The Star was a very early theater, having been mentioned in the September 5, 1908, issue of The Billboard. According to Monessen: A Typical Steel Country Town, by Cassandra Vivian, William McShaffrey opened the Star some time after he had built the Monessen Opera House, which had opened on December 4, 1904. He also operated theaters in Monongahela, Charleroi, and Donora.
I had first thought that the Broadway Theatre had been designed by Pettigrew & Worley, but the house was featured in an add for the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company in the March 5, 1949, issue of Boxoffice, and the text attributed the Broadway to Pettigrew, Cook & Associates.
Digging a bit more I found that John Worley had gone into the army in 1941. After the war he returned to the partnership, which had originally been formed in 1937. It appears that while Worley was away, Pettigrew had teamed up with an architect named Walter W. Cook. So far this house is the only one I’ve found that Pettigrew and Cook designed. I’ve been unable to find anything else about Walter W. Cook, though there was an architect of that name who had been active in the 1920s, but not in Texas. Perhaps he came out of retirement for the duration of the war.
This house was in operation by 1915 as the Castle Theatre, noted in that year’s Report of the Chief of the Massachusetts District Police as being in good condition and operated by John D. Baird. By 1922 it had been renamed the Eagle Theatre and was operated by local theater magnate Michael J. Keegan, who had owned an earlier movie house called the Pastime Theatre, and by 1922 had also opened the Strand Theatre.
Sherrie_Roberts_Patching: My profile photo is a view of Broadway in Los Angeles in the late 1920s, not the Topeka Orpheum. I don’t have a larger version of it, and can’t remember where I originally got it, though it was probably from the USC Digital Archive.
The disappearance of issues of The Reel Journal from The Internet Archive apparently has something to do with the publishers of the successor magazine, Boxoffice Pro, attempting to remove the old magazines from the public domain. Unfortunately there are a lot of such dead links in comments at Cinema Treasures, and probably most of them can’t be fixed.
I don’t remember the specific picture in The Reel Journal that I linked to, but it’s possible that it was this one which Rivest 266 uploaded to our photo page in 2012.
Jack Tillmany’s list of San Fracisco theaters after 1906 has the Majestic at 365 Third Street in operation from 1911 to 1931, but the 1916 article Predator posted says that Henry F. Slater had been manager of the house for seven years, giving it an opening year no later than 1909.
The claim that this house was rebuilt from the Lyric/first Melba Theatre is mistaken. The New Melba was a new theater. A week before the New Melba opened, the original Melba, located a block away, was closed. It was converted into a furniture store.
If the State was indeed the same building as the Fotosho, then it was opened in 1910 by F. E. McVeigh as the Marco Theatre, according to the 1925 book Historical Sketches and Sidelights of Miami, Florida by Isidor Cohen (Google Books preview.)
114 Concord Street is now occupied by Vermillion Office Supply, and the single-story building has an arched parapet of reasonably theatrical appearance, but is rather small. 111 Concord is a slightly wider, two-story building now subdivided into offices. The parapet (indeed the entire facade) is a bit fancier than the one on the building at 114, and now has the name “Place de la Concorde” on it.
It is not obvious which building is older. However, the building at 111 has a slightly larger footprint, and is also tall enough to have had a balcony, and thus is most likely to have been able to accommodate 410 seats.
The theater opened at one or the other of these locations (my guess would be 111 Concord) in June, 1913. The Saturday, June 14, issue of the Abbeville Progress said that A. O. Landry had opened his new Victor Theatre on Sunday night (presumably the previous Sunday, June 8.) The article also said that the building was new construction.
A. O. Landry’s Victor Theatre was listed in the 1914-1915 edition of Gus Hill’s theatrical directory as a ground floor house with 450 seats, playing road shows, vaudeville, and pictures. The stage was rather small, being but 22 feet deep and 37 feet wide, and a mere 20 feet high, reflecting the absence of a fly tower.
Mr. Landry provided capsule reviews of movies for the “What the Picture Did for Me” columns of various issues of Motography in 1917.
“Find a Grave” reveals that A. O. Landry’s father was named Victor, so the Victor Theatre was most likely named for him.
JohnnyC: They weren’t in operation at the same time. The claim on our page for the Melba Performing Arts Center that the New Melba Theatre which opened in 1938 was a rebuild of the old Melba is mistaken. The New Melba was on a different site. The June 9, 1938, issue of the Houston Herald featured an ad for a furniture store “…located in the old Melba Theatre Building.”
A good rule of thumb to follow at Cinema Treasures is that if dallasmovietheatres makes a claim that contradicts an earlier claim made somewhere on the site, it is probably the earlier claim that is wrong.
Cinematour lists Bridge Theatre as an aka for the earlier Kuo Hwa (aka Edwards San Gabriel/Century) at 330 W. Las Tunas. A comment on our Edwards Century page concurs.
For those wondering about the name, it was most likely named for Yu Kuo-hwa (January 10, 1914 – October 4, 2000) who was the Premier of the Republic of China (Taiwan) from 1984 to 1989.
The Whittier Narrows earthquake struck on the morning of October 1, 1987, so if that event led to the permanent closure of this theater, the last show must have been run on the evening of September 30.
