The Saturday, April 9, 1938 issue of The Film Daily listed the Roxy Theatre in Norfolk as a new house, opened on April 4. The item listed the architect as Ben Speigel, but it might have been a typo for Spiegel. Internet searches reveal no other references to an architect of either name, though.
This article with a history of the theater up to 2009 says that Bruce Babbitt changed the name from Gala to Silver Screen in 1981. It also says that an “open house” was held in the new theater on October 30, 1939. It doesn’t say that this was the Gala’s first show, but regular operation of the house must have begun around that time.
The July, 1914, issue of a trade journal called The Gas Industry had a brief item about a public demonstration of gas appliances recently held at the Colonial Theatre in Kendallville, Indiana.
Commonwealth Theatres' Hancock Plaza 4 would hold its grand opening that night, according to the July 23, 1981, issue of the Colorado Springs Gazette. The 1,202-seat quad was Colorado Springs' first four-screen house. Commonwealth, founded in Lawrence, Kansas in 1930, operated nine other screens in the city, including the Cooper Triplex and Ute 70 which it had acquired from Cooper-Highland in 1977.
The Hancock Plaza was designed by Ray Stevens, architect for Glatz-Jacobsen Theater Design Consultants, Inc.
Multiple sources available on the Internet agree that the Princess Theatre opened in 1908, and also agree that it was demolished in 1917. This does seem likely. George A. Giles had control of the Princess prior to 1917, the year he took over operation of the larger Gorman Theatre and first announced plans to build an even larger house in Framingham, noted in the January 6 issue of The Moving Picture World.
Although Giles' plans for a new house at Framingham did not come to fruition until 1921, I’ve found no references to the Princess in trade journal articles about Giles after November, 1917, though there are several to his other theaters, including the Gorman.
While the buildings of small theaters such as the Princess were sometimes incorporated as entrances to new auditoriums built behind them, the frontage of the St. George building was broader, and the width of its entrance narrower, than the Princess building. This really looks like a case of demolition and replacement rather than remodeling and incorporation of an earlier structure. The Princess should probably have its own page.
An item about the conversion of the Orpheum to the Gardner Cinema I and Cinema II appeared in the October 2, 1968, Fitchburg Sentinel:
“Gardner -Theaters To Replace Orpheum GARDNER – Cinema I and Cinema II are the names of two movie theaters which will replace what was once the Orpheum Theater on Parker Street. The latter theater has been closed since June 4, pending plans for complete renovation. Cinema I, which is due to open before the end of the year, will be housed in the former Orpheum auditorium. Cinema II will be housed in an entirely new building to be constructed adjacent to the existing building.”
Also, the Orpehum appears to have been older than we thought. This item is from the November 24, 1917, issue of Motography:
“Million Dollar Theater Company Is Formed
“The interests of the Trimount Theaters Inc., a Massachusetts corporation, which controlled the Princess and Gorman Theaters, of Framingham, Mass., and the Orpheum and Gardner Theaters of Gardner, Mass, were taken over by the George A. Giles Company, a new Massachusetts corporation with a capitalization of one million dollars.
“Mr. Giles, the treasurer of the old company, is also the treasurer and general manager of the new corporation.
“The Giles Company under its new and broad charter is making plans for more extensive operations.”
Indeed, a photo of the audience in the Orpheum runs across the bottom of page 633 of the October 11, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World (scan at Internet Arcnive.)
The original Gardner Theatre was an upstairs house that was rebuilt for George A. Giles in 1919-20, as noted in this paragraph from an item about Giles' proposed new theater in Framingham that appeared in the January 31, 1920, issue of The Film Daily:
“The same company has set February 23d as the opening date for the new Gardner Theatre at Gardner, Mass. This theatre, seating 1,200, is remodelled [sic] from the old store and up-stairs theatre into a modern down-stairs playhouse, being entirely new throughout with the exception of the four walls. The Giles Company have for some time operated the Orpheum there.”
Giles' newly-formed corporation had taken over the assets of the Trimount Theaters Inc., including the Gardner and Orpheum at Gardner and the Princess and Gorman at Framingham, in 1917. Giles had been the treasurer of Trimount, and continued to use the name Trimount Theaters for his theater operations for a number of years.
The renaming of the Gardner took place in early 1930, and was noted in the January 22 issue of The Film Daily that year: “Gardner, Mass. — The new Uptown, formerly known as the Gardner, has reopened with a new policy with the installation of sound equipment.”
