The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists the Okay Theatre at 201 Davis Avenue, so there was once a theater at that address. It just wan’t the Hippodrome.
This item, datelined West Virginia, was in the January 15, 1916, issue of The Music Trade Review: “The Hippodrome, which will cost $20,000, will soon open at Elkins.”
It remains impossible to reconcile the vintage photo, depicting the Hippodrome, with the address 201 Davis Avenue. That address has a very old brick store building bearing no resemblance to the theater building in the photo. Even combined with the building next door, adjacent to the Manos Theatre, I don’t see how the structures at 201-203 could possibly have held a 648-seat theater, even if they shared a common wall all the way back (which, per the satellite view, they don’t.)
But this photo, though small and a bit blurry, reveals the location of the Hippodrome to have been up the block from the Manos, not down the block, with the address probably being no lower than 211 Davis. The horizontal sign with the theater’s name can be made out, just barely, and the balcony seen above the sign in our vintage photo is revealed to be the lower of two such balconies on what was the tallest building on the block.
The Hippodrome last appeared in the FDY in 1957, and in 1958 the Elkins Theatre appeared. The name most likely changed in 1957, though it’s always possible the FDY was late updating the information and it happened earlier (at least they did update it, unlike the address, which they got wrong year after year after year.) As I noted earlier the Monessen Entertainment Company had both the Manos Theatre and the Elkins Theatre in operation at least as late as 1967. An earlier Elkins Theatre was listed in FDY’s in the late 1920s, but that smaller house was located in the Moose Lodge’s building at 112 Davis Avenue.
Street view needs to be reset. The second Jennings Block, northeast corner of Broad and 15th, has a modernized facade and the name “Metropolitan” on its front. The Theatorium, located at the west end of the building at the corner of 15th Street, was one of two movie houses located in the second Jennings Block at various times, the other being the Ideal Theatre, which occupied the east end of the building in the 1930s. A third theater, the Star/Starette, operated in an annex to the first Jennings Building at 1329 Broad Street.
The Princess was listed at 222 S. Main Street in the 1922 city directory, which would place it directly across the street from the site of the Castle Theatre.
This item from The American Contractor of March 18, 1916, might be about the Grand Theatre on Main Street, but there was another Grand Theatre in New Castle, and the Grand Theater Company might also have operated other houses:
“Movinq Picture Theater (rebuild): 1 sty. Newcastle, Ind. Archt. Charles E. Bacon, 1603 Merchants Bank bldg., Indianapolis. Owner Grand Theater Co., Paul Jamison, Newcastle. Prelim, plans in progress. Brk. Details later.”
Here is a history of the first Grand Theatre building from the NRHP registration form for the New Castle Commercial Historic District:
“The former Coca-Cola Bottling plant at 123 N. Main was originally constructed between 1901 and 1908 as the "Coliseum Skating Rink” (photograph 19). The rink was home to the New Castle Roller Polo team from 1908 to 1909, which was disbanded after the building was converted to the Grand Theatre in 1909 and the semi-professional team had nowhere to skate.By 1924, the building had been adapted for the sale and repairing of automobiles, and in 1940 the Taylor Motor Co. was selling Studebaker’s [sic] at this address. In 1941 the building was remodeled, with its present Art Moderne look, for use as the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New Castle.“
The Grand Theatre was listed in the 1922 city directory with the address 1207 Race Street, so the location at 123 N. Main had closed by then. The second Grand Theatre was in the Masonic Temple, which had an 850-seat theater upstairs originally called the Alcazar. It was renamed the Grand when converted to a movie house, and operated until 1926 when it was gutted by a fire. Rebuilding in 1927 the Masons converted the former theater space for their own use.
A theater operated at 1331 Broad Street from 1914 to 1949, according to the NRHP registration form for the Newcastle Commercial Historic District (1329 is now the address for the entrance to the building’s upstairs. The building was erected as an annex to the larger Jennings Building to the east, and the upstairs space was originally probably accessed through that building.)
The November 3, 1917 issue of The Moving Picture World said: “OSSIAN, IA. — Majestic theater is being remodeled and will be reopened under the name of Princess.”
