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.
I don’t believe the Park Theatre building has been demolished. It appears to be the two-story building with two upstairs windows and red trim on the ground floor. The address is not visible in Google street view, but the building across the vacant lot to the south has the number 114, and the Chinese restaurant to the north has the address 126. The vacant lot was probably at 118-120. A brochure for a walking tour of downtown Ontario says this about the building:
“Lerch Building- 122 N. Euclid Ave.– Built in 1913 as a theatre by Jacob Lerch, the Lerch Building later became
known as the ‘Park Theater’ and then ‘Euclid Theater’ until
1928. By 1951, the front façade of the building had been removed and altered. The only remnant from this building’s theater era is the marquees used to display movie posters. Local Landmark No. 18 (1998)
This item from the May 9, 1919 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor might be about the Liberty Theatre, the Grand’s predecessor:
“Miami, Ariz.– Work will be started at once on a new theater to be erected on the property of Charles Goodwin for Theodore Souris, Peter Souris and John Kresos, proprietors of the Lyric Theater. The building will be fireproof and will seat about 700.”
AMinton: The conflation of the two Towers would have been highly improbable. Aside from the fact that the Tower in Los Angeles had been built almost a decade earlier, the Architect & Engineer item I cited didn’t mention the name Tower:
“S. Charles Lee, 381 Bush Street, San Francisco, has let contracts for remodeling the Majestic Theater at 2465 Mission Street, San Francisco.”
I doubt that Lee maintained a full office in San Francisco, so 381 Bush must have been the quarters of someone associated with him, at least on this particular project. I checked the address in the 1937 San Francisco city directory, and among the 32 results were one architect, Douglas Dacee Stone, and one structural engineer, John B. Leonard, either of whom might have been Lee’s San Francisco associate for this project.
In any case (and I don’t know why I didn’t notice this earlier) Lee’s remodeling job took place in 1937, and since the correspondence you mention was dated 1941-42, it would have been about a different project. It was not unusual for theaters to undergo alterations requiring an architect’s involvement every few years. One thing we can be sure of is that the name was not changed after Lee’s remodeling job. The house was still listed as the Majestic in the 1939 city directory. That means it’s likely that the marquee and vertical sign with just enough spaces for the name Tower probably dates from Minton’s remodeling rather than Lee’s.
Coincidentally, the August, 1937 Architect & Engineer did have a brief article about a school auditorium in San Mateo designed by H. A. Minton, with illustrations on this page and the text on the previous page.
As Lee’s office was in Los Angeles, he would have hired a supervising architect from the Bay Area for the project, preferably one who, like Minton, had previous experience building theaters.
The June 8, 1944 issue of The Jacksboro Gazette had an ad for the Texas Theatre with the line “Formerly the Jack.” The name of the house had changed after a new owner took over in May, but this was the earliest ad I’ve found noting the former name. The Jack Theatre was advertised in the paper at least as early as August 20, 1942.
What I have not yet been able to discover is whether the Jack/Texas Theatre was the same house that had operated as the Opera House Theatre at least as late as December, 1939. The Opera House had become predominantly a movie theatre in 1910, and in the mid-1930s had been operated as the Opera House Picture Show. The Opera House was apparently an upstairs theater, if I’ve correctly interpreted the phrase “…it is ‘all balcony’….” used in an article in the March 30, 1939 issue of the Gazette (scan at The Portal to Texas History.)
In 1950 Jacksboro still had two walk-in theaters. An ad in the December 14 issue of the Jacksboro Gazette-News offered Christmas Coupon Books from the Mecca and Texas theaters. By 1955, only the Texas Theatre was still advertising in the paper, but the Mesquite Drive-In had opened by then.
The Crazy Theatre was one of six movie houses listed for Mineral Wells in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The Portal to Texas History says that this photo predates 1914, as the street had not yet been paved when it was taken.
On September 1, 1927, the Crazy Theatre ran an ad in the Jakesboro Gazette announcing the presentation of “The Big Parade” at the theater, with two shows a day from September 9 through September 12. “Now in its second year on Broadway in New York at $2.00,” the ad said, noting that all seats would be 50 cents for the matinees at the Crazy, with prices of 75 cents on the main floor and 50 cents in the balcony for evening performances. Tickets were on sale at the Grand Theatre’s box office, so the two houses must have been under the same management.
