Although it said that the building was to be only two stories, this notice from the June 3, 1916, issue of The American Contractor was probably about the Crown Theatre:
“Lowell, Mass. — Moving Picture Theater: $25,000. 2 sty. 44x97. Archt. Harry Prescott Graves, 18 Shattuck st. Owners Crown Theater Co., Sam'l Orback, pres., care Owl Theater, Central st., taking bids.”
It’s possible that the “2 sty” referred only to the auditorium, which had a balcony, or that a decision was made to make the head of the building taller before construction was complete. The March 11, 1940 obituary of architect Harry Prescott Graves in The Lowell Sun didn’t mention the Crown among his works, but did mention the Strand and Merrimack Square theatres. I’ve also found a reference to Graves designing a theater in Worcester in 1913, but I haven’t been able to identify the house.
The aka Star Theatre needs to be added to the “Previous Names” field.
Both the January 24, 1900, and the October 8, 1900 issues of The Lowell Sun carried notices of the opening of the new Gaiety (not Gaity) Theatre. I don’t know if the theater moved to a new location in October or perhaps just reopened at the same location under new management.
The April 13, 1901 issue of the Sun said that the Boston Theatre, formerly the Gaiety, would open on April 18. The Star Theatre, on Merrimack Street opposite City Hall, was being mentioned in The Lowell Sun by April, 1908. The new Premier Theatre, opposite City Hall, was mentioned in the October 10, 1912, Sun. The Tuesday, February 9, 1915 Sun> said that Wolf’s Theatre, which had been “entirely remodeled,” would open Wednesday evening.
Lowell did have a house called the Bijou Theatre, opened in 1892 and, according to a January 2, 1974, article in The Lowell Sun, it was located “…at Cardinal O'Connell Parkway….” That street, only two blocks long, intersects Merrimack at the end of the 300 block, just where the Gaiety would have been, so we should consider the possibility that the new Gaiety of 1900 was indeed just a new name for the old Bijou. However, I have not found any references to confirm this surmise.
Hennesy & Bunker’s Funnyland Theatre was mentioned in The Billboard of November 2, 1907, but no address was given. Theatre La Scala was advertised in the December 31, 1908 issue of The Lowell Sun, along with four other theaters. The December 4 issue of the paper had advertised the Funnyland Theatre, so the name change took place that month.
La Scala Theatre, managed by Hennesy & Bunker, was mentioned in the “Motion Picture Notes” section of The New York Dramatic Mirror of September 18, 1909. Hennesy & Bunker were also mentioned as managers of Theatre Voyons in the same column.
The house was styled Theatre La Scala again in a 1912 book about Lowell, as it had been in various issues of The Lowell Sun in 1909. La Sala [sic] Theatre was listed at 245 Central in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, but the altered name was most likely just a typo.
Indeed it looks like the whole block has been replaced except for the four-story brick building at the corner of Stanton Avenue. The new project looks like one big building in satellite view, though the facade treatment attempts to make it appear from the street to be several narrower buildings.
Flickr member Darren Snow posted this photo of the Sosna State Theatre taken in 1997, shortly after the house closed. The caption says the panels on the facade were Vitrolite, which was a pigmented glass tile, sometimes generically called vitreous marble.
The Vitrolite brand was introduced in 1908 by the Vitrolite Company, and was later made by Libby-Owens-Ford from 1935 to 1947. Popular during both the Art Deco and Streamline Modern periods, Vitrolite and its chief competitor, Carrara Glass, are once again hot items, with vintage tiles being quickly snatched up for use in architectural restorations and by collectors.
Pepperama is correct. The first Gane’s Manhattan Theatre, operating from 1907 to 1909, was the former Standard Theatre, located on 6th Avenue between 32nd and 33rd Streets. It was demolished in 1909 to make way for Gimbel’s Department Store, which is now occupied in part by a branch of J.C. Penney’s.
The second Gane’s, of which we have four photos on our photo page, must have been on the southwest corner of Broadway and 31st, and was in operation by 1910. Note in the vintage photo uploaded by CharmaineZoe the angle at which the pedestrians on Broadway are crossing the side street. The theater was clearly on an obtuse corner.
The three most distant of the four buildings to the right of the theater in the photo are still standing on West 31st Street, though the nearest has had its top floor lopped off. The fourth of the group, the one adjacent to the theater building itself, is gone.