Ossian had an 350-seat Opera House, built in 1893 and still in use after having been renovated and converted into a Knights of Columbus facility in 1956. I don’t know if it ever served as a movie theater.
Ossian did get a new movie house called the Ossian Theatre in 1939 or 1940, noted in the January 6, 1940 issue of Boxoffice as “…the first new house in this town in 10 years.”
The Mound Theatre first appears in the FDY in 1949, when it is listed with 240 seats. Theaters are not listed by city in the 1948 FDY, but earlier Ocheyedan had a house called the Princess Theatre, listed with 165 seats in 1947 and with between 150 and 200 seats in various previous years. The Princess was in operation at least as early as 1917. I’ve been unable to discover if the Mound was the Princess expanded, but it must have been in operation by 1947, and possibly as early as 1946.
The February, 1890 issue of construction trade journal Stone said that the $80,000 theater being built at St. Paul for Jacob Litt had been designed by Oscar Cobb.
Here is a peculiar item from the “Canadian Notes” column of the April 21, 1917 issue of The Moving Picture Weekly:
“The Garrick Theatre, College and
Bovercourt [sic] Road, is Toronto’s newest house, or rather one should say one of Toronto’s oldest houses made new. As a matter of fact the Garrick has been nameless ever since its construction, it being built but never operated. However, one of the local theatre syndicates has secured it and is remodelling and equipping the house to open very shortly. There is no doubt that it will present a most attractive appearance”
The May 4, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World also mentions the Garrick in Toronto:
“The Garrick, Toronto, has been secured by A. L. Hall of Montreal.”
The same journal mentions the Garrick again in its issue of June 8, 1918:
“The Garrick theater, College and Dovercourt road, Toronto, has again changed hands. The new owner is W. C. Wright, a veteran theater man. Mr. Wright has not been engaged in any theatrical enterprise for the past twelve years.”
I’ve found no later mentions of the Garrick, but the College Theatre is mentioned in this item from The Moving Picture World of September 6, 1919:
“The Aliens are getting ready to open new theatres in half a dozen different Canadian cities. Four new houses are nearly completed in Toronto alone, these being the St. Clair Theatre in the North End, Parkdale Theatre in the West, Beach Theatre in the East and College Theatre, near Dovercourt and College streets.”
Given the location of the Garrick and the College, and the fact that there seems to have been no overlap in their operation, the question that naturally arises is was the College a rebuild of the Garrick? While the interior of the College does look like something C. Howard Crane would have designed, the exterior bears a resemblance, and that only passing, only to his United Artists Theatre in Chicago. Perhaps he had to work with an existing building and lavished the Allens' limited money on the interior?
I’ve been unable to find any construction journal items about either the Garrick or the College, so there is no clue to their comparative sizes, nor have I found any photos of the Garrick. Still, it’s an interesting possibility that they were the same house.
There is a photo of the Ohio Theatre on page 75 of the Arcadia Publishing Co. book Tell City, by Chris Cail, published in August, 2017 (Google Books preview.) The caption says the building later became a church and was demolished following a fire.
The caption also says that Edward Jones financial advisors has built a new building on the site, and indeed in the current Google street view of 439 Main there is a foundation for that building newly laid. It looks like the only building in the vintage photo still standing is the narrow, single-floor storefront just to the right of the theater, which in street view now appears to have an antiques shop in it.
This house has been renamed Cinema 66, and has a new web site. The old web site is still up, but has become some sort of movie-related link farm.
An old Buzzfile listing has a Tell City Twin Cinemas located in the Highway 66 Plaza shopping center, so that must have been the name of this house before it was quaded. It was in operation by 1991, and probably earlier. This line from an article by Tell City native Scott Saalman probably refers to this former twin: “Opened in 1948, my beloved Swiss Theater never had a chance once the 1978 movie ‘Superman' flew across the twin screens of a newly opened cinema.”
That suggests a likely opening year of 1978 for this house, and a likely closing of the Swiss Theatre not long after.
The Swiss Theatre was at 1030 Main Street. The building is recognizable only from its situation and its size. The front has been remodeled and covered with vertical siding painted grayish blue, and an overhead door has been installed at one end. The set-back brick building to the left of the theater in the vintage photo is still there, as is the conifer growing in the parkway at the right. Otherwise it would be impossible to tell that this building once housed the Swiss Theatre.