The Grand was most likely built by the owner of the Crazy Theatre, as an April 1, 1920 item in Texas Trade Review and Industrial Record said that architect A. B. Withers was preparing plans for the Crazy Theatre, but there doesn’t appear to have been any change to the Crazy itself in 1920. The plans were most likely for the house that became the Grand, which was designed by Withers and was open by 1921.
Multiple sources indicate that the Cactus Theatre was designed by local architect Robert Maxey. The Cactus closed as a movie theater in May, 1958, according to the papers of Joe H. Bryant, the theater’s first operator.
An article about Plains in the August 13, 1948 issue of the
Lubbock Morning Avalanche had these lines which were probably about the Mac Theatre, the design of which appears to be from that period:
“A new motion picture theater was constructed by Mr. and Mrs. Don McGinty last year at a cost of $40,000. Plains is proud of the late pictures shown there and of the fact that visitors come from Brownfield and Denver City to see movies in Plains.”
My guess would be that Mac was Mr. McGinty’s nickname.
The Ritz is listed in Eric Ledell Smith’s book African American Theater Buildings: An Illustrated Historical Directory. It’s possible that the Ritz was the successor to a theater built in 1929 at Avenue A and 19th Street. The item about its construction in the August 13, 1929 Lubbock Morning Avalanche didn’t give the name of that house.
The theater at 1116 Broadway Street was originally to have been called the Ritz, according to an article in the August 13, 1933 issue of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. Remodeling of the existing building, with plans by architect S. B. Haynes (Sylvan Blum Haynes), would get underway within a few days and the project was expected to take about thirty days to completion.
The August 5, 1950 Lubbock Morning Avalanche said that the Arnett-Benson Theatre would have its formal opening that night. The owners of the new neighborhood house were Mr. and Mrs. Preston Smith, who had entered the theater business when they opened the Tech Theatre in Lubbock on June 2, 1936. By 1950 the Smith Theaters chain included the State Theatre, the Plains Theatre, and the 5-Point Drive-In.
Mr. and Mrs. Preston Smith, both graduates of Texas Tech University, opened the Tech Theatre on June 2, 1936, according to an article about the opening of their fourth theater, the Arnett-Benson, that appeared in the August 5, 1950 issue of the Lubbock Morning Avalanche. The Tech was the Smiths' first theater venture.
A brief article in the June 25, 1935 issue of the Lubbock Morning Avalanche said that excavation had been completed in Morton for a brick and concrete theater building, 28x130 feet, for Wallace Blankenship. The opening was targeted for September 1.
The Wallace Theatre in the photo uploaded by Don Lewis looks about the right size.
Are we sure the Nox Theatre has been demolished? As of August, 2013, it still appeared in Google’s street view, stage house and all, and the building looked to be in fairly decent condition. There is no more recent street view.
An article in the June 28, 1965 issue of the Eldorado Daily Journal said that S. M. Farrar took over the Casino Theatre in 1909. In 1912, Farrar, O. L. Turner, W. T. Turner and others merged their various holdings and formed the Colonial Amusement Company. That company was supplemented by Turner and Farrar’s Egyptian Amusement Company in 1914, and both companies were consolidated into Turner-Farrar Theaters in 1945, by which time a succeeding generation of the families had taken over management of the company. Essentially, the Casino/Orpheum was controlled by Turner-Farrar as early as 1912.
A fire that led to the reconstruction of the Casino Theatre took place on April 6, 1927, and was reported by numerous newspapers around the region. The house was renamed the Orpheum when it was reopened. Another fire struck the Orpheum in 1928, as reported in the January 14 issue of the Decatur Herald, which said that the fire was the result of an incendiary device.
The style of the theater is less difficult to identify than kencmcintyre thought. The use of face brick to create a frame around the entrance is characteristic of the Prairie style, that offshoot of the Art Nouveau movement that flourished in the region around Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Casino was a rather plain example of the style, lacking the more intricate decoration used by such exponents as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, or George Elmslie, but the influence is still obvious.
The asymmetry of the Orpheum’s facade is almost certainly the result of one of the post-fire rebuildings. The left sidewall must have been built out a few feet beyond its original location, but the decorative motif of the earlier frontage was not altered to accommodate the additional width. I’ve been unable to discover if the Prairie style facade was part of the 1917 expansion (which, come to think of it, might also have been when the side wall was moved outward,) or if it was part of the original, pre-1909 Casino. Pre-1909 is more likely, but 1917 is not out of the question.