The L.A. County assessor’s office says that the building at the southeast corner of Pico and Fedora Street was originally built in 1905, and rebuilt in 1918 (apparently a rear extension.) The Pico Heights Theatre is listed at 2698 W. Pico in the 1911 city directory, which is the earliest edition featuring a listing for the category Moving Picture Theatres. Many later directories list the theater’s address as 2696 W. Pico.
The 1906 through 1908 directories list 2596 W. Pico as the location of the Pico Heights Realty Company. I can’t find anything listed at either 2696 or 2698 in 1909 or 1910, and the Pico Heights Realty Company is not listed after 1908.
The 1909 and 1910 directories have a category called “Moving Pictures and Machines” under which movie theaters are listed, but almost all those listed were downtown, though there must have been a great any neighborhood theaters in operation by that time. Sixteen are listed in the 1911 directory, including the Pico Heights. I think it’s possible that the theater was in operation as early as 1909 or even late 1908, but simply didn’t get listed in the directories.
A comment made by kencmcintyre back in 2009 says that the architects of the World Theatre were Roth & Fleisher. Gabriel Blum Roth and Elizabeth R. Hirsh Fleisher established their firm in 1941. Hirsh Fleisher was one of the first women licensed to practice architecture in Pennsylvania, and the first to establish a practice in Philadelphia.
Google Maps is currently putting the pin icon and street view for this theater in the wrong place (again!) But this time there is something very weird about the address itself. This accurate view at Google Maps displays the peculiar address 240 West E. Roper Rd., which suggests that whoever was responsible for assigning addresses in Nogales might have been eating the peyote.
I did not know Mr. Perkins, and merely found a few references to him on the Internet. I always lived in California myself, but I’ve never been directly connected with the movie industry.
Jack Coursey’s link is dead, but I did find this page with photos and some drawings and floor plans of the gutted and drastically rebuilt house. Plans for the rebuild were made by the firm Manuelle Gautrand Architecture.
Oasis Cinema 9 was designed by cinema specialists The Henry Architects. Construction began March 1, 2005. The house has 1,486 fixed seats and 36 wheelchair spaces.
To belatedly answer dickwpierce’s question, the Internet says that Morris “Dooley” Perkins died on February 12, 1990, and had been born December 19, 1904, which would have made him 85 at the time of his death.
I haven’t found out when the Ace was twinned, but the owner, John Eickhof (who commented on this thread earlier and was operating the house at the time it closed) might know.
This web page has many photos and newspaper clippings about the second Majestic Theatre, though the primary focus is Harry Houdini, who made an appearance at the house in 1916. The Majestic was demolished in 1966, one of many buildings over several blocks razed to make way for the enormous Tarrant County Convention Center.
Many photos of the Majestic, including some taken shortly before and during its 1966 demolition, are linked from this web page about Fort Worth’s theaters.
This web pageis primarily about the second Majestic, with a focus on Harry Houdini’s appearance there in 1916, but there are three images about a third of the way down that pertain to the first Majestic. Most useful is the map, which shows the dormitories of St. Ignatius Academy, still standing across Jennings Avenue from the Savoy’s site. A line drawn through the axis of that building also passes through the Savoy building, allowing us to see that the theater stood just where the realigned Texas Street connects with the west side of Jennings Avenue.
This web page has four photos, and the one at upper right shows the side of the Savoy, probably around 1920. The wall has a sign, partly obscured, that appears to say “Professional Stock” indicating that for at least part of its history the Savoy operated as a legitimate house.
This web page with part of an article about the Isis Theatre says that the house opened on May 21, 1914, and was designed by architect Louis B. Weinman.
The subsequent page of the article reveals that the original Isis was a reverse theater, with the screen at the street end of the small auditorium and the projection booth at the rear, next to an alley. The building of the New Isis was occasioned by a fire which destroyed the original house in 1935.
The New Isis Theatre, with a footprint considerably larger than the original Isis, opened on March 27, 1936. The architect for the rebuilding is as yet unidentified.
The Majestic that opened in 1905 was a different house, located either on Jennings Avenue or on Throckmorton Street. The second Majestic, on Commerce Street, opened in 1911. The first Majestic was then renamed the Savoy Theatre, but had been gutted and converted into a garage by the end of the 1920s. It is not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.
