Boxoffice of January 26, 1970, said that Esquire Cinemas of America was building a twin cinema at 19 Arlington Street in Boston. Target dates for completion were March 15 for Cinema 1 and May 15 for Cinema 2, access for which was to be provided both by stairs and an elevator.
Although Boxoffice reported that a permit had been issued for a twin, it appears that only the one auditorium was completed. Bert Fedderman [sic] was the architect and decorator for the project, Boxoffice said. An article in The New York Times of November 7, 1983, quoted architect Burt Federman as saying that he had built more than 1,000 theaters, all of them multi-screen, since 1966. Maybe he forgot that the Garden Theatre ended up as a single-screen house.
The former Lisbon Playhouse reopened as the Lisbon Cinema on December 19, 1969, as noted in the January 26, 1970, issue of Boxoffice. The new lessee was long-time Massachusetts exhibitor Karl Doran. The theater had been bought by Anthony Corey in October, 1956, who had operated the house until 1963, after which it had been used only intermittently for community events.
Google’s street view shows a bowling alley at this intersection now. I wonder if it’s the same building, and it reverted to its earlier use after theater closed? Though perhaps the bowling alley’s old building became available for conversion to a theater in 1969 because that was when the bowling alley moved to the building it’s now in?
The Windsor is not listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The directory was not exhaustive, though, many small theaters being left out, so the Windsor might still have been in operation that late.
This twin had a brief life. It had already been closed when the October 20, 1985 issue of the Albuquerque Journal reported that it was to be removed to make way for a new 53,000 square foot shopping center to be built on its site at 4200 Wyoming Blvd. NE.
Rather than being slated for demolition, the article said, the theater building was to be moved to a site at Yale Blvd. SE and Southern Ave. SE. How the developer proposed to move a large precast concrete building more than seven miles I don’t know, unless perhaps it was dismantled and reassembled. I’ve checked Google street view of the area around Yale and Southern, and there are a couple of buildings that might have been built using the theater’s parts, but there’s no way to tell if one of them actually was.
The Tepee Theatre was mentioned in the August 17, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“Red Cloud, Neb. — Geo. J. Warren has again come into control of the Teepe [sic] theatre here, as well as the Orpheum.”
411 N. Webster is the address of the Red Cloud Opera House, so 413 must be either the storefront on the ground floor of the Opera House and to the right of its entrance, or the building immediately north of the Opera house. I can’t read the addresses in Google’s street view at this location.
A. J. Inks, who had the Crystal Theatre rebuilt in 1924, had taken over the house in 1909, as noted in the July 9 issue of The Moving Picture World that year:
“Ligonier, Ind. — A. J. Inks, of Toledo, has purchased the Crystal Theater here from Baum & Regula, and has taken possession.”
Albert John “Bert” Inks (misspelled as “Jinks” in the trade journal item I cited in my previous comment) was a native of Ligonier, and was a professional baseball player in the late 19th century. A couple of books with biographical sketches of early baseball players say that Inks operated the Crystal until his death in 1941.
The August 17, 1918 issue of The Moving Picture World said that Inks had also taken over the White Light Theatre in Ligonier, and planned to make improvements to the house.
An 1897 directory for Portland has several businesses with quarters in the Auditorium block on West Walnut Street, and the only theater listed at Portland in the Cahn guides for over a decade is the Auditorium. That had to be the Opera House.
Cahn guides list the Auditorium as a 1,000-seat, second floor house with a stage 66x32 feet. The theater was probably gutted and converted for a ground floor auditorium when it became a full-time movie house.
The Worcester Memorial Auditorium was designed by New York architect Frederic Charles Hirons in collaboration with the Worcester firm L. W. Briggs Company (Lucius Wallace Briggs.)
The “Little Theatre” sign is still in place above the entrance to the house. The approximate address would be 62 Harvard Street.
Konrad Schiecke’s Historic Movie Theatres in Illinois, 1883–1960 says that the Plaza Theatre opened in 1915 and closed in 1929. This is probably correct, as the Plaza advertised in The Dispatch, Moline’s daily paper, in the early 1920s.
