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.
The Daily News-Journal of May 5, 2013, had a history of this theater. The original address of Murfreesboro’s second Princess Theatre was 132 W. College Street, though the Pinnacle Bank building on the site today (the northeast corner of College and Maple Street) uses the address 114 W. College. The house was built in 1902 as Fox’s Opera House, part of the Sam Davis Building. Later it was called the Sam Davis Opera House.
In 1923, Tony Sudekum’s Crescent Amusement Company bought the opera house and had it extensively renovated, with plans by the company’s usual architects of the period, Marr & Holman. The old theater was showing its age by 1936, and Crescent closed it for the better part of the year and had the building gutted and almost completely rebuilt, reopening as the New Princess late that year. Although I’ve found no documentation, it is likely that Marr & Holman designed this rebuild as well.
The exact address of the first Princess Theatre was 118 N. Church Street. It operated from 1915 until 1923, when Crescent Amusement renovated the Sam Davis Opera House (originally Fox’s Opera House) at 132 W. College Street and moved the Princess name there. I don’t know if the original Princess was closed at that time or was kept open for a while under a different name.
The Victory Theatre had been opened by March 13, 1926, when that date’s issue of The Moving Picture World provided this information about it:
“The new theatre is called the Victory and is owned and operated by Frank Davis and Wilford Williams. It represents an investment of $60,000, which includes land and fixtures, etc. It is of fireproof construction, brick and concrete, and is 37 ½ ft. wide by 140 ft. long and has two small store rooms in the front. Has a seating capacity of 524, upholstered seats.
“Has a stage for road shows. Booth equipment consists of two latest Powers 6B improved Projectors with Powerlite Reflector Lamps and Roth Brothers Actodector Generator. The theatre is equipped with good heating and ventilating system which assure good ventilation and proper heating at all times. The acoustics of the theatre are very good. It has all the modern conveniences.
“The Architect is D. D. Spani, Rock Springs, Wyo. The booth equipment, and the chairs which are Heywood-Wakefield, were sold and installed by Utah Theatre Supply Co., Earl D. Smith, Mgr., Salt Lake City.”
Davis and Williams had been operating the New Kemmerer Theatre, built in 1910, since 1922. The Victory’s architect, Daniel D. Spani, had been practicing in Rock Springs since moving there from St. Louis in 1911.
The Google fetches a bit information about this theater, but only if you search using the spelling Orphium. As an October 24, 2015 article in the Xenia Gazette notes, the original owner, Henry Binder “…spelled Orphium with the ‘I’ so it would not be confused with the Orpheum Vaudeville Circuit.”
The Orphium was located at the corner of E. Main and Whiteman Street, and was in operation by 1912. It was still being advertised as the Orphium in the mid-1940s, but it’s possible that when Chakeres took over (which I believe was in the late 1940s) they converted to the orthodox spelling Orpheum. I haven’t seen any ads from that period, though.
This article from the Xenia Gazette of October 24, 2015, reveals that the Bijou/Xenia Theatre was on Greene Street. It was twinned following a fire in 1977 and closed in 1987. The building is now occupied by county offices.
Mr. Google says that the Greene County general offices are at 69 Greene Street. The extensively remodeled building looks like it has been expanded beyond its original footprint, but at least some parts of the walls of the original theater are likely still intact.
The article also says that the Bijou was built around 1917. The Bijou is listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, but at 10 Green [sic] Street, so it likely did move into a new building around that time.
Prior to being taken over by Chakeres Theatres in January, 1936, this house was called the Pythian Theatre. From the newspaper ads I’ve seen the company always advertised the house as either the Logan Theatre or Chakeres Logan Theatre, never simply as the Chakeres Theatre.
An article in the June 14, 1976 issue of The Logan Daily News said that the Ruble Theatre building, by then converted into offices for a Savings & Loan Association, was on North Market Street. The February 23, 1960 issue of the News had reported on the sale of the building and the proposed conversion for a bank, with offices upstairs in space which had previously been the Ruble Hotel.
From the description of the project and its location I’d say there’s a very strong probability that the Rubble Theatre was in the building now occupied by the Century National Bank, at 61 N. Market Street.
The announcement that Chakeres Theatres had bought the lease on the Ruble Theatre was made on November 22, 1941. Though the Ruble Theatre was not listed in the FDY prior to 1927, it was being mentioned in the daily newspaper from nearby Athens, Ohio, the Athens Messenger at least as early as May, 1925.
Issues of Motion Picture Herald from 1943 have capsule movie reviews sent in by J. C. Baldwin, then manager of this house, but he called the house the Frances Theatre, not Francis. Boxoffice also used the spelling Frances in the one mention of the house I’ve found in its pages.
Mechanicsburg had a movie house called the Princess Theatre in operation at least as early as 1914 when it was listed in The American Motion Picture Directory. It was also located on Main Street, and might have the house that eventually became the Frances.
