army-navy stores, the famous Record Rendevous, etc. The Hipp marquee on Prospect was gone by the late 60s, although I believe there was an entrance to the office building.

The Carter was probably adjacent to the Carter Hotel (later Pick-Carter) which was converted to senior housing in the 1970s, and I think is still known as Carter Manor. The Carter was a respectable hotel but not in the same class as the Sheraton-Cleveland on Public Square or the Statler Hilton, further down Euclid near halle’s.

Ad from 1959:
View link

some amazing photos on flickr
demolition
View link
View link
great exterior shot
View link
press ads
View link
View link
View link

From The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History…..

The HIPPODROME THEATER was located in an 11-story office building at 720 Euclid Ave. Designed by Cleveland architect John Elliot, the “Hipp” featured exceptionally good acoustics, a lavish interior, grandiose spaciousness, and a second entrance on Prospect Ave. Considered to be among the world’s great playhouses, it attracted performers such as Enrico Caruso, Sarah Bernhardt, W. C. Fields, Will Rogers, Al Jolson, and John McCormack. The auditorium had boxes, 2 balconies with elevators, and seating for 3,548. The stage was equipped to handle large-scale productions and spectacles such as operas. The world’s 2nd-largest, next to the Hippodrome in New York, it measured 130' wide, 104' deep, 110' high, and could be lifted to 4 different levels by hydraulic jacks. On one level was an 80x40x10-ft. water tank used for water spectacles. The theater was built in 1907 by an operating company headed by Max Faetkenhauer at a cost of $800,000. After several years, theater operations were leased to B. F. Keith. In 1922 Walter Reasoner took over operations, followed by RKO in 1929. Remodeling in 1931 made it the largest American theater devoted entirely to motion pictures. A large portion of the stage was removed, while the main floor was lowered and a new mezzanine added to increase seating to above 4,000. In 1933 the theater went bankrupt, and operations were taken over by Warner Bros. In 1951 it became part of the Telenews chain, and in 1972 the property was purchased by Alvin Krenzler. The last of the major downtown movie houses to close, the Hipp’s downfall came when the office space was closed and the theater’s revenues proved insufficient to support the building. The Hippodrome was demolished in 1981 to make way for a parking lot.