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists both the Photoplay Theatre and a Lyric Theatre on Market Street in Duncannon.
Harrisburg district news from the July 3, 1948, issue of Boxoffice includes this brief item:
“Robert Moore has been named manager of the Canon Theatre, recently opened in suburban Duncannon.”
Given the date, this might have been either a new theater or the Fox restored and reopened. This is the only instance of the name I’ve found in Boxoffice, or anywhere else. After this, Duncannon’s theater history gets rather confusing. Film Daily Yearbook continues to list the Fox Theatre at Duncannon through 1952. Then in 1953 and 1954 it lists a Markan Theater in Duncannon. The Fox reappears in 1956, and then it’s back to the Markan through 1959.
The Markan Theatre also shows up in The Perry County Times from New Bloomfield, into the early 1960s, but the Duncannon house most often mentioned in that paper is called the Kanon Theatre, which turns up as late as 1963. The name Kanon never appears in the FDY. The Times sometimes mentions both the Markan and the Kanon in the same issue, but both houses seem to have been running movies only intermittently through the 1950s and later, so were not in competition.
Bizapedia lists the Markan Theatre as a fictitious business name filed on June 7, 1950. I don’t know why the name doesn’t show up in the FDY or the local paper until a few years later. I haven’t found a Bizapedia listing for a Kanon Theatre.
As dallasmovietheaters noted in an earlier comment, the Crystal Theatre on Traer Street and Ingall’s Opera House on N. Second Street were two different theaters. Both were in operation under those names during the period 1914-1921. The Opera house was an older building, in operation at least as early as 1909, but the Crystal was apparently newly built in 1913. Both were ground floor houses, but the Opera House probably had a flat floor, as the local newspaper mentions dances being held there frequently.
The earliest mention of the Crystal I’ve found in the trade journals so far is this item from Motion Picture News of July 13, 1929:
“Harry Gottlieb, salesman for
M-G-M has bought the Crystal at Greene, Iowa. This house was formerly owned by Amos Engalls [sic] who will devote his time to his print shop at Greene.”
Amos Ingalls was publisher of The Greene County Recorder at least as early as 1910. I don’t know when Mr. Ingalls began operating the Crystal, but both the Crystal and the Opera House were mentioned in the March 17, 1915, issue of the Recorder, and the Crystal had been mentioned in the paper in early 1914.
Interestingly, the web site Iowa Opera Houses lists the Opera House in Green as Ingalls' Opera House from around 1914 to 1924. Mr. Ingalls was a busy fellow. He also did a stint as Greene’s postmaster.
I found another photo of the Crystal at Twitter. The building had 1913 on its parapet, so that was probably the opening year.
Here is an item about the Capitol from the September 8, 1934, issue of Motion Picture Herald:
“New Capitol Opens In Greeneville, Tenn.
“Considerable local attention was given the recent opening of the new Capitol theatre, in Greeneville, Tenn., operated by the Crescent Amusement Company, of which Tony Sudekum is president. Seating 800, the theatre is modernly equipped.
“The opening ceremony was featured by addresses by John S. Bernard, mayor of Greeneville; Mr. Sudekum, R. L. Baulch, secretary-treasurer; Joe W. Holman, architect. Harry C. Beekner is manager of the new theatre.”
Back in 1947 when C. E. Means, owner of the Lux Theatre, announced plans to build a new theater in Grants, the October 11 issue of Boxoffice said that the new house was to be designed by Albuquerque architect Gordon Ferguson.
Given the fact that only the walls of the new theater were built until J. C. West completed it in 1959, I don’t know if Ferguson’s original plans were used for West’s completion or not, but he might have been involved in the project at that final stage as he continued to practice in Albuquerque into the 1970s.
A small photo of the Park Theatre can be seen on this page at the auction site Worthpoint. There is also a photo of another of Lehighton’s movie houses, the Classic Theatre, which was on Iron Street at First Street.
I’ve come across conflicting reports about a theater in Lehighton built in the early 1920s. Sources from 1922 indicate that the Bayer family, operators since around 1908 of the Grand Opera House in Lehighton, were planning to build a new theater. Notices in The American Contractor gave the location as South First Street. Construction was set to begin in April.
However, the Park Theatre didn’t open until 1923, when a notice of the event appeared in the July 31 issue of The Film Daily. But the theater, though operated by the Bayers, was not on First Street. It was located at 100 S. Second Street, where the building is still standing, the auditorium now housing a bowling alley, and the stage house occupied by a dance school.
The 1922 construction journal notices named the Allentown architectural, engineering, and construction firm the Tilghman Moyer Co. as designers of the Bayers' theater project, but I don’t know if that company’s design was kept when the project was built a year later on Second Street.
The June 9, 1962, issue of The Circleville Herald had an article about the closing of the Grand Theatre. The June 26 issue of the paper said that the building had been sold at auction, the winner being a local bank with plans to demolish the theater and establish a drive-up teller service.
The June 9 article said that the Grand Opera House had opened in 1888. Chakeres Theatres took over operation at the beginning of 1939. The theater was located at the corner of N. Court Street and Pinckney Street.