The town also enjoyed movies in the Opera House, located in the Town Hall, which The Moving Picture World of February 19, 1916, reported had begun showing movies regularly, with an occasional vaudeville act thrown in. The Opera House was located on North Main Street. Interestingly, the March 11 MPW said that the Opera House had been taken over by Philip Chakers [sic], so the Chakeres company’s interest in Mechanicsburg went way back.
The founders of the chain were brothers Philip, Louis, and Nicholas Chakeres, who entered the business when they took over the Princess Theatre in Springfield, Ohio, in 1911. This has me wondering if perhaps they had the Princess in Mechanicsburg (not too far from Springfield) as well, and took over the Opera House after it began showing movies to prevent a rival from getting a foothold in the town.
This item from the February 12, 1910 issue of The Economist was about this theater:
“William J. Van Keuren has finished plans for remodeling an addition to a two story hall, 48x122 feet, at 1611 to 1615 North Robey street [now Damen Avenue], to be converted into a theater for F.C. Smalley. The improvements will cost $10,000.”
The Edna Theatre could be this project noted in the May 21, 1910 issue of The Economist:
William F. Pagels has completed plans for a two story theater, with store, 35x125 feet, to be erected on North avenue, near Forty-first avenue. It will cost $20,000.“
Chicago’s numbered avenues were given names around 1913. The 4100 block has since begun at Karlov Avenue.
This item appeared in the “Building Permits” column of the June 25, 1910 issue of The Economist, and doesn’t match up with the information above:
“Chas Klappame, 1 story brick theater, 25x124, 5518 South Ashland av; architect, A. G. Ferree; builder, owner. 7000.”
The Boulevard Theatre is listed at 5522 S. Ashland in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, but I don’t see the Schell Theatre listed, nor any theater at 5518 Ashland.
The brick-fronted building occupied by the First St. Peter M.B. Church of Chicago looks like it could have begun life as a theater, though it uses the address 5524 Ashland. Still, I suspect that it is in the old Boulevard Theatre building.
The April 2, 1910 issue of the Chicago business journal The Economist had an item about a theater project in Waukegan which was most likely this house:
“William R. Gibb has completed plans for a one story theater, 47.6x126.6 feet, to be erected for Samuel Fleckles, manager of the Laemmle Film Service of Chicago, at Waukegan. It will cost $20,000.”
Architect William R. Gibb is most remembered today as the designer of a large number of Chicago’s early elevated railroad stations.
The Lexington Theatre at 40th Avenue (now Pulaski Road) and Lexington Street in Chicago was listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory twice, once with that address and once with the address 715 S. Crawford Avenue, which was another aka for Pulaski Road. Another Lexington Theatre was listed at 1168 E. 63rd Street.
It seems quite likely that the Lexington Theatre on Pulaski Road was the project noted in the June 25, 1910 issue of The Economist, which gave the address of the site as 3952-4-6-8 Lexington Street. The two-story brick theater and store building, 121x84 feet, was designed for P. Schiavire & Son by architect Alexander L. Levy.
The December 18, 1909 issue of The Economist said that architect A. E. Robinson had prepared plans for a two-story brick theater, 46x110, at 3916-3918 Lincoln Avenue for the Republic Theater Company.
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.
The Daily News-Journal of May 5, 2013, had a history of this theater. The original address of Murfreesboro’s second Princess Theatre was 132 W. College Street, though the Pinnacle Bank building on the site today (the northeast corner of College and Maple Street) uses the address 114 W. College. The house was built in 1902 as Fox’s Opera House, part of the Sam Davis Building. Later it was called the Sam Davis Opera House.
In 1923, Tony Sudekum’s Crescent Amusement Company bought the opera house and had it extensively renovated, with plans by the company’s usual architects of the period, Marr & Holman. The old theater was showing its age by 1936, and Crescent closed it for the better part of the year and had the building gutted and almost completely rebuilt, reopening as the New Princess late that year. Although I’ve found no documentation, it is likely that Marr & Holman designed this rebuild as well.
The exact address of the first Princess Theatre was 118 N. Church Street. It operated from 1915 until 1923, when Crescent Amusement renovated the Sam Davis Opera House (originally Fox’s Opera House) at 132 W. College Street and moved the Princess name there. I don’t know if the original Princess was closed at that time or was kept open for a while under a different name.
The Victory Theatre had been opened by March 13, 1926, when that date’s issue of The Moving Picture World provided this information about it:
Davis and Williams had been operating the New Kemmerer Theatre, built in 1910, since 1922. The Victory’s architect, Daniel D. Spani, had been practicing in Rock Springs since moving there from St. Louis in 1911.The Google fetches a bit information about this theater, but only if you search using the spelling Orphium. As an October 24, 2015 article in the Xenia Gazette notes, the original owner, Henry Binder “…spelled Orphium with the ‘I’ so it would not be confused with the Orpheum Vaudeville Circuit.”
The Orphium was located at the corner of E. Main and Whiteman Street, and was in operation by 1912. It was still being advertised as the Orphium in the mid-1940s, but it’s possible that when Chakeres took over (which I believe was in the late 1940s) they converted to the orthodox spelling Orpheum. I haven’t seen any ads from that period, though.