Chester is a puzzle. For one thing, there are two towns in New York called Chester, the other being in Warren County, and Orange County, where this Chester is located, also has a village called Chester.
The bigger puzzle is that the November 24, 1951, issue of Boxoffice has a photo purporting to be of the Paramount Theatre in Chester, New York, designed by Michael DeAngelis, but Wikipedia tells me that in 1950 Chester’s population was only 2,878, and the Chester in Warren County was even smaller, so neither was likely to have a theater as spacious as the one in the photo.
John Lewis’s 1994 photo of the Quickway Cinema at CinemaTour shows a fairly large and rather plain building, but one that might have been built around 1950. Could it possibly have been the Paramount, as improbable as that seems? I suppose it’s more likely that Boxoffice just put the theater in the wrong town.
As joemasher said back in 2005, the theater’s building has been converted into a two-floor office building, but with some stores on the ground floor. The section that had the theater entrance in John Lewis’s photo looks like it is still there, but extended and filled with shops. The address of the Quickway Shopping Center is 69 Brookside Avenue.
According to this page at the Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada, the conversion of the building that had been the Montreal Auxilliary Bible Society into the Gaiety Theatre in 1909 was designed by architects Charles A. Mitchell and Daniel J. Crighton. The short-lived firm of Mitchell & Crighton lasted from 1907 to 1909, but produced two theaters, the other being the Idealograph Motion Picture Theatre, on Notre Dame Street West near Guy Street, also a 1909 project.
This item from the June 2, 1923, issue of The Moving Picture World is about the first Coliseum Theatre:
“Gross Will Attract Floating Population
“When W. D. Gross of Juneau, Alaska, was in Seattle recently he made arrangements with B. F. Shearer, Inc., for the complete equipment and furnishings, lighting effects, etc., for his new Coliseum Theatre in Ketchikan.
“Gross will have one of the finest houses on the coast. It will cost in the neighborhood of $85,000 and will seat 1,000. The theatre will be planned somewhat like the Liberty Theatre of Seattle, with a ramp going up to the mezzanine floor where it divides, circling to the balcony. Plans are by R. H. Rowe, architect of Seattle.
“A novel feature is the fact that Gross has ordered three large electric signs. The third is to be erected where it will shine from a high position out over the bay, the direction in which the theatre fronts. Ketcikan is a great anchorage for fishing fleets, and Gross wants to attract the ‘floating population.’”
Engineering News-Record of October 23, 1919, said that Loew’s Enterprises planned to spend $150,000 for alterations to the Palace Hippodrome Theatre in Seattle. This seems to have been about the standard amount Loew’s spent on refitting the big old theaters it acquired during this period. Plans for the project were, as usual, prepared by Thomas Lamb’s firm.
In 1920, this house was known as Loew’s Casino Theatre. A biography of vaudevillian Ted Healy says that he appeared there August 9-15, 1920. A notice in the October 23, 1919 issue of Engineering News-Record said that Loew’s Enterprises planned to spend $150,000 on alterations to the Casino Theatre in Salt Lake City. Plans for the project were by Thomas Lamb.
Porn is gone from the Paris Theatre. It is back to hosting live music. Here is the web site.
The March 16, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World had this brief but mis-located notice:
Here is an early interior photo of the Eagles Theatre.
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists the Okay Theatre at 201 Davis Avenue, so there was once a theater at that address. It just wan’t the Hippodrome.
This item, datelined West Virginia, was in the January 15, 1916, issue of The Music Trade Review: “The Hippodrome, which will cost $20,000, will soon open at Elkins.”
It remains impossible to reconcile the vintage photo, depicting the Hippodrome, with the address 201 Davis Avenue. That address has a very old brick store building bearing no resemblance to the theater building in the photo. Even combined with the building next door, adjacent to the Manos Theatre, I don’t see how the structures at 201-203 could possibly have held a 648-seat theater, even if they shared a common wall all the way back (which, per the satellite view, they don’t.)
