The Gotham Theatre was built in 1920 and designed by Carlson & Wiseman. A notice that plans for the project had been filed appeared in the September 25, 1920 issue of Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide. This web page has an overview of the theater’s history.
The September 4, 1920 issue of Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide had a short article saying that the City of New York had granted a twenty year lease on a plot of city-owned land under the Manhattan Bridge to developer Henry E. Jacobs.
Jacobs planned to erect a two-story store and showroom building along the East Broadway frontage, which would include an entrance for a moving picture theater that would occupy the remainder of the plot. The entire project was being designed by architects Gronenberg & Leuchtag. The theater was to be leased to the Florence Theatre Corporation, also for a term of twenty years.
Extensive alterations were made to the Riverhead Theatre in 1931, the house reopening on February 5 as advertised in that day’s issue of The County Review (PDF here.) The architect for the remodeling was Calvin Kiessling, who had offices in New York City and in New Caanan, Connecticut.
The Scenic Theatre was the only theater listed for Keene in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. This PDF file has an extract from a book about Keene which says that the Scenic Theatre was built by Pike & Whipple in 1914, and the building was demolished in 1966. A 2004 article gives the Scenic’s opening date as March 2, and says that it closed in the early 1960s.
Theater industry trade journals indicate that by early 1918 the Scenic was being run by Charles C. Baldwin, who would open the Colonial Theatre in 1924. Keene’s first motion picture house, the Nickel Theatre (aka Majestic) opened on Church Street on January 9, 1905, and by 1913 the town had a house called the Dreamland Theatre.
Larry Harnisch’s “Daily Mirror” weblog has posted an ad for this theater that ran in the July 17, 1947 issue of the Los Angeles Sentinal, the city’s African-American newspaper. The ad promotes the house as the Flo-Mills Theatre.
The Rex Theatre was mentioned in the June 15, 1918 issue of Motography. The Victor Theatre was open by 1906, and construction had begun in 1905. It was listed as a 900-seat, ground floor house in the Cahn guides. The Victor was listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory along with houses called the Lyric and the Majestic.
This item from the August 10, 1969 issue of The Tennessean contradicts our current description of this house. It says that the Madison Theatre was opened by Martin Theatres. I notice that the grand opening ad uploaded by Mike Rivest doesn’t mention either Loew’s or Martin, but it must have been a Martin house first, later taken over by Loew’s.
Architects were the Columbus, Georgia firm Brookbank, Murphy & Shields. Predecessor firm Brookbank & Murphy had designed Martin’s Georgia Cinerama in Atlanta in 1965, and probably did a number of other projects for Martin during this period.
Rstewart: Martin did have at least one theater designed by Brookbank, Murphy & Shields, the successors to the firm that designed the Georgia Cinerama. It’s the only one I’ve identified so far, being the Madison Theatre in Nashville, which doesn’t look much like the Georgia house. Chains tend to stay with the same architects for many projects, though, so it’s entirely possible that there is a near-twin to the Martin Cinerama out there somewhere.
I’ve been hunting down more information about the Odeon and the Bijou, and though I’ve found out that both opened somewhat earlier than I’d thought, I haven’t had much luck unraveling the confusion over the later names used in the 1920s. I’ll put together what I’ve found so far and submit the new pages as soon as possible.
This item about the 1927 rebuilding of the Robinson Grand Theatre is from the July 9 issue of The Moving Picture World:
“Construction work on the Robinson Grand Theatre, Clarksburg, W. Va., is being speeded up by increased labor and a night shift in an effort to get the new playhouse ready for its formal opening, scheduled for Labor Day, or, perhaps, a little sooner. Interior decorating is to begin within a short time. All steel construction is being used throughout in the building, and it is said that the house is as near fireproof as engineers can make it.”
An ad for the Pictureland Theatre appears in the November 7, 1924, issue of a publication called The Tower. The 1926 edition of Glenville State Normal School’s student annual, “The Kanewhachen,” makes reference to a showingof “The Ten Commandments” at the Pictureland Theatre on October 5, 1925.
The Pictureland Theatre is listed in the 1926 FDY, though with only 100 seats, so the house was probably either expanded or moved to a new location later. I did find this web page with the line: “Finally, Thelma told me she and Newsom were able to get an apartment over the new Pictureland Theatre owned by Judge Marsh in 1929.” The wording suggests a new location more than an expansion.