Although I’ve never found any photos of the interior of the Burbank from its later years, and I was never inside the theater myself, friends who did go there in the early 1960s told me that the interior was still very old fashioned. I don’t think that the 1930s remodeling, or any later remodeling, made any significant stylistic change to the interior of the theater. Essentially all that was done was to slap a streamline modern facade onto the old building and clean up the lobby a bit.
A bit of the original interior style is revealed in the two photos I have found, both from 1898 (the proscenium and the men’s lounge) and though it’s possible that these were altered by one of the early 20th century remodelings, I’m quite sure that there was nothing particularly Art Deco about the place. Main Street was already in decline by the time the Art Deco style emerged in the 1920s, and nobody would have been spending money to update an old theater there with anything as costly as Art Deco. One advantage of Streamline Modern, emerging during the depression of the 1930s, was that it was simple and could be done on the cheap.
The original exterior was of course Romanesque Revival, but the early interior looks to have been that awkward Victorian pastiche of styles that, in America at least, often went by the misleading name Queen Anne, or sometimes the somewhat more appropriate name Eastlake, after the English architect and writer Charles Locke Eastlake, who promoted a somewhat similar style in Victorian Britain.
The Granada’s restored marquee in action. The house hosted a fashion show on May 26, but I know of no other events since then. The official web site has not been updated.
The L.A. County Assessor says that the Strand was built in 1928/1929.
Here is an item about the Strand’s owner Paul Swickard from the April 7, 1945 issue of Boxoffice:
“J. Paul Swickard, like most ‘native sons,’ has been a booster not only for California but for that state’s great industry, motion pictures. In 1917 he operated the University Theatre and 14 years later the Strand, Los Angeles, a 1,000-seat house, his present property. A resident of San Marino, Swickard is a member of the Masons and Rotary Club. Married, he has three sons, all in uniform: J. Paul jr., and Donald R. with the army, Ross H. aboard a submarine.”
This ca. 1938 photo of actress Bonita Granville at the Strand shows a bit of the mural decorating what appears to be the lobby wall.
The fourth photo on this web page is a view of Pine Avenue, probably from the late 1920s, with the Victory Theatre’s vertical sign prominently featured.
Although it said that the building was to be only two stories, this notice from the June 3, 1916, issue of The American Contractor was probably about the Crown Theatre:
It’s possible that the “2 sty” referred only to the auditorium, which had a balcony, or that a decision was made to make the head of the building taller before construction was complete. The March 11, 1940 obituary of architect Harry Prescott Graves in The Lowell Sun didn’t mention the Crown among his works, but did mention the Strand and Merrimack Square theatres. I’ve also found a reference to Graves designing a theater in Worcester in 1913, but I haven’t been able to identify the house.The aka Star Theatre needs to be added to the “Previous Names” field.
Both the January 24, 1900, and the October 8, 1900 issues of The Lowell Sun carried notices of the opening of the new Gaiety (not Gaity) Theatre. I don’t know if the theater moved to a new location in October or perhaps just reopened at the same location under new management.
The April 13, 1901 issue of the Sun said that the Boston Theatre, formerly the Gaiety, would open on April 18. The Star Theatre, on Merrimack Street opposite City Hall, was being mentioned in The Lowell Sun by April, 1908. The new Premier Theatre, opposite City Hall, was mentioned in the October 10, 1912, Sun. The Tuesday, February 9, 1915 Sun> said that Wolf’s Theatre, which had been “entirely remodeled,” would open Wednesday evening.
Lowell did have a house called the Bijou Theatre, opened in 1892 and, according to a January 2, 1974, article in The Lowell Sun, it was located “…at Cardinal O'Connell Parkway….” That street, only two blocks long, intersects Merrimack at the end of the 300 block, just where the Gaiety would have been, so we should consider the possibility that the new Gaiety of 1900 was indeed just a new name for the old Bijou. However, I have not found any references to confirm this surmise.
Hennesy & Bunker’s Funnyland Theatre was mentioned in The Billboard of November 2, 1907, but no address was given. Theatre La Scala was advertised in the December 31, 1908 issue of The Lowell Sun, along with four other theaters. The December 4 issue of the paper had advertised the Funnyland Theatre, so the name change took place that month.