But this photo, though small and a bit blurry, reveals the location of the Hippodrome to have been up the block from the Manos, not down the block, with the address probably being no lower than 211 Davis. The horizontal sign with the theater’s name can be made out, just barely, and the balcony seen above the sign in our vintage photo is revealed to be the lower of two such balconies on what was the tallest building on the block.
The Hippodrome last appeared in the FDY in 1957, and in 1958 the Elkins Theatre appeared. The name most likely changed in 1957, though it’s always possible the FDY was late updating the information and it happened earlier (at least they did update it, unlike the address, which they got wrong year after year after year.) As I noted earlier the Monessen Entertainment Company had both the Manos Theatre and the Elkins Theatre in operation at least as late as 1967. An earlier Elkins Theatre was listed in FDY’s in the late 1920s, but that smaller house was located in the Moose Lodge’s building at 112 Davis Avenue.
This house was listed as the Star Theater, 1329 Broad Street, in the 1909 city directory.
Street view needs to be reset. The second Jennings Block, northeast corner of Broad and 15th, has a modernized facade and the name “Metropolitan” on its front. The Theatorium, located at the west end of the building at the corner of 15th Street, was one of two movie houses located in the second Jennings Block at various times, the other being the Ideal Theatre, which occupied the east end of the building in the 1930s. A third theater, the Star/Starette, operated in an annex to the first Jennings Building at 1329 Broad Street.
The Princess was listed at 222 S. Main Street in the 1922 city directory, which would place it directly across the street from the site of the Castle Theatre.
This item from The American Contractor of March 18, 1916, might be about the Grand Theatre on Main Street, but there was another Grand Theatre in New Castle, and the Grand Theater Company might also have operated other houses:
Here is a history of the first Grand Theatre building from the NRHP registration form for the New Castle Commercial Historic District:The Grand Theatre was listed in the 1922 city directory with the address 1207 Race Street, so the location at 123 N. Main had closed by then. The second Grand Theatre was in the Masonic Temple, which had an 850-seat theater upstairs originally called the Alcazar. It was renamed the Grand when converted to a movie house, and operated until 1926 when it was gutted by a fire. Rebuilding in 1927 the Masons converted the former theater space for their own use.A theater operated at 1331 Broad Street from 1914 to 1949, according to the NRHP registration form for the Newcastle Commercial Historic District (1329 is now the address for the entrance to the building’s upstairs. The building was erected as an annex to the larger Jennings Building to the east, and the upstairs space was originally probably accessed through that building.)
The November 3, 1917 issue of The Moving Picture World said: “OSSIAN, IA. — Majestic theater is being remodeled and will be reopened under the name of Princess.”
Ossian had an 350-seat Opera House, built in 1893 and still in use after having been renovated and converted into a Knights of Columbus facility in 1956. I don’t know if it ever served as a movie theater.
Ossian did get a new movie house called the Ossian Theatre in 1939 or 1940, noted in the January 6, 1940 issue of Boxoffice as “…the first new house in this town in 10 years.”
The Mound Theatre first appears in the FDY in 1949, when it is listed with 240 seats. Theaters are not listed by city in the 1948 FDY, but earlier Ocheyedan had a house called the Princess Theatre, listed with 165 seats in 1947 and with between 150 and 200 seats in various previous years. The Princess was in operation at least as early as 1917. I’ve been unable to discover if the Mound was the Princess expanded, but it must have been in operation by 1947, and possibly as early as 1946.
The address is 115 W. Second Street, directly across the street from the Washington Theatre at 116.
The address is 116 W. Second Street.
The February, 1890 issue of construction trade journal Stone said that the $80,000 theater being built at St. Paul for Jacob Litt had been designed by Oscar Cobb.
Here is a peculiar item from the “Canadian Notes” column of the April 21, 1917 issue of The Moving Picture Weekly:
The May 4, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World also mentions the Garrick in Toronto:The same journal mentions the Garrick again in its issue of June 8, 1918:I’ve found no later mentions of the Garrick, but the College Theatre is mentioned in this item from The Moving Picture World of September 6, 1919:Given the location of the Garrick and the College, and the fact that there seems to have been no overlap in their operation, the question that naturally arises is was the College a rebuild of the Garrick? While the interior of the College does look like something C. Howard Crane would have designed, the exterior bears a resemblance, and that only passing, only to his United Artists Theatre in Chicago. Perhaps he had to work with an existing building and lavished the Allens' limited money on the interior?I’ve been unable to find any construction journal items about either the Garrick or the College, so there is no clue to their comparative sizes, nor have I found any photos of the Garrick. Still, it’s an interesting possibility that they were the same house.