The March 11, 1939 issue of Boxoffice had this news from Glenville:
“Lyric to Haney
“Glenville, W. Va. — H. L. Stump has withdrawn from the operation of the new Lyric Theatre which was opened here less than two months ago. Bruce Haney is now in charge.”
The New Lyric Theatre was advertised in the January 17, 1939 issue of The Glenville Mercury.
There are references to an earlier house called the Lyric Theatre in Glenville, operating at least as early as 1925, which might have been the year it opened. The 1926 FDY has listings for the Pictureland Theatre and an “M. P. Theatre” at Glenville, which might indicate that the new house hadn’t yet been opened or named when the yearbook went to press sometime in late 1925.
The December 21, 1921 issue of Exhibitors Trade Review ran this item about the relaunch of the Palace Theatre as the Gillis:
“The Palace, Clarksburg, W. Va., which
has been a vaudeville house since it was built ten years ago, has changed hands and is now the property of the Gillis Amusement Co. On Oct. 22 the Palace was closed and opened up on Oct. 31 after some repairs and improvements being made. It was opened as The Gillis, as a first-run movie house under the management of the Gillis family, C. L., A. M., and George D. Gillis, who formerly owned and managed and made a success of the Bijou of this city, which they sold Sept. 1, last year, 1920.”
Ken Roe: Having rechecked my sources I now believe I conflated the histories of two different theaters on this page. The Odeon at 311 Pike Street did not become the second Orpheum. The second Orpheum was the former Bijou Theatre at 331 Main Street.
My careless reading of the following two paragraphs from this web page was the source of my confusion, which was aggravated by certain puzzling inconsistencies in the FDY lists for Clarksburg:
“In 1920, a theater that was at one time named the ‘Odeon’ and at another, the ‘Bijou,’ existed during the second decade of the 20th century at 311 West Pike Street, near the current location of Jackson Square.
“In 1922, after purchasing the Bijou on West Main Street, Jack Marks changed the name to ‘Marks’ Orpheum' and opened the theater continuously until the time of his death in 1952.”
I now suspect that the house listed as the Bijou in FDY’s during the late 1920s was probably the former Odeon, and the first Bijou on Main Street, then operated by Jack Marks, was most likely the house listed by the FDYs of the late 1920s and early 1930s as the Main Street Theatre. Marks attempted to use the name Orpheum at the former Bijou in 1923, but a 1924 court decision awarded the rights tot he name to the new lessee of the original Orpheum, Claude Robinson. Marks was able to use the name Orpheum for his Main Street house after the original Orpheum closed.
The former Odeon was renamed the Bijou at some point in the 1920s, but it is not clear from FDY listings just when. Most likely it was when Marks started calling the original Bijou the Orpheum, and he ended up losing both names. The Odeon/first Bijou appears to have closed as the Main Street Theatre no later than 1931, in any case. It is not listed in FDYs after that year.
After Jack Marks lost the lease on the original Orpheum in, the house was taken over by Claude Robinson. Marks took over the former Bijou Theatre on Main Street and renamed it the Orpheum, leading to a contretemps with Robinson, as noted in this item from The Moving Picture World of September 15, 1923:
“The identity of two picture theatres is involved in an Injunction proceeding instituted by Jack Marks of Clarksburg, W. Va., proprietor of one of the theatres before Judge Maxwell of the Harrison County Circuit Court. Marks asks that Claude Robinson, proprietor of one theatre and lessee of two others, be restrained from using the name ‘Orpheum’ for a theatre at West Pike and Fourth streets. Marks for several years held a lease on the latter house as the Orpheum. Recently, when his lease expired he took over the Bijou Theatre at West Main street and changed the name to the Orpheum. He took the theatre name along with him, but it is contended by Robinson that the old Orpheum should retain its name. It is closed temporarily but will be reopened in a short time.”
The court’s decision went against Marks, as revealed by this item from MPW of March 8, 1924:
“The Orpheum Theatre is the name of the building located at the corner of Fourth and Pike streets, Clarksburg, W. Va., and this name will remain, according to a decision just handed down by the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. Jack Marks, former lessee of the theatre, and who now operates a house on West Main street, sought to enjoin Frank Moore, owner, and Claude Robinson, lessee, from using the name of Orpheum Theatre, but the restraining order was denied him both in the circuit court of Harrison county and the state supreme court.”