The book also says that the theater has been demolished, but from Google’s satellite view it looks like the auditorium is still there, but the original entrance building has been replaced by a modern structure.
The end of Brotman’s Mirror Theatre was reported in the January 7, 1928, issue of Motion Picture News:
“The Mirror Theatre at Moline,
Illinois, owned by I. Brotman and Son, was totally destroyed by fire last week. Whether or not the house will be rebuilt is as yet undetermined.”
As it turned out, the house was not rebuilt. The building on the site now was built instead, and originally housed a Montgomery Ward department store.
This item appeared in the January 14, 1911, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“Moline’s new picture house, at Sixth avenue and Fifteenth street, has been named The Mirror, a prize of $5 has been awarded to Miss Bernice Oppenheimer, in a contest. A mirror screen is a feature.”
“Runaway June” which is advertised on a banner in the vintage photo of the Mirror was a serial released in 1915. The Domino Film Company’s short “Tricked” was also a 1915 release.
Konrad Schiecke’s Historic Movie Theatres in Illinois, 1883–1960 says that the Abby Theatre opened in 1949 and closed in 1965, with a hiatus in operation between 1961 and late 1963. I did find an ad for a live concert at the Abby in the Galesburg Register-Mail of February 28, 1974, so the theater was still intact at least that late.
Schiecke also gives the location as S. Main Street, not N. Main, and says the building is still standing but the exterior has been altered, as it originally featured three colors of glass tiles. It was also the town’s first theater built specifically for movies, Abingdon’s earlier houses having all been converted storefronts, except for the old Opera House, built in 1906.
Almost all of downtown Abingdon’s surviving buildings are obviously quite old, but there is one building at 114 S. Main which would be a likely location for the Abby Theatre. It even looks as though the walls were built of concrete block instead of the red brick that prevails in most of the district. Although there are a couple of other buildings with modernized fronts in the area, none of them look as though they’d have been built as late as 1948.
I’ve been unable to find any photos of the Abby’s exterior, but this Facebook page has a photo of an audience of children inside the darkened auditorium, dating from around 1958.
I just noticed that the 1950 newspaper article Brian Paris uploaded to the photo page says that the Texan opened on April 23, 1948, so the completion of renovations just missed the theater’s 70th anniversary.
The Texan Theatre opened in 1948 and closed in 1984, according to this article about the recent renovations and imminent reopening.
An entirely new roof had to be built on the structure, which had been vacant for more than three decades. Nothing remains of the original interior, but the vintage “Texan” sign has been refurbished and reinstalled on the facade.
An open house will be held on May 15, 2018, but there is no word yet on what sort of events the theater might host. It will be available for private rentals, so perhaps for now it should be classified as an event center.
There were two theaters called the Star in Salem. The second one opened in either 1941 or 1942, and was at 27 N. Main Street (though the Google Map insists on saying it is at 213, if you zoom in you can plainly see the 27 on one of the building’s colonial style columns.)
The first Star Theatre was in a two-story building that might be one that now has a third floor on it. An old real photo postcard of it exists, but the full-sized version isn’t currently available on the Internet. It’s hard to make out the details in the thumbnail version, but it looks to me like the first Star might have been in the building on the northeast corner of Main and Broadway.
The “New Theaters” column in The Film Daily of March 12, 1929, said: “Delavan, Wis. — Construction of the new
Delavan is nearing completion.”
There is surprisingly little about this theater in the trade journals. In the 1940s it was a Warner Bros. house, and in 1949 the manager was named Bud Campbell, and that’s all I’ve found.
A bit more history of this theater appeared in an item in Boxoffice of November 28, 1966 which said that the house was slated to be closed on December 1. Manager Charles Thomas had reopened the house on February 23, 1962. For parts of 1960 and 1961, the Del-Van had been operated by the Delavan Better Business Club.
Edson Hart, The owner of the theater, had acquired it in 1941 and operated it for fifteen years. Closed for four years starting in 1956, the Del-Van never got wide-screen equipment until Thomas had it installed after taking over in 1962.