The only theater listed at Eldorado (mis-entered as Elodrado) in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory is not listed by its name, but under the name of the manager as the “S. M. Farrar Theatre.” I have no doubt the house listed was the Casino, though.
A movie house called the Lyric was also mentioned in the December 2, 1908 issue of the Freeport Journal-Standard. I don’t know if it was the same house that was operating in the 1910s, though.
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists the Majestic M. P. Theatre, at 118 Stephenson St. I believe Freeport’s lots have since been renumbered.
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists the Orpheum Theatre at 77 Stephenson Street. Meanwhile, the August 2, 1913 issue of The Moving Picture World had this item:
“Carl Eademacher, owner of the Orpheum Theater at Freeport, has opened a new airdome on Chicago street, in that city. The place has a capacity of 1,000, and secures an admission of ten cents for two acts of vaudeville and three reels of pictures. The plan of operating in conjunction with the theater, which has been so popular in Illinois, will be followed, and in case of rain the performances are being held in the Orpheum.”
I believe addresses have changed in Freeport at some point, perhaps more than once. Not only are theaters in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory listed at addresses that do not now exist, but an item in a “Fifty Years Ago” column of the July 21, 1964, issue of the Freeport Journal-Standard, telling of the construction of the Alhambra Theatre, gives its address as 110 Stephenson.
The vintage photo uploaded by elmorovivo shows the Strand on the south side of what is now the two-digit block of West Stephenson, a couple of doors east of Van Buren Avenue. The old courthouse in the next block has been replaced by a modern building, but the Civil War Memorial in front of it is still there, as is a church steeple seen farther west on the north side of Stephenson in both the vintage photo and Google’s street view.
It will probably take quite a bit of puzzling to discover the actual modern addresses of Freeport’s old theaters, and some old photos of their historic surroundings. In the meantime, it looks quite likely that the old Alhambra/Strand building is still standing, but given the angle of the vintage photo it’s impossible to tell which of the old buildings it was in. My best guess would be either the store occupied by Celia’s Gifts, Antiques and Home, 25 W. Stephenson, or Chubby Belly Buffet, 23 W. Stephenson. Still, it could have been another door or two east.
The caption on the vintage postcard got the location wrong. The view is east along West Main Street, from the 200 block. The building with the Empire Theatre sign has been demolished, as has its four-story neighbor at the corner of Galena Avenue.
I’ve set Google street view to the correct location. A business in a surviving building next door to the Empire’s site uses the address 213 W. Main, so I would estimate the Empire’s address as either 209 or 211 W. Main.
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.
I don’t believe the Park Theatre building has been demolished. It appears to be the two-story building with two upstairs windows and red trim on the ground floor. The address is not visible in Google street view, but the building across the vacant lot to the south has the number 114, and the Chinese restaurant to the north has the address 126. The vacant lot was probably at 118-120. A brochure for a walking tour of downtown Ontario says this about the building:
This PDF of the brochure has a (very tiny) photo of the building when the theater was in it, with its entrance in the right-hand bay. Whoever wrote the text for the brochure obviously knows less about the theater’s history than we do, but they were probably right that the building is still standing.This item from the May 9, 1919 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor might be about the Liberty Theatre, the Grand’s predecessor:
AMinton: The conflation of the two Towers would have been highly improbable. Aside from the fact that the Tower in Los Angeles had been built almost a decade earlier, the Architect & Engineer item I cited didn’t mention the name Tower:
I doubt that Lee maintained a full office in San Francisco, so 381 Bush must have been the quarters of someone associated with him, at least on this particular project. I checked the address in the 1937 San Francisco city directory, and among the 32 results were one architect, Douglas Dacee Stone, and one structural engineer, John B. Leonard, either of whom might have been Lee’s San Francisco associate for this project.In any case (and I don’t know why I didn’t notice this earlier) Lee’s remodeling job took place in 1937, and since the correspondence you mention was dated 1941-42, it would have been about a different project. It was not unusual for theaters to undergo alterations requiring an architect’s involvement every few years. One thing we can be sure of is that the name was not changed after Lee’s remodeling job. The house was still listed as the Majestic in the 1939 city directory. That means it’s likely that the marquee and vertical sign with just enough spaces for the name Tower probably dates from Minton’s remodeling rather than Lee’s.