Marks was eventually able to use the name Orpheum for the former Bijou, but not until the original Orpheum had been closed and its building converted into offices.
A Princess Theatre, situated on Pike Street in Shinnston, was listed in a 1921 Clarksburg city directory. However, as the Princess building at 314 Pike features a parapet inscription reading “A&M 1940” I don’t think we can be sure the 1921 Princess was the same house. The Princess might have moved to a new building in 1940, or the original building might have been remodeled at that time.
I believe the seating capacity of 350 we list for this Orpheum was taken from a later FDY and was actually the capacity of the second Orpheum, aka Marks' Orpheum, which operated until 1952. The 1929 FDY gives the Orpheum a capacity of 1,400, which itself is probably a gross exaggeration. The 1914 edition of Gus Hill’s National Theatrical Directory lists the Orpheum with 700 seats, which is more plausible.
1929 was the original Orpheum’s last year of operation, after which the building was converted into offices for the Monongahela Power Company. Nevertheless, FDY continued to list the Orpheum with 1,400 seats as late as 1932. They finally corrected the error in 1933, listing the second Orpheum with 400 seats.
Clarksburg’s Orpheum was not part of the Orpheum vaudeville circuit. The Orpheum circuit was primarily a western operation, while the east was dominated by the Keith-Albee circuit, with which the Orpheum circuit eventually merged. When the Orpheum circuit was founded in California in the 1890s, Orpheum was already a fairly common name for theaters, and the circuit was unable to trademark the name.
The Moller organ installed at the Orpheum in 1915 might have been a replacement for a piano or perhaps a Fotoplayer orchestrion, both of which were frequently used in early movie theaters.
Wilmer and Vincent’s Orpheum Theatre in Allentown opened on August 27, 1906, and was designed by architect Fuller Claflin, according to this article by Frank Whelan posted December 5, 2016, on the web site of Allentown television station WFMZ. The State Theatre building was demolished in 1954, though the house had closed some years earlier. Its site, occupied by a parking lot for more than six decades, was recently redeveloped with an apartment complex.
This brief article from the June 28, 2015 Reading Eagle says that, yes, the Hippodrome was renamed the Towne Theatre in the 1970s, but was closed before the end of that decade. The article also says the Hippodrome had opened in December, 1914.
San Francisco architect Phillip Schwerdt of the firm of Laist & Schwerdt was the original architect of the Scribner Opera House. The Scribner was an upstairs house, and the 1919 rebuild designed by O. L. Clark gutted the building to put the California Theatre on the ground floor. It also increased the seating capacity from 800 to the 1,200 with which the house was listed in the 1926 FDY.
The earliest evidence of the California Theatre I’ve found was this project noted in the May 23, 1919 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor:
“Ontario- J. [sic] Stanley Wilson of Riverside is preparing plans for a two-story brick theater building to contain an auditorium seating 700 and ten offices, to be erected in Ontario for Dr. McClelland.”
The July 25 issue of the same publication had this item:
“Ontario- Dr. C. McClelland expects to begin work at once on the new California theater building at Euclid Ave. and B st., to cost $30,000.”
It’s possible that the California opened before the end of 1919. The 700-seat California and the 500-seat Euclid are the only theaters listed for Ontario in the 1926 FDY.
SWB&C appears to have gotten the architect’s first initial wrong. He was surely Riverside architect G. Stanley Wilson, who in the 1910s worked under Myron Hunt on the Mission Inn in Riverside, and later was responsible for designing a number of the expansions the hotel underwent over the years.
The Gotham Theatre was built in 1920 and designed by Carlson & Wiseman. A notice that plans for the project had been filed appeared in the September 25, 1920 issue of Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide. This web page has an overview of the theater’s history.
The September 4, 1920 issue of Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide had a short article saying that the City of New York had granted a twenty year lease on a plot of city-owned land under the Manhattan Bridge to developer Henry E. Jacobs.
Jacobs planned to erect a two-story store and showroom building along the East Broadway frontage, which would include an entrance for a moving picture theater that would occupy the remainder of the plot. The entire project was being designed by architects Gronenberg & Leuchtag. The theater was to be leased to the Florence Theatre Corporation, also for a term of twenty years.
Extensive alterations were made to the Riverhead Theatre in 1931, the house reopening on February 5 as advertised in that day’s issue of The County Review (PDF here.) The architect for the remodeling was Calvin Kiessling, who had offices in New York City and in New Caanan, Connecticut.