The April 13 issue of Film Daily noted the transfer of the Uptown and Orpheum at Gardner to Publix:
“Publix Completes Deal for Two Gardner Houses
“Gardner, Mass. — Purchase of the new Uptown and Orpheum by Publix has been completed and new resident managers are expected to be appointed shortly. The houses were bought from the George A. Giles Co.”
The houses in Gardner were back in the Giles circuit’s hands by 1940. The May 21, 1941, issue of The Exhibitor said that the Giles circuit had just spent $94,000 remodeling the Uptown and had completely renovated the Orpheum the previous year.
They misspelled the name of the city, but the April 8, 1930, issue of The Film Daily did note the renovation of this house:
“Remodel Gardner Opera House
“Gardner, Me. — Russell Amusement Co., Publix subsidiary, operating the Johnson Opera House, reopened the house after completely redecorating and refurnishing it. Sound equipment was also installed.”
The Billings Gazette provides this web page about the theaters in Billings, and it says that the World was closed in 1978 and demolished to provide parking space for a bank. The following year Theatre Operators, Inc. opened the World West Theatre at Rimrock Mall, its name probably being a tribute to the chain’s lost downtown house.
According to the Dec 12, 2016, issue of the Billings Gazette, the former World West Theatres, located at 2520 Central Avenue (just off Stewart Park Road, at the northwest corner of the Rimrock Mall property), was being demolished. The building is still visible in Google’s satellite and street views, which have not yet been updated, and I’ve set street view to the proper location.
The Gazette says the house was operated by the same company that had the Rimrock 4 (later 5) inside the mall. That was a Theatre Operators, Inc. house, a chain that was later taken over by Carmike, so Carmike must have gotten the twin as well.
The World West was most likely named in tribute to Theatre Operators' World Theatre in downtown Billings, closed and demolished for a parking lot the year before the twin was opened.
Incidentally, the vintage photo uploaded by Predator indicates that the Ideal must have been open as late as 1960, as “Jazz Boat” (I have no idea why they added that H on the marquee) with Anthony Newley and Anne Aubrey was released that year.
An Ideal Theatre at Milford is mentioned in the October 4, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World, along with the Opera House and a house called the Lyceum Theatre. The Ideal was presenting “Quo Vadis” while a locally-made film called “Famous Granite Quarries” was appearing at the Lyceum. The Opera House was featuring talking movies.
A timeline of events in Milford on this web page says that the Ideal Theatre opened on April 20, 1912. The Ideal was not listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, which was not exhaustive, but was mentioned in trade journals occasionally through the 1910s and 1920s and as late as the 1940s.
The 1914-15 Directory did list the Lyceum, located on Main Street, and the Music Hall, which was an aka for the Opera house, as well as a Nipmuc Park Theatre (actually a seasonal operation in Mendon, Massachusetts) and a house called the Tripoli Theatre located at 12 E. Main Street.
The Capitol Theatre at Winchendon does not appear in the state’s Department of Public Safety annual reports until the one issued for the year ending November 30, 1928. That year, the Capitol Theatre, operated by Fred J. Sharby and J. Mathieu, recieved a rating of Good.
This indicates that the Capitol opened either in 1927, after the inspections were carried out, or early enough in 1928 to be included in that year’s theater inspections. The Capitol was probably the proposed theater noted in this item from Exhibitors Daily of January 25, 1927
“WINCHENDON, Mass. — Architect, J. A. Tuck, Inc., Park Square Building, Boston, making sketches for $160,000 theatre in Winchendon. Owner, F. Sharby, 249 Roxbury Street, Keene, N. H.”
I’ve been unable to find more about architect J. A. Tuck, but Fred Sharby had previously operated theaters in Winchendon called the Gem and the National.
Ram9214: I just reset the Google street view to what I believe was the location of the North Star Cinema, judging from the vintage photo uploaded by elmorovivo. The building occupied by Joske’s in the photo now houses a branch of Dillard’s. The center’s map on its web site shows several small shops flanking the new mall entrance (which can be seen in street view) that has been punched through the theater space. The stores displacing the theater include Lens Crafters, Pac Sun, Journeys, Gurinsky’s Jewelers, Justice, and Urban Cowboy.