La Scala Theatre, managed by Hennesy & Bunker, was mentioned in the “Motion Picture Notes” section of The New York Dramatic Mirror of September 18, 1909. Hennesy & Bunker were also mentioned as managers of Theatre Voyons in the same column.
The house was styled Theatre La Scala again in a 1912 book about Lowell, as it had been in various issues of The Lowell Sun in 1909. La Sala [sic] Theatre was listed at 245 Central in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, but the altered name was most likely just a typo.
Indeed it looks like the whole block has been replaced except for the four-story brick building at the corner of Stanton Avenue. The new project looks like one big building in satellite view, though the facade treatment attempts to make it appear from the street to be several narrower buildings.
Flickr member Darren Snow posted this photo of the Sosna State Theatre taken in 1997, shortly after the house closed. The caption says the panels on the facade were Vitrolite, which was a pigmented glass tile, sometimes generically called vitreous marble.
The Vitrolite brand was introduced in 1908 by the Vitrolite Company, and was later made by Libby-Owens-Ford from 1935 to 1947. Popular during both the Art Deco and Streamline Modern periods, Vitrolite and its chief competitor, Carrara Glass, are once again hot items, with vintage tiles being quickly snatched up for use in architectural restorations and by collectors.
Pepperama is correct. The first Gane’s Manhattan Theatre, operating from 1907 to 1909, was the former Standard Theatre, located on 6th Avenue between 32nd and 33rd Streets. It was demolished in 1909 to make way for Gimbel’s Department Store, which is now occupied in part by a branch of J.C. Penney’s.
The second Gane’s, of which we have four photos on our photo page, must have been on the southwest corner of Broadway and 31st, and was in operation by 1910. Note in the vintage photo uploaded by CharmaineZoe the angle at which the pedestrians on Broadway are crossing the side street. The theater was clearly on an obtuse corner.
The three most distant of the four buildings to the right of the theater in the photo are still standing on West 31st Street, though the nearest has had its top floor lopped off. The fourth of the group, the one adjacent to the theater building itself, is gone.
The L.A. County assessor’s office says that the building at the southeast corner of Pico and Fedora Street was originally built in 1905, and rebuilt in 1918 (apparently a rear extension.) The Pico Heights Theatre is listed at 2698 W. Pico in the 1911 city directory, which is the earliest edition featuring a listing for the category Moving Picture Theatres. Many later directories list the theater’s address as 2696 W. Pico.
The 1906 through 1908 directories list 2596 W. Pico as the location of the Pico Heights Realty Company. I can’t find anything listed at either 2696 or 2698 in 1909 or 1910, and the Pico Heights Realty Company is not listed after 1908.
The 1909 and 1910 directories have a category called “Moving Pictures and Machines” under which movie theaters are listed, but almost all those listed were downtown, though there must have been a great any neighborhood theaters in operation by that time. Sixteen are listed in the 1911 directory, including the Pico Heights. I think it’s possible that the theater was in operation as early as 1909 or even late 1908, but simply didn’t get listed in the directories.
The Picture Theatre, Roberts & Goodrich proprietors, was listed at 545 S. Main Street in the 1907 Los Angeles city directory.
A comment made by kencmcintyre back in 2009 says that the architects of the World Theatre were Roth & Fleisher. Gabriel Blum Roth and Elizabeth R. Hirsh Fleisher established their firm in 1941. Hirsh Fleisher was one of the first women licensed to practice architecture in Pennsylvania, and the first to establish a practice in Philadelphia.
Ah, there we go.
Well, crap, the link doesn’t work. Google can’t find the map it just showed me! Maybe Google is eating the peyote.
Let’s try this one.
Google Maps is currently putting the pin icon and street view for this theater in the wrong place (again!) But this time there is something very weird about the address itself. This accurate view at Google Maps displays the peculiar address 240 West E. Roper Rd., which suggests that whoever was responsible for assigning addresses in Nogales might have been eating the peyote.
I did not know Mr. Perkins, and merely found a few references to him on the Internet. I always lived in California myself, but I’ve never been directly connected with the movie industry.