The Scenic Theatre was the only theater listed for Keene in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. This PDF file has an extract from a book about Keene which says that the Scenic Theatre was built by Pike & Whipple in 1914, and the building was demolished in 1966. A 2004 article gives the Scenic’s opening date as March 2, and says that it closed in the early 1960s.
Theater industry trade journals indicate that by early 1918 the Scenic was being run by Charles C. Baldwin, who would open the Colonial Theatre in 1924. Keene’s first motion picture house, the Nickel Theatre (aka Majestic) opened on Church Street on January 9, 1905, and by 1913 the town had a house called the Dreamland Theatre.
Larry Harnisch’s “Daily Mirror” weblog has posted an ad for this theater that ran in the July 17, 1947 issue of the Los Angeles Sentinal, the city’s African-American newspaper. The ad promotes the house as the Flo-Mills Theatre.
The Liberty Theatre was at 221 E. Main Street, according to this article. The Liberty was in operation from 1929 to 1956.
The Rex Theatre was mentioned in the June 15, 1918 issue of Motography. The Victor Theatre was open by 1906, and construction had begun in 1905. It was listed as a 900-seat, ground floor house in the Cahn guides. The Victor was listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory along with houses called the Lyric and the Majestic.
This item from the August 10, 1969 issue of The Tennessean contradicts our current description of this house. It says that the Madison Theatre was opened by Martin Theatres. I notice that the grand opening ad uploaded by Mike Rivest doesn’t mention either Loew’s or Martin, but it must have been a Martin house first, later taken over by Loew’s.
Architects were the Columbus, Georgia firm Brookbank, Murphy & Shields. Predecessor firm Brookbank & Murphy had designed Martin’s Georgia Cinerama in Atlanta in 1965, and probably did a number of other projects for Martin during this period.
Rstewart: Martin did have at least one theater designed by Brookbank, Murphy & Shields, the successors to the firm that designed the Georgia Cinerama. It’s the only one I’ve identified so far, being the Madison Theatre in Nashville, which doesn’t look much like the Georgia house. Chains tend to stay with the same architects for many projects, though, so it’s entirely possible that there is a near-twin to the Martin Cinerama out there somewhere.
I’ve been hunting down more information about the Odeon and the Bijou, and though I’ve found out that both opened somewhat earlier than I’d thought, I haven’t had much luck unraveling the confusion over the later names used in the 1920s. I’ll put together what I’ve found so far and submit the new pages as soon as possible.
This item about the 1927 rebuilding of the Robinson Grand Theatre is from the July 9 issue of The Moving Picture World:
An ad for the Pictureland Theatre appears in the November 7, 1924, issue of a publication called The Tower. The 1926 edition of Glenville State Normal School’s student annual, “The Kanewhachen,” makes reference to a showingof “The Ten Commandments” at the Pictureland Theatre on October 5, 1925.
The Pictureland Theatre is listed in the 1926 FDY, though with only 100 seats, so the house was probably either expanded or moved to a new location later. I did find this web page with the line: “Finally, Thelma told me she and Newsom were able to get an apartment over the new Pictureland Theatre owned by Judge Marsh in 1929.” The wording suggests a new location more than an expansion.
The March 11, 1939 issue of Boxoffice had this news from Glenville:
The New Lyric Theatre was advertised in the January 17, 1939 issue of The Glenville Mercury.There are references to an earlier house called the Lyric Theatre in Glenville, operating at least as early as 1925, which might have been the year it opened. The 1926 FDY has listings for the Pictureland Theatre and an “M. P. Theatre” at Glenville, which might indicate that the new house hadn’t yet been opened or named when the yearbook went to press sometime in late 1925.
The December 21, 1921 issue of Exhibitors Trade Review ran this item about the relaunch of the Palace Theatre as the Gillis:
Ken Roe: Having rechecked my sources I now believe I conflated the histories of two different theaters on this page. The Odeon at 311 Pike Street did not become the second Orpheum. The second Orpheum was the former Bijou Theatre at 331 Main Street.