There is a photo of the Ohio Theatre on page 75 of the Arcadia Publishing Co. book Tell City, by Chris Cail, published in August, 2017 (Google Books preview.) The caption says the building later became a church and was demolished following a fire.
The caption also says that Edward Jones financial advisors has built a new building on the site, and indeed in the current Google street view of 439 Main there is a foundation for that building newly laid. It looks like the only building in the vintage photo still standing is the narrow, single-floor storefront just to the right of the theater, which in street view now appears to have an antiques shop in it.
This house has been renamed Cinema 66, and has a new web site. The old web site is still up, but has become some sort of movie-related link farm.
An old Buzzfile listing has a Tell City Twin Cinemas located in the Highway 66 Plaza shopping center, so that must have been the name of this house before it was quaded. It was in operation by 1991, and probably earlier. This line from an article by Tell City native Scott Saalman probably refers to this former twin: “Opened in 1948, my beloved Swiss Theater never had a chance once the 1978 movie ‘Superman' flew across the twin screens of a newly opened cinema.”
That suggests a likely opening year of 1978 for this house, and a likely closing of the Swiss Theatre not long after.
The Swiss Theatre opened on July 27, 1948, according to the July 31 issue of Boxoffice.
The Swiss Theatre was at 1030 Main Street. The building is recognizable only from its situation and its size. The front has been remodeled and covered with vertical siding painted grayish blue, and an overhead door has been installed at one end. The set-back brick building to the left of the theater in the vintage photo is still there, as is the conifer growing in the parkway at the right. Otherwise it would be impossible to tell that this building once housed the Swiss Theatre.
Chester is a puzzle. For one thing, there are two towns in New York called Chester, the other being in Warren County, and Orange County, where this Chester is located, also has a village called Chester.
The bigger puzzle is that the November 24, 1951, issue of Boxoffice has a photo purporting to be of the Paramount Theatre in Chester, New York, designed by Michael DeAngelis, but Wikipedia tells me that in 1950 Chester’s population was only 2,878, and the Chester in Warren County was even smaller, so neither was likely to have a theater as spacious as the one in the photo.
John Lewis’s 1994 photo of the Quickway Cinema at CinemaTour shows a fairly large and rather plain building, but one that might have been built around 1950. Could it possibly have been the Paramount, as improbable as that seems? I suppose it’s more likely that Boxoffice just put the theater in the wrong town.
As joemasher said back in 2005, the theater’s building has been converted into a two-floor office building, but with some stores on the ground floor. The section that had the theater entrance in John Lewis’s photo looks like it is still there, but extended and filled with shops. The address of the Quickway Shopping Center is 69 Brookside Avenue.
According to this page at the Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada, the conversion of the building that had been the Montreal Auxilliary Bible Society into the Gaiety Theatre in 1909 was designed by architects Charles A. Mitchell and Daniel J. Crighton. The short-lived firm of Mitchell & Crighton lasted from 1907 to 1909, but produced two theaters, the other being the Idealograph Motion Picture Theatre, on Notre Dame Street West near Guy Street, also a 1909 project.
This item from the June 2, 1923, issue of The Moving Picture World is about the first Coliseum Theatre:
Engineering News-Record of October 23, 1919, said that Loew’s Enterprises planned to spend $150,000 for alterations to the Palace Hippodrome Theatre in Seattle. This seems to have been about the standard amount Loew’s spent on refitting the big old theaters it acquired during this period. Plans for the project were, as usual, prepared by Thomas Lamb’s firm.
In 1920, this house was known as Loew’s Casino Theatre. A biography of vaudevillian Ted Healy says that he appeared there August 9-15, 1920. A notice in the October 23, 1919 issue of Engineering News-Record said that Loew’s Enterprises planned to spend $150,000 on alterations to the Casino Theatre in Salt Lake City. Plans for the project were by Thomas Lamb.