Coincidentally, the August, 1937 Architect & Engineer did have a brief article about a school auditorium in San Mateo designed by H. A. Minton, with illustrations on this page and the text on the previous page.
As Lee’s office was in Los Angeles, he would have hired a supervising architect from the Bay Area for the project, preferably one who, like Minton, had previous experience building theaters.
The June 8, 1944 issue of The Jacksboro Gazette had an ad for the Texas Theatre with the line “Formerly the Jack.” The name of the house had changed after a new owner took over in May, but this was the earliest ad I’ve found noting the former name. The Jack Theatre was advertised in the paper at least as early as August 20, 1942.
What I have not yet been able to discover is whether the Jack/Texas Theatre was the same house that had operated as the Opera House Theatre at least as late as December, 1939. The Opera House had become predominantly a movie theatre in 1910, and in the mid-1930s had been operated as the Opera House Picture Show. The Opera House was apparently an upstairs theater, if I’ve correctly interpreted the phrase “…it is ‘all balcony’….” used in an article in the March 30, 1939 issue of the Gazette (scan at The Portal to Texas History.)
In 1950 Jacksboro still had two walk-in theaters. An ad in the December 14 issue of the Jacksboro Gazette-News offered Christmas Coupon Books from the Mecca and Texas theaters. By 1955, only the Texas Theatre was still advertising in the paper, but the Mesquite Drive-In had opened by then.
The Crazy Theatre was one of six movie houses listed for Mineral Wells in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The Portal to Texas History says that this photo predates 1914, as the street had not yet been paved when it was taken.
On September 1, 1927, the Crazy Theatre ran an ad in the Jakesboro Gazette announcing the presentation of “The Big Parade” at the theater, with two shows a day from September 9 through September 12. “Now in its second year on Broadway in New York at $2.00,” the ad said, noting that all seats would be 50 cents for the matinees at the Crazy, with prices of 75 cents on the main floor and 50 cents in the balcony for evening performances. Tickets were on sale at the Grand Theatre’s box office, so the two houses must have been under the same management.
The Grand was most likely built by the owner of the Crazy Theatre, as an April 1, 1920 item in Texas Trade Review and Industrial Record said that architect A. B. Withers was preparing plans for the Crazy Theatre, but there doesn’t appear to have been any change to the Crazy itself in 1920. The plans were most likely for the house that became the Grand, which was designed by Withers and was open by 1921.
The Rhea Theatre opened in 1939, and was a Griffith Amusement Company house, according to the November 6, 1939 issue of the El Paso Herald-Post.
Multiple sources indicate that the Cactus Theatre was designed by local architect Robert Maxey. The Cactus closed as a movie theater in May, 1958, according to the papers of Joe H. Bryant, the theater’s first operator.
An article about Plains in the August 13, 1948 issue of the Lubbock Morning Avalanche had these lines which were probably about the Mac Theatre, the design of which appears to be from that period:
My guess would be that Mac was Mr. McGinty’s nickname.The Ritz is listed in Eric Ledell Smith’s book African American Theater Buildings: An Illustrated Historical Directory. It’s possible that the Ritz was the successor to a theater built in 1929 at Avenue A and 19th Street. The item about its construction in the August 13, 1929 Lubbock Morning Avalanche didn’t give the name of that house.
The theater at 1116 Broadway Street was originally to have been called the Ritz, according to an article in the August 13, 1933 issue of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. Remodeling of the existing building, with plans by architect S. B. Haynes (Sylvan Blum Haynes), would get underway within a few days and the project was expected to take about thirty days to completion.
The August 5, 1950 Lubbock Morning Avalanche said that the Arnett-Benson Theatre would have its formal opening that night. The owners of the new neighborhood house were Mr. and Mrs. Preston Smith, who had entered the theater business when they opened the Tech Theatre in Lubbock on June 2, 1936. By 1950 the Smith Theaters chain included the State Theatre, the Plains Theatre, and the 5-Point Drive-In.
Mr. and Mrs. Preston Smith, both graduates of Texas Tech University, opened the Tech Theatre on June 2, 1936, according to an article about the opening of their fourth theater, the Arnett-Benson, that appeared in the August 5, 1950 issue of the Lubbock Morning Avalanche. The Tech was the Smiths' first theater venture.
A brief article in the June 25, 1935 issue of the Lubbock Morning Avalanche said that excavation had been completed in Morton for a brick and concrete theater building, 28x130 feet, for Wallace Blankenship. The opening was targeted for September 1.