Jack Coursey’s link is dead, but I did find this page with photos and some drawings and floor plans of the gutted and drastically rebuilt house. Plans for the rebuild were made by the firm Manuelle Gautrand Architecture.
The Signature Cinemas in Placerville was designed by The Henry Architects.
Oasis Cinema 9 was designed by cinema specialists The Henry Architects. Construction began March 1, 2005. The house has 1,486 fixed seats and 36 wheelchair spaces.
To belatedly answer dickwpierce’s question, the Internet says that Morris “Dooley” Perkins died on February 12, 1990, and had been born December 19, 1904, which would have made him 85 at the time of his death.
I haven’t found out when the Ace was twinned, but the owner, John Eickhof (who commented on this thread earlier and was operating the house at the time it closed) might know.
This web page has many photos and newspaper clippings about the second Majestic Theatre, though the primary focus is Harry Houdini, who made an appearance at the house in 1916. The Majestic was demolished in 1966, one of many buildings over several blocks razed to make way for the enormous Tarrant County Convention Center.
Many photos of the Majestic, including some taken shortly before and during its 1966 demolition, are linked from this web page about Fort Worth’s theaters.
This web pageis primarily about the second Majestic, with a focus on Harry Houdini’s appearance there in 1916, but there are three images about a third of the way down that pertain to the first Majestic. Most useful is the map, which shows the dormitories of St. Ignatius Academy, still standing across Jennings Avenue from the Savoy’s site. A line drawn through the axis of that building also passes through the Savoy building, allowing us to see that the theater stood just where the realigned Texas Street connects with the west side of Jennings Avenue.
This web page has four photos, and the one at upper right shows the side of the Savoy, probably around 1920. The wall has a sign, partly obscured, that appears to say “Professional Stock” indicating that for at least part of its history the Savoy operated as a legitimate house.
This web page with part of an article about the Isis Theatre says that the house opened on May 21, 1914, and was designed by architect Louis B. Weinman.
The subsequent page of the article reveals that the original Isis was a reverse theater, with the screen at the street end of the small auditorium and the projection booth at the rear, next to an alley. The building of the New Isis was occasioned by a fire which destroyed the original house in 1935.
The New Isis Theatre, with a footprint considerably larger than the original Isis, opened on March 27, 1936. The architect for the rebuilding is as yet unidentified.
The Majestic that opened in 1905 was a different house, located either on Jennings Avenue or on Throckmorton Street. The second Majestic, on Commerce Street, opened in 1911. The first Majestic was then renamed the Savoy Theatre, but had been gutted and converted into a garage by the end of the 1920s. It is not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.
Although I’ve never found any photos of the interior of the Burbank from its later years, and I was never inside the theater myself, friends who did go there in the early 1960s told me that the interior was still very old fashioned. I don’t think that the 1930s remodeling, or any later remodeling, made any significant stylistic change to the interior of the theater. Essentially all that was done was to slap a streamline modern facade onto the old building and clean up the lobby a bit.
A bit of the original interior style is revealed in the two photos I have found, both from 1898 (the proscenium and the men’s lounge) and though it’s possible that these were altered by one of the early 20th century remodelings, I’m quite sure that there was nothing particularly Art Deco about the place. Main Street was already in decline by the time the Art Deco style emerged in the 1920s, and nobody would have been spending money to update an old theater there with anything as costly as Art Deco. One advantage of Streamline Modern, emerging during the depression of the 1930s, was that it was simple and could be done on the cheap.
The original exterior was of course Romanesque Revival, but the early interior looks to have been that awkward Victorian pastiche of styles that, in America at least, often went by the misleading name Queen Anne, or sometimes the somewhat more appropriate name Eastlake, after the English architect and writer Charles Locke Eastlake, who promoted a somewhat similar style in Victorian Britain.
The Granada’s restored marquee in action. The house hosted a fashion show on May 26, but I know of no other events since then. The official web site has not been updated.
The L.A. County Assessor says that the Strand was built in 1928/1929.
Here is an item about the Strand’s owner Paul Swickard from the April 7, 1945 issue of Boxoffice:
This ca. 1938 photo of actress Bonita Granville at the Strand shows a bit of the mural decorating what appears to be the lobby wall.The fourth photo on this web page is a view of Pine Avenue, probably from the late 1920s, with the Victory Theatre’s vertical sign prominently featured.