The adjacent building to the right of the theater in the photo is probably a narrow, two-story brick building that is still standing on the west side of the 400 block of Locust Street, just north of a parking lot for a church. On the other side of the theater was an ornate building that I don’t see anywhere on Locust Street. Both it and the theater were probably demolished for the church’s parking lot.
Konrad Schiecke’s Historic Movie Theatres in Illinois, 1883–1960 says that the Del-Van Theatre opened in 1938.
The NRHP registration form for the Noblesville Commercial Historic District indicates that we have the wrong address for the Logan Theatre. There is currently no 880 Logan Street, and the building we are showing in street view, the Evans block at 864-870 Logan, was not a theater. The Logan Theatre was in the Lacy Block, now numbered 848-856 Logan, though that was not always its number.
The NRHP form says that the Logan Theatre was in the east bay of the Lacy Block, which is now a boutique called the Linden Tree, at 856 W. Logan. The form also says that it was earlier the location of houses called the Star Theatre and the U. S. Theatre. Other sources reveal that the Star Theatre was in operation by 1911, when it was mentioned in the April 11 issue of Motography, and the U. S. Theatre was in operation as early as December, 1914, and as late as April, 1920, per mentions in The Noblesville Register.
There is also a possibility that the house operated as the Isis Theatre prior to being renamed the U. S. Theatre, and it is very likely that it was also called the American Theatre through part of 1923 and 1924, and became the Palace Theatre in late 1924, possibly continuing under that name into 1925. I’m still trying to find more evidence of these three names being used for this house. There might be additional aka’s under which the house operated as well.
The recent opening of the Karlton Theatre was noted in this item from The Moving Picture World of June 9, 1923:
“A. K. Allen has just completed booking the newest features of first-class producers for showing in his newly opened Karlton Theatre, at Quakertown, Pa., among them ‘Hunting Big Game’ and opening last week with ‘Peg o’ My Heart.‘ This will be the first showing of the African Game Hunt in the territory.”
The November 1, 1902, issue of The Engineering Record reported that architect James M. Wood was drawing the plans for the rebuilding of Bay City’s Wood Opera House.
This house had still another aka, according to this item from the January 7, 1936, issue of The Film Daily:
“Bay City-Rialto Theater Co. has been incorporated as operating company for the Temple, Bay City, being renamed the Rialto upon acquisition by Associated Theaters.”
Boxoffice of January 26, 1970, said that Esquire Cinemas of America was building a twin cinema at 19 Arlington Street in Boston. Target dates for completion were March 15 for Cinema 1 and May 15 for Cinema 2, access for which was to be provided both by stairs and an elevator.
Although Boxoffice reported that a permit had been issued for a twin, it appears that only the one auditorium was completed. Bert Fedderman [sic] was the architect and decorator for the project, Boxoffice said. An article in The New York Times of November 7, 1983, quoted architect Burt Federman as saying that he had built more than 1,000 theaters, all of them multi-screen, since 1966. Maybe he forgot that the Garden Theatre ended up as a single-screen house.
The former Lisbon Playhouse reopened as the Lisbon Cinema on December 19, 1969, as noted in the January 26, 1970, issue of Boxoffice. The new lessee was long-time Massachusetts exhibitor Karl Doran. The theater had been bought by Anthony Corey in October, 1956, who had operated the house until 1963, after which it had been used only intermittently for community events.
Google’s street view shows a bowling alley at this intersection now. I wonder if it’s the same building, and it reverted to its earlier use after theater closed? Though perhaps the bowling alley’s old building became available for conversion to a theater in 1969 because that was when the bowling alley moved to the building it’s now in?
The Windsor is not listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The directory was not exhaustive, though, many small theaters being left out, so the Windsor might still have been in operation that late.
This twin had a brief life. It had already been closed when the October 20, 1985 issue of theAlbuquerque Journal reported that it was to be removed to make way for a new 53,000 square foot shopping center to be built on its site at 4200 Wyoming Blvd. NE.