This article from the Xenia Gazette of October 24, 2015, reveals that the Bijou/Xenia Theatre was on Greene Street. It was twinned following a fire in 1977 and closed in 1987. The building is now occupied by county offices.
Mr. Google says that the Greene County general offices are at 69 Greene Street. The extensively remodeled building looks like it has been expanded beyond its original footprint, but at least some parts of the walls of the original theater are likely still intact.
The article also says that the Bijou was built around 1917. The Bijou is listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, but at 10 Green [sic] Street, so it likely did move into a new building around that time.
The Kaymar Theatre was around the corner from the Markay, at 222 Broadway. The building now houses a Sherwin-Williams paint store.
This article from 2016 says the Markay Theatre originally opened on October 20, 1930.
Prior to being taken over by Chakeres Theatres in January, 1936, this house was called the Pythian Theatre. From the newspaper ads I’ve seen the company always advertised the house as either the Logan Theatre or Chakeres Logan Theatre, never simply as the Chakeres Theatre.
An article in the June 14, 1976 issue of The Logan Daily News said that the Ruble Theatre building, by then converted into offices for a Savings & Loan Association, was on North Market Street. The February 23, 1960 issue of the News had reported on the sale of the building and the proposed conversion for a bank, with offices upstairs in space which had previously been the Ruble Hotel.
From the description of the project and its location I’d say there’s a very strong probability that the Rubble Theatre was in the building now occupied by the Century National Bank, at 61 N. Market Street.
The announcement that Chakeres Theatres had bought the lease on the Ruble Theatre was made on November 22, 1941. Though the Ruble Theatre was not listed in the FDY prior to 1927, it was being mentioned in the daily newspaper from nearby Athens, Ohio, the Athens Messenger at least as early as May, 1925.
The Majestic Theatre, London, Ohio, was mentioned in the March 11, 1922 issue of Motion Picture News. Joseph Neiser was operating the house.
Motion Picture Herald of July 12, 1947, said that a fire had damaged the projection room at Chakeres' Majestic Theatre in London, Ohio.
Issues of Motion Picture Herald from 1943 have capsule movie reviews sent in by J. C. Baldwin, then manager of this house, but he called the house the Frances Theatre, not Francis. Boxoffice also used the spelling Frances in the one mention of the house I’ve found in its pages.
Mechanicsburg had a movie house called the Princess Theatre in operation at least as early as 1914 when it was listed in The American Motion Picture Directory. It was also located on Main Street, and might have the house that eventually became the Frances.
The town also enjoyed movies in the Opera House, located in the Town Hall, which The Moving Picture World of February 19, 1916, reported had begun showing movies regularly, with an occasional vaudeville act thrown in. The Opera House was located on North Main Street. Interestingly, the March 11 MPW said that the Opera House had been taken over by Philip Chakers [sic], so the Chakeres company’s interest in Mechanicsburg went way back.
The founders of the chain were brothers Philip, Louis, and Nicholas Chakeres, who entered the business when they took over the Princess Theatre in Springfield, Ohio, in 1911. This has me wondering if perhaps they had the Princess in Mechanicsburg (not too far from Springfield) as well, and took over the Opera House after it began showing movies to prevent a rival from getting a foothold in the town.
This item from the February 12, 1910 issue of The Economist was about this theater:
The Edna Theatre could be this project noted in the May 21, 1910 issue of The Economist:
Chicago’s numbered avenues were given names around 1913. The 4100 block has since begun at Karlov Avenue.This item appeared in the “Building Permits” column of the June 25, 1910 issue of The Economist, and doesn’t match up with the information above:
The Boulevard Theatre is listed at 5522 S. Ashland in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, but I don’t see the Schell Theatre listed, nor any theater at 5518 Ashland.The brick-fronted building occupied by the First St. Peter M.B. Church of Chicago looks like it could have begun life as a theater, though it uses the address 5524 Ashland. Still, I suspect that it is in the old Boulevard Theatre building.
The April 2, 1910 issue of the Chicago business journal The Economist had an item about a theater project in Waukegan which was most likely this house:
Architect William R. Gibb is most remembered today as the designer of a large number of Chicago’s early elevated railroad stations.The Lexington Theatre at 40th Avenue (now Pulaski Road) and Lexington Street in Chicago was listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory twice, once with that address and once with the address 715 S. Crawford Avenue, which was another aka for Pulaski Road. Another Lexington Theatre was listed at 1168 E. 63rd Street.
It seems quite likely that the Lexington Theatre on Pulaski Road was the project noted in the June 25, 1910 issue of The Economist, which gave the address of the site as 3952-4-6-8 Lexington Street. The two-story brick theater and store building, 121x84 feet, was designed for P. Schiavire & Son by architect Alexander L. Levy.
The December 18, 1909 issue of The Economist said that architect A. E. Robinson had prepared plans for a two-story brick theater, 46x110, at 3916-3918 Lincoln Avenue for the Republic Theater Company.