The history page of the Center’s web site says that Jacob and Sarah Eskin hired Boscobel, Wisconsin architect Joseph G. Durrant to design the Eskin Theatre. Durrant had earlier designed the Blaine Theatre at Boscobel and the Fort Theatre at Montfort, Wisconsin. The Eskin Theatre opened on March 4, 1937. Sarah Eskin received title to the Eskin and the Richland Theatre in a divorce settlement granted on March 29.
The Blaine Theatre was designed by local architect Joseph G. Durrant. Durrant established his practice in Boscobel in 1933, and the Blaine was one of two theater/community center projects he designed the following year, the other being at Montfort, Wisconsin. The Montfort building has been (insensitively) remodeled and its Fort Theatre converted into a post office, but the only desecration at Boscobel is a bland addition to the community center building.
The Fort Theatre was part of the Montfort Community Center, built in 1934-35 with funding from the Works Progress Administration. It was designed by architect Joseph G. Durrant of Boscobel, Wisconsin. Durrant designed another streamline modern community center/theater project for Boscobel the same year. Unlike the Fort Theatre, Boscobel’s Blaine Theatre is still in operation and largely intact.
The Monroe Theatre has an active Facebook page, and posts items about the ongoing efforts to renovate the house and reopen it as a performing arts theater. This post from March 8 reproduces an article from the Monroe County Beacon noting a $20,000 grant to the Monroe Theatre Committee from the local Baker Foundation. The grant will be used to fund a feasibility study.
Another post reveals that the Monroe Theatre opened on December 2, 1939.
MSC77: A brief article in Boxoffice of May 14, 1962, did say that the new Forman-Nace house in suburban Phoenix was called the Bethany West Theatre, but didn’t say why.
I just checked CinemaTour and they list houses called the Amusu at both 122 E. Main and 106 W. Main. If they were two different theaters we can’t be sure which of them it was that was listed in the 1922 Cahn guide.
The Amusu was in operation at least as early as 1921, as it was listed in the moving picture theaters section of the 1922 Cahn-Hill guide, published in late 1921.
There might be a problem with the address we have listed for the Amusu. The last building on the even-numbered side of the 100 block of E. Main Street is at 110, currently occupied by the Hart Gallery. East of it is a triangular parking lot at the corner of Rossville Street, beyond which is the 200 block. I don’t think the numbers would have jumped all the way to 122 in one lot.
To add more confusion, Mike Rivest’s list of Chattanooga theaters has the Amusu at 106 West Main. It would be helpful if somebody could get hold of an old city directory, telephone book, or a Sanborn map of the area.
The Princess Theater building is at 120 N. Main Street. It actually looks to be in pretty good shape, in both street view and satellite photos.
The March 13, 1915, issue of The American Contractor had this item about thenew theater being built at White Hall:
“White Hall, Ill—Theater & Two Stores: 1 sty. & bas. 40x135. Archt. C. W. Buckingham, Morrison blk., Jacksonville, Ill. Owner White Hall Theater Co., C. Lowenstein, mgr., White Hall. Gen. contr. let to F. L. Grant, White Hall.”
This item is from the November 6, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“PRINCESS THEATER, WHITE HALL, ILL.
“On August 28, last, the White Hall Theater Company, Inc., of White Hall, Ill., opened its Princess theater. The initial picture to be played at the house was the feature entitled ‘The Christian,’ and the ticket office registered 1,037 paid admissions for the first day of business.
“The outside dimensions of the structure are 40 x 138 feet.
It has a seating capacity of 500 and cost $19,000 to erect.
It has been equipped with a 25-foot stage. The manager of
the Princess is Carl Lowenstein.”
In 1911 White Hall had a movie house called the Bungalow Theatre. I haven’t found any details about it, or what became of it.
Information about Syracuse is very thin in the theater industry trade journals, and researching it is complicated by the fact that it shares its name with a much larger city in New York. Except for the single mention of the Theatorium in 1917, I haven’t found the town mentioned until 1937, when the Pickwick was built. Syracuse does not appear in the 1914-1915 edition of The American Motion Picture Directory, which might not signify that the Theatorium was not yet in operation then, as the directory was not exhaustive.
The Film Daily’s yearbooks are not sufficiently detailed to determine if the Theatorium was the same house as the Oakland, or the Oakland the same house as the Community, but Syracuse being as small as it was it does seem likely that these were all sequential names for the same theater. In any case, the early theaters in Syracuse had to have been far smaller than the Pickwick. Assuming that they were on the same site as the Pickwick, they must have originated as a storefront conversion and occupied only a portion of the ground floor of that building.