Rather than being slated for demolition, the article said, the theater building was to be moved to a site at Yale Blvd. SE and Southern Ave. SE. How the developer proposed to move a large precast concrete building more than seven miles I don’t know, unless perhaps it was dismantled and reassembled. I’ve checked Google street view of the area around Yale and Southern, and there are a couple of buildings that might have been built using the theater’s parts, but there’s no way to tell if one of them actually was.
The Tepee Theatre was mentioned in the August 17, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World:
411 N. Webster is the address of the Red Cloud Opera House, so 413 must be either the storefront on the ground floor of the Opera House and to the right of its entrance, or the building immediately north of the Opera house. I can’t read the addresses in Google’s street view at this location.A. J. Inks, who had the Crystal Theatre rebuilt in 1924, had taken over the house in 1909, as noted in the July 9 issue of The Moving Picture World that year:
Albert John “Bert” Inks (misspelled as “Jinks” in the trade journal item I cited in my previous comment) was a native of Ligonier, and was a professional baseball player in the late 19th century. A couple of books with biographical sketches of early baseball players say that Inks operated the Crystal until his death in 1941.The August 17, 1918 issue of The Moving Picture World said that Inks had also taken over the White Light Theatre in Ligonier, and planned to make improvements to the house.
This theater’s ads in the Ligonier Leader use the name White Light Theatre, not Whitelite.
An 1897 directory for Portland has several businesses with quarters in the Auditorium block on West Walnut Street, and the only theater listed at Portland in the Cahn guides for over a decade is the Auditorium. That had to be the Opera House.
Cahn guides list the Auditorium as a 1,000-seat, second floor house with a stage 66x32 feet. The theater was probably gutted and converted for a ground floor auditorium when it became a full-time movie house.
The Worcester Memorial Auditorium was designed by New York architect Frederic Charles Hirons in collaboration with the Worcester firm L. W. Briggs Company (Lucius Wallace Briggs.)
The “Little Theatre” sign is still in place above the entrance to the house. The approximate address would be 62 Harvard Street.
Konrad Schiecke’s Historic Movie Theatres in Illinois, 1883–1960 says that the Plaza Theatre opened in 1915 and closed in 1929. This is probably correct, as the Plaza advertised in The Dispatch, Moline’s daily paper, in the early 1920s.
The book also says that the theater has been demolished, but from Google’s satellite view it looks like the auditorium is still there, but the original entrance building has been replaced by a modern structure.
The end of Brotman’s Mirror Theatre was reported in the January 7, 1928, issue of Motion Picture News:
As it turned out, the house was not rebuilt. The building on the site now was built instead, and originally housed a Montgomery Ward department store.This item appeared in the January 14, 1911, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“Runaway June” which is advertised on a banner in the vintage photo of the Mirror was a serial released in 1915. The Domino Film Company’s short “Tricked” was also a 1915 release.Konrad Schiecke’s Historic Movie Theatres in Illinois, 1883–1960 says that the Abby Theatre opened in 1949 and closed in 1965, with a hiatus in operation between 1961 and late 1963. I did find an ad for a live concert at the Abby in the Galesburg Register-Mail of February 28, 1974, so the theater was still intact at least that late.
Schiecke also gives the location as S. Main Street, not N. Main, and says the building is still standing but the exterior has been altered, as it originally featured three colors of glass tiles. It was also the town’s first theater built specifically for movies, Abingdon’s earlier houses having all been converted storefronts, except for the old Opera House, built in 1906.
Almost all of downtown Abingdon’s surviving buildings are obviously quite old, but there is one building at 114 S. Main which would be a likely location for the Abby Theatre. It even looks as though the walls were built of concrete block instead of the red brick that prevails in most of the district. Although there are a couple of other buildings with modernized fronts in the area, none of them look as though they’d have been built as late as 1948.
I’ve been unable to find any photos of the Abby’s exterior, but this Facebook page has a photo of an audience of children inside the darkened auditorium, dating from around 1958.