The Wallace Theatre in the photo uploaded by Don Lewis looks about the right size.
There is a reference to the Wallace Theatre at Lorenzo in the August 4, 1946 Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.
Are we sure the Nox Theatre has been demolished? As of August, 2013, it still appeared in Google’s street view, stage house and all, and the building looked to be in fairly decent condition. There is no more recent street view.
Vintage photo of the Nox on What Was There.
An article in the June 28, 1965 issue of the Eldorado Daily Journal said that S. M. Farrar took over the Casino Theatre in 1909. In 1912, Farrar, O. L. Turner, W. T. Turner and others merged their various holdings and formed the Colonial Amusement Company. That company was supplemented by Turner and Farrar’s Egyptian Amusement Company in 1914, and both companies were consolidated into Turner-Farrar Theaters in 1945, by which time a succeeding generation of the families had taken over management of the company. Essentially, the Casino/Orpheum was controlled by Turner-Farrar as early as 1912.
A fire that led to the reconstruction of the Casino Theatre took place on April 6, 1927, and was reported by numerous newspapers around the region. The house was renamed the Orpheum when it was reopened. Another fire struck the Orpheum in 1928, as reported in the January 14 issue of the Decatur Herald, which said that the fire was the result of an incendiary device.
The style of the theater is less difficult to identify than kencmcintyre thought. The use of face brick to create a frame around the entrance is characteristic of the Prairie style, that offshoot of the Art Nouveau movement that flourished in the region around Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Casino was a rather plain example of the style, lacking the more intricate decoration used by such exponents as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, or George Elmslie, but the influence is still obvious.
The asymmetry of the Orpheum’s facade is almost certainly the result of one of the post-fire rebuildings. The left sidewall must have been built out a few feet beyond its original location, but the decorative motif of the earlier frontage was not altered to accommodate the additional width. I’ve been unable to discover if the Prairie style facade was part of the 1917 expansion (which, come to think of it, might also have been when the side wall was moved outward,) or if it was part of the original, pre-1909 Casino. Pre-1909 is more likely, but 1917 is not out of the question.
The only theater listed at Eldorado (mis-entered as Elodrado) in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory is not listed by its name, but under the name of the manager as the “S. M. Farrar Theatre.” I have no doubt the house listed was the Casino, though.
A movie house called the Lyric was also mentioned in the December 2, 1908 issue of the Freeport Journal-Standard. I don’t know if it was the same house that was operating in the 1910s, though.
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists the Majestic M. P. Theatre, at 118 Stephenson St. I believe Freeport’s lots have since been renumbered.
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists the Orpheum Theatre at 77 Stephenson Street. Meanwhile, the August 2, 1913 issue of The Moving Picture World had this item:
I believe addresses have changed in Freeport at some point, perhaps more than once. Not only are theaters in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory listed at addresses that do not now exist, but an item in a “Fifty Years Ago” column of the July 21, 1964, issue of the Freeport Journal-Standard, telling of the construction of the Alhambra Theatre, gives its address as 110 Stephenson.
The vintage photo uploaded by elmorovivo shows the Strand on the south side of what is now the two-digit block of West Stephenson, a couple of doors east of Van Buren Avenue. The old courthouse in the next block has been replaced by a modern building, but the Civil War Memorial in front of it is still there, as is a church steeple seen farther west on the north side of Stephenson in both the vintage photo and Google’s street view.
It will probably take quite a bit of puzzling to discover the actual modern addresses of Freeport’s old theaters, and some old photos of their historic surroundings. In the meantime, it looks quite likely that the old Alhambra/Strand building is still standing, but given the angle of the vintage photo it’s impossible to tell which of the old buildings it was in. My best guess would be either the store occupied by Celia’s Gifts, Antiques and Home, 25 W. Stephenson, or Chubby Belly Buffet, 23 W. Stephenson. Still, it could have been another door or two east.
The Lyric Theatre was one of five movie theaters listed at Freeport in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.
The caption on the vintage postcard got the location wrong. The view is east along West Main Street, from the 200 block. The building with the Empire Theatre sign has been demolished, as has its four-story neighbor at the corner of Galena Avenue.
I’ve set Google street view to the correct location. A business in a surviving building next door to the Empire’s site uses the address 213 W. Main, so I would estimate the Empire’s address as either 209 or 211 W. Main.