Indiana Memory says that the Oakland was on the site of the Pickwick, but doesn’t mention the Theatorium or the Community Theatre. It also mistakenly says that the house first burned in 1927 rather than 1925, which reduces their credibility.
That the Pickwick would have used part of the original brick walls of the Victorian building does seem likely, but it also seems likely that much of the Pickwick’s 1937 auditorium would have been new construction. The upper floor of the back part of the building was probably removed entirely and the walls cut down quite a bit. Also, judging from the early photo with the group of men standing in front of the original building it looks to me like it was not as deep as the Pickwick building is. For one thing, the early building does not extend to the part of the side alley that runs steeply uphill, but the Pickwick’s building does. The chimney does look like it was in the same place, but that place was about halfway back on the original building while it is less than a third of the way back on the Pickwick’s building.
Also, though there was probably a lot of wood used in the construction of the original building on the site, that facade in the old photo doesn’t look much like wood to me. The nature of the detailing and of the finish looks very much like the cast iron that was used on tens of thousands of buildings in the last half of the 19th century and even into the early years of the 20th century. Builders could select from a vast array of pre-cast structural and decorative modular elements featured in catalogs and have them delivered to the building site. Just bolt them together and attach them to the rest of the structure and there’s your front, as fancy or as plain as you please.
The Film Daily of Saturday, April 9, 1938, gave the opening date of the Park Theatre as February 10.
The Saturday, April 9, 1938 issue of The Film Daily listed the Roxy Theatre in Norfolk as a new house, opened on April 4. The item listed the architect as Ben Speigel, but it might have been a typo for Spiegel. Internet searches reveal no other references to an architect of either name, though.
This article with a history of the theater up to 2009 says that Bruce Babbitt changed the name from Gala to Silver Screen in 1981. It also says that an “open house” was held in the new theater on October 30, 1939. It doesn’t say that this was the Gala’s first show, but regular operation of the house must have begun around that time.
The July, 1914, issue of a trade journal called The Gas Industry had a brief item about a public demonstration of gas appliances recently held at the Colonial Theatre in Kendallville, Indiana.
The Saturday, April 9, 1938 issue of The Film Daily listed the Pikes Theatre in its “Theater Changes” column as a new theater opened on March 25.
Commonwealth Theatres' Hancock Plaza 4 would hold its grand opening that night, according to the July 23, 1981, issue of the Colorado Springs Gazette. The 1,202-seat quad was Colorado Springs' first four-screen house. Commonwealth, founded in Lawrence, Kansas in 1930, operated nine other screens in the city, including the Cooper Triplex and Ute 70 which it had acquired from Cooper-Highland in 1977.
The Hancock Plaza was designed by Ray Stevens, architect for Glatz-Jacobsen Theater Design Consultants, Inc.
Multiple sources available on the Internet agree that the Princess Theatre opened in 1908, and also agree that it was demolished in 1917. This does seem likely. George A. Giles had control of the Princess prior to 1917, the year he took over operation of the larger Gorman Theatre and first announced plans to build an even larger house in Framingham, noted in the January 6 issue of The Moving Picture World.
Although Giles' plans for a new house at Framingham did not come to fruition until 1921, I’ve found no references to the Princess in trade journal articles about Giles after November, 1917, though there are several to his other theaters, including the Gorman.
While the buildings of small theaters such as the Princess were sometimes incorporated as entrances to new auditoriums built behind them, the frontage of the St. George building was broader, and the width of its entrance narrower, than the Princess building. This really looks like a case of demolition and replacement rather than remodeling and incorporation of an earlier structure. The Princess should probably have its own page.
An item about the conversion of the Orpheum to the Gardner Cinema I and Cinema II appeared in the October 2, 1968, Fitchburg Sentinel:
Also, the Orpehum appears to have been older than we thought. This item is from the November 24, 1917, issue of Motography:Indeed, a photo of the audience in the Orpheum runs across the bottom of page 633 of the October 11, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World (scan at Internet Arcnive.)The original Gardner Theatre was an upstairs house that was rebuilt for George A. Giles in 1919-20, as noted in this paragraph from an item about Giles' proposed new theater in Framingham that appeared in the January 31, 1920, issue of The Film Daily:
Giles' newly-formed corporation had taken over the assets of the Trimount Theaters Inc., including the Gardner and Orpheum at Gardner and the Princess and Gorman at Framingham, in 1917. Giles had been the treasurer of Trimount, and continued to use the name Trimount Theaters for his theater operations for a number of years.The renaming of the Gardner took place in early 1930, and was noted in the January 22 issue of The Film Daily that year: “Gardner, Mass. — The new Uptown, formerly known as the Gardner, has reopened with a new policy with the installation of sound equipment.”