I just noticed that the 1950 newspaper article Brian Paris uploaded to the photo page says that the Texan opened on April 23, 1948, so the completion of renovations just missed the theater’s 70th anniversary.
The Texan Theatre opened in 1948 and closed in 1984, according to this article about the recent renovations and imminent reopening.
An entirely new roof had to be built on the structure, which had been vacant for more than three decades. Nothing remains of the original interior, but the vintage “Texan” sign has been refurbished and reinstalled on the facade.
An open house will be held on May 15, 2018, but there is no word yet on what sort of events the theater might host. It will be available for private rentals, so perhaps for now it should be classified as an event center.
There were two theaters called the Star in Salem. The second one opened in either 1941 or 1942, and was at 27 N. Main Street (though the Google Map insists on saying it is at 213, if you zoom in you can plainly see the 27 on one of the building’s colonial style columns.)
The first Star Theatre was in a two-story building that might be one that now has a third floor on it. An old real photo postcard of it exists, but the full-sized version isn’t currently available on the Internet. It’s hard to make out the details in the thumbnail version, but it looks to me like the first Star might have been in the building on the northeast corner of Main and Broadway.
The “New Theaters” column in The Film Daily of March 12, 1929, said: “Delavan, Wis. — Construction of the new
Delavan is nearing completion.”
There is surprisingly little about this theater in the trade journals. In the 1940s it was a Warner Bros. house, and in 1949 the manager was named Bud Campbell, and that’s all I’ve found.
A bit more history of this theater appeared in an item in Boxoffice of November 28, 1966 which said that the house was slated to be closed on December 1. Manager Charles Thomas had reopened the house on February 23, 1962. For parts of 1960 and 1961, the Del-Van had been operated by the Delavan Better Business Club.
Edson Hart, The owner of the theater, had acquired it in 1941 and operated it for fifteen years. Closed for four years starting in 1956, the Del-Van never got wide-screen equipment until Thomas had it installed after taking over in 1962.
American Classic Images has a photo of the Del-Van Theatre dated March, 1985.
The adjacent building to the right of the theater in the photo is probably a narrow, two-story brick building that is still standing on the west side of the 400 block of Locust Street, just north of a parking lot for a church. On the other side of the theater was an ornate building that I don’t see anywhere on Locust Street. Both it and the theater were probably demolished for the church’s parking lot.
Konrad Schiecke’s Historic Movie Theatres in Illinois, 1883–1960 says that the Del-Van Theatre opened in 1938.
The NRHP registration form for the Noblesville Commercial Historic District indicates that we have the wrong address for the Logan Theatre. There is currently no 880 Logan Street, and the building we are showing in street view, the Evans block at 864-870 Logan, was not a theater. The Logan Theatre was in the Lacy Block, now numbered 848-856 Logan, though that was not always its number.
The NRHP form says that the Logan Theatre was in the east bay of the Lacy Block, which is now a boutique called the Linden Tree, at 856 W. Logan. The form also says that it was earlier the location of houses called the Star Theatre and the U. S. Theatre. Other sources reveal that the Star Theatre was in operation by 1911, when it was mentioned in the April 11 issue of Motography, and the U. S. Theatre was in operation as early as December, 1914, and as late as April, 1920, per mentions in The Noblesville Register.
There is also a possibility that the house operated as the Isis Theatre prior to being renamed the U. S. Theatre, and it is very likely that it was also called the American Theatre through part of 1923 and 1924, and became the Palace Theatre in late 1924, possibly continuing under that name into 1925. I’m still trying to find more evidence of these three names being used for this house. There might be additional aka’s under which the house operated as well.
The recent opening of the Karlton Theatre was noted in this item from The Moving Picture World of June 9, 1923:
The November 1, 1902, issue of The Engineering Record reported that architect James M. Wood was drawing the plans for the rebuilding of Bay City’s Wood Opera House.
This house had still another aka, according to this item from the January 7, 1936, issue of The Film Daily:
The family’s surname was Frels. No apostrophe in it.
Rubin Frels.