My careless reading of the following two paragraphs from this web page was the source of my confusion, which was aggravated by certain puzzling inconsistencies in the FDY lists for Clarksburg:
I now suspect that the house listed as the Bijou in FDY’s during the late 1920s was probably the former Odeon, and the first Bijou on Main Street, then operated by Jack Marks, was most likely the house listed by the FDYs of the late 1920s and early 1930s as the Main Street Theatre. Marks attempted to use the name Orpheum at the former Bijou in 1923, but a 1924 court decision awarded the rights tot he name to the new lessee of the original Orpheum, Claude Robinson. Marks was able to use the name Orpheum for his Main Street house after the original Orpheum closed.The former Odeon was renamed the Bijou at some point in the 1920s, but it is not clear from FDY listings just when. Most likely it was when Marks started calling the original Bijou the Orpheum, and he ended up losing both names. The Odeon/first Bijou appears to have closed as the Main Street Theatre no later than 1931, in any case. It is not listed in FDYs after that year.
After Jack Marks lost the lease on the original Orpheum in, the house was taken over by Claude Robinson. Marks took over the former Bijou Theatre on Main Street and renamed it the Orpheum, leading to a contretemps with Robinson, as noted in this item from The Moving Picture World of September 15, 1923:
The court’s decision went against Marks, as revealed by this item from MPW of March 8, 1924:Marks was eventually able to use the name Orpheum for the former Bijou, but not until the original Orpheum had been closed and its building converted into offices.A Princess Theatre, situated on Pike Street in Shinnston, was listed in a 1921 Clarksburg city directory. However, as the Princess building at 314 Pike features a parapet inscription reading “A&M 1940” I don’t think we can be sure the 1921 Princess was the same house. The Princess might have moved to a new building in 1940, or the original building might have been remodeled at that time.
I believe the seating capacity of 350 we list for this Orpheum was taken from a later FDY and was actually the capacity of the second Orpheum, aka Marks' Orpheum, which operated until 1952. The 1929 FDY gives the Orpheum a capacity of 1,400, which itself is probably a gross exaggeration. The 1914 edition of Gus Hill’s National Theatrical Directory lists the Orpheum with 700 seats, which is more plausible.
1929 was the original Orpheum’s last year of operation, after which the building was converted into offices for the Monongahela Power Company. Nevertheless, FDY continued to list the Orpheum with 1,400 seats as late as 1932. They finally corrected the error in 1933, listing the second Orpheum with 400 seats.
Clarksburg’s Orpheum was not part of the Orpheum vaudeville circuit. The Orpheum circuit was primarily a western operation, while the east was dominated by the Keith-Albee circuit, with which the Orpheum circuit eventually merged. When the Orpheum circuit was founded in California in the 1890s, Orpheum was already a fairly common name for theaters, and the circuit was unable to trademark the name.
The Moller organ installed at the Orpheum in 1915 might have been a replacement for a piano or perhaps a Fotoplayer orchestrion, both of which were frequently used in early movie theaters.
This history of Clarksburg’s theaters says that the Robinson Grand Theatre opened on February 5, 1913.
Wilmer and Vincent’s Orpheum Theatre in Allentown opened on August 27, 1906, and was designed by architect Fuller Claflin, according to this article by Frank Whelan posted December 5, 2016, on the web site of Allentown television station WFMZ. The State Theatre building was demolished in 1954, though the house had closed some years earlier. Its site, occupied by a parking lot for more than six decades, was recently redeveloped with an apartment complex.
This brief article from the June 28, 2015 Reading Eagle says that, yes, the Hippodrome was renamed the Towne Theatre in the 1970s, but was closed before the end of that decade. The article also says the Hippodrome had opened in December, 1914.
Ever-unreliable Google Maps broke my earlier link. Maybe they won’t break this one. (As if!)
San Francisco architect Phillip Schwerdt of the firm of Laist & Schwerdt was the original architect of the Scribner Opera House. The Scribner was an upstairs house, and the 1919 rebuild designed by O. L. Clark gutted the building to put the California Theatre on the ground floor. It also increased the seating capacity from 800 to the 1,200 with which the house was listed in the 1926 FDY.
The earliest evidence of the California Theatre I’ve found was this project noted in the May 23, 1919 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor:
The July 25 issue of the same publication had this item:It’s possible that the California opened before the end of 1919. The 700-seat California and the 500-seat Euclid are the only theaters listed for Ontario in the 1926 FDY.SWB&C appears to have gotten the architect’s first initial wrong. He was surely Riverside architect G. Stanley Wilson, who in the 1910s worked under Myron Hunt on the Mission Inn in Riverside, and later was responsible for designing a number of the expansions the hotel underwent over the years.