The April 13 issue of Film Daily noted the transfer of the Uptown and Orpheum at Gardner to Publix:
The houses in Gardner were back in the Giles circuit’s hands by 1940. The May 21, 1941, issue of The Exhibitor said that the Giles circuit had just spent $94,000 remodeling the Uptown and had completely renovated the Orpheum the previous year.They misspelled the name of the city, but the April 8, 1930, issue of The Film Daily did note the renovation of this house:
The Billings Gazette provides this web page about the theaters in Billings, and it says that the World was closed in 1978 and demolished to provide parking space for a bank. The following year Theatre Operators, Inc. opened the World West Theatre at Rimrock Mall, its name probably being a tribute to the chain’s lost downtown house.
According to the Dec 12, 2016, issue of the Billings Gazette, the former World West Theatres, located at 2520 Central Avenue (just off Stewart Park Road, at the northwest corner of the Rimrock Mall property), was being demolished. The building is still visible in Google’s satellite and street views, which have not yet been updated, and I’ve set street view to the proper location.
The Gazette says the house was operated by the same company that had the Rimrock 4 (later 5) inside the mall. That was a Theatre Operators, Inc. house, a chain that was later taken over by Carmike, so Carmike must have gotten the twin as well.
The World West was most likely named in tribute to Theatre Operators' World Theatre in downtown Billings, closed and demolished for a parking lot the year before the twin was opened.
Incidentally, the vintage photo uploaded by Predator indicates that the Ideal must have been open as late as 1960, as “Jazz Boat” (I have no idea why they added that H on the marquee) with Anthony Newley and Anne Aubrey was released that year.
An Ideal Theatre at Milford is mentioned in the October 4, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World, along with the Opera House and a house called the Lyceum Theatre. The Ideal was presenting “Quo Vadis” while a locally-made film called “Famous Granite Quarries” was appearing at the Lyceum. The Opera House was featuring talking movies.
A timeline of events in Milford on this web page says that the Ideal Theatre opened on April 20, 1912. The Ideal was not listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, which was not exhaustive, but was mentioned in trade journals occasionally through the 1910s and 1920s and as late as the 1940s.
The 1914-15 Directory did list the Lyceum, located on Main Street, and the Music Hall, which was an aka for the Opera house, as well as a Nipmuc Park Theatre (actually a seasonal operation in Mendon, Massachusetts) and a house called the Tripoli Theatre located at 12 E. Main Street.
The Capitol Theatre at Winchendon does not appear in the state’s Department of Public Safety annual reports until the one issued for the year ending November 30, 1928. That year, the Capitol Theatre, operated by Fred J. Sharby and J. Mathieu, recieved a rating of Good.
This indicates that the Capitol opened either in 1927, after the inspections were carried out, or early enough in 1928 to be included in that year’s theater inspections. The Capitol was probably the proposed theater noted in this item from Exhibitors Daily of January 25, 1927
I’ve been unable to find more about architect J. A. Tuck, but Fred Sharby had previously operated theaters in Winchendon called the Gem and the National.Ram9214: I just reset the Google street view to what I believe was the location of the North Star Cinema, judging from the vintage photo uploaded by elmorovivo. The building occupied by Joske’s in the photo now houses a branch of Dillard’s. The center’s map on its web site shows several small shops flanking the new mall entrance (which can be seen in street view) that has been punched through the theater space. The stores displacing the theater include Lens Crafters, Pac Sun, Journeys, Gurinsky’s Jewelers, Justice, and Urban Cowboy.
The history page of the Center’s web site says that Jacob and Sarah Eskin hired Boscobel, Wisconsin architect Joseph G. Durrant to design the Eskin Theatre. Durrant had earlier designed the Blaine Theatre at Boscobel and the Fort Theatre at Montfort, Wisconsin. The Eskin Theatre opened on March 4, 1937. Sarah Eskin received title to the Eskin and the Richland Theatre in a divorce settlement granted on March 29.
The Blaine Theatre was designed by local architect Joseph G. Durrant. Durrant established his practice in Boscobel in 1933, and the Blaine was one of two theater/community center projects he designed the following year, the other being at Montfort, Wisconsin. The Montfort building has been (insensitively) remodeled and its Fort Theatre converted into a post office, but the only desecration at Boscobel is a bland addition to the community center building.
The Fort Theatre was part of the Montfort Community Center, built in 1934-35 with funding from the Works Progress Administration. It was designed by architect Joseph G. Durrant of Boscobel, Wisconsin. Durrant designed another streamline modern community center/theater project for Boscobel the same year. Unlike the Fort Theatre, Boscobel’s Blaine Theatre is still in operation and largely intact.
The Monroe Theatre has an active Facebook page, and posts items about the ongoing efforts to renovate the house and reopen it as a performing arts theater. This post from March 8 reproduces an article from the Monroe County Beacon noting a $20,000 grant to the Monroe Theatre Committee from the local Baker Foundation. The grant will be used to fund a feasibility study.
Another post reveals that the Monroe Theatre opened on December 2, 1939.
MSC77: A brief article in Boxoffice of May 14, 1962, did say that the new Forman-Nace house in suburban Phoenix was called the Bethany West Theatre, but didn’t say why.
I just checked CinemaTour and they list houses called the Amusu at both 122 E. Main and 106 W. Main. If they were two different theaters we can’t be sure which of them it was that was listed in the 1922 Cahn guide.
The Amusu was in operation at least as early as 1921, as it was listed in the moving picture theaters section of the 1922 Cahn-Hill guide, published in late 1921.
There might be a problem with the address we have listed for the Amusu. The last building on the even-numbered side of the 100 block of E. Main Street is at 110, currently occupied by the Hart Gallery. East of it is a triangular parking lot at the corner of Rossville Street, beyond which is the 200 block. I don’t think the numbers would have jumped all the way to 122 in one lot.
To add more confusion, Mike Rivest’s list of Chattanooga theaters has the Amusu at 106 West Main. It would be helpful if somebody could get hold of an old city directory, telephone book, or a Sanborn map of the area.
The Princess Theater building is at 120 N. Main Street. It actually looks to be in pretty good shape, in both street view and satellite photos.
The March 13, 1915, issue of The American Contractor had this item about thenew theater being built at White Hall:
This item is from the November 6, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World:In 1911 White Hall had a movie house called the Bungalow Theatre. I haven’t found any details about it, or what became of it.Information about Syracuse is very thin in the theater industry trade journals, and researching it is complicated by the fact that it shares its name with a much larger city in New York. Except for the single mention of the Theatorium in 1917, I haven’t found the town mentioned until 1937, when the Pickwick was built. Syracuse does not appear in the 1914-1915 edition of The American Motion Picture Directory, which might not signify that the Theatorium was not yet in operation then, as the directory was not exhaustive.
The Film Daily’s yearbooks are not sufficiently detailed to determine if the Theatorium was the same house as the Oakland, or the Oakland the same house as the Community, but Syracuse being as small as it was it does seem likely that these were all sequential names for the same theater. In any case, the early theaters in Syracuse had to have been far smaller than the Pickwick. Assuming that they were on the same site as the Pickwick, they must have originated as a storefront conversion and occupied only a portion of the ground floor of that building.
Indiana Memory says that the Oakland was on the site of the Pickwick, but doesn’t mention the Theatorium or the Community Theatre. It also mistakenly says that the house first burned in 1927 rather than 1925, which reduces their credibility.
That the Pickwick would have used part of the original brick walls of the Victorian building does seem likely, but it also seems likely that much of the Pickwick’s 1937 auditorium would have been new construction. The upper floor of the back part of the building was probably removed entirely and the walls cut down quite a bit. Also, judging from the early photo with the group of men standing in front of the original building it looks to me like it was not as deep as the Pickwick building is. For one thing, the early building does not extend to the part of the side alley that runs steeply uphill, but the Pickwick’s building does. The chimney does look like it was in the same place, but that place was about halfway back on the original building while it is less than a third of the way back on the Pickwick’s building.
Also, though there was probably a lot of wood used in the construction of the original building on the site, that facade in the old photo doesn’t look much like wood to me. The nature of the detailing and of the finish looks very much like the cast iron that was used on tens of thousands of buildings in the last half of the 19th century and even into the early years of the 20th century. Builders could select from a vast array of pre-cast structural and decorative modular elements featured in catalogs and have them delivered to the building site. Just bolt them together and attach them to the rest of the structure and there’s your front, as fancy or as plain as you please.