The advertising truck in the vintage photo DavidZornig uploaded was parked in front of the theater, which is itself out of the frame. A new building for The Savings Bank has been built on the theater’s site and uses the address 118 N. Court Street.
Actually there is quite a bit of information about this theater on the Internet. It was built in 1902 by the Harry Brothers, who operated a hardware store on the ground floor. The Ralston Opera House occupied the entire upper floor. The theater ran movies into the 1920s, but closed before the end of that decade.
After sitting disused for about sixty years, it was bought by Bill Hiser in the mid-1980s, as noted in this article from NewsOK. Hiser began the restoration of the house, but died before it was completed. Despite being listed on the NRHP, the Opera House building is deteriorating and is in danger of being demolished. Local citizens attempting to save it have launched a Go Fund Me site for the project.
This web page has many recent photos of the building, quite a few of them depicting the Opera House interior. The auditorium still has seats in it, though the floor is flat, which was customary in small town opera houses of the period, which were intended for multiple uses. There is no projection booth.
I’ve also found mention of a movie house called the People’s Theatre operating in Ralston in the early 1920s. As the Opera House was open at the same time, the People’s must have been a different theater, perhaps a storefront conversion.
Townline Plaza has been renamed Parkway Plaza, though the access road running in front of the stores is still called Townline Plaza on some maps, and some shops still have Townline Plaza addresses on the Internet while others use Parkway Plaza addresses.
The center is located on the south side of Eastern Boulevard east of Booth Street. Much of Eastern Boulevard is both U.S. Highway 20 and State Highway 5, which is probably why the address we have listed is fetching the wrong location from Google Maps. The entire development was renovated in 2013, which may account for inconsistencies in maps and addresses on the Internet.
I wouldn’t even guess which building the theater was in, or even if the theater building is still standing. But I find that putting the name Parkway Plaza into Google Maps fetches the right general location. The shopping center itself uses the collective address 39 Eastern Boulevard.
The Star was a very early theater, having been mentioned in the September 5, 1908, issue of The Billboard. According to Monessen: A Typical Steel Country Town, by Cassandra Vivian, William McShaffrey opened the Star some time after he had built the Monessen Opera House, which had opened on December 4, 1904. He also operated theaters in Monongahela, Charleroi, and Donora.
I had first thought that the Broadway Theatre had been designed by Pettigrew & Worley, but the house was featured in an add for the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company in the March 5, 1949, issue of Boxoffice, and the text attributed the Broadway to Pettigrew, Cook & Associates.
Digging a bit more I found that John Worley had gone into the army in 1941. After the war he returned to the partnership, which had originally been formed in 1937. It appears that while Worley was away, Pettigrew had teamed up with an architect named Walter W. Cook. So far this house is the only one I’ve found that Pettigrew and Cook designed. I’ve been unable to find anything else about Walter W. Cook, though there was an architect of that name who had been active in the 1920s, but not in Texas. Perhaps he came out of retirement for the duration of the war.
This house was in operation by 1915 as the Castle Theatre, noted in that year’s Report of the Chief of the Massachusetts District Police as being in good condition and operated by John D. Baird. By 1922 it had been renamed the Eagle Theatre and was operated by local theater magnate Michael J. Keegan, who had owned an earlier movie house called the Pastime Theatre, and by 1922 had also opened the Strand Theatre.
Sherrie_Roberts_Patching: My profile photo is a view of Broadway in Los Angeles in the late 1920s, not the Topeka Orpheum. I don’t have a larger version of it, and can’t remember where I originally got it, though it was probably from the USC Digital Archive.
The disappearance of issues of The Reel Journal from The Internet Archive apparently has something to do with the publishers of the successor magazine, Boxoffice Pro, attempting to remove the old magazines from the public domain. Unfortunately there are a lot of such dead links in comments at Cinema Treasures, and probably most of them can’t be fixed.
I don’t remember the specific picture in The Reel Journal that I linked to, but it’s possible that it was this one which Rivest 266 uploaded to our photo page in 2012.
Jack Tillmany’s list of San Fracisco theaters after 1906 has the Majestic at 365 Third Street in operation from 1911 to 1931, but the 1916 article Predator posted says that Henry F. Slater had been manager of the house for seven years, giving it an opening year no later than 1909.
This article says that Guildford’s Picture Playhouse Arcade was designed by local architect Frederick J. Hodgson.
The claim that this house was rebuilt from the Lyric/first Melba Theatre is mistaken. The New Melba was a new theater. A week before the New Melba opened, the original Melba, located a block away, was closed. It was converted into a furniture store.
If the State was indeed the same building as the Fotosho, then it was opened in 1910 by F. E. McVeigh as the Marco Theatre, according to the 1925 book Historical Sketches and Sidelights of Miami, Florida by Isidor Cohen (Google Books preview.)
114 Concord Street is now occupied by Vermillion Office Supply, and the single-story building has an arched parapet of reasonably theatrical appearance, but is rather small. 111 Concord is a slightly wider, two-story building now subdivided into offices. The parapet (indeed the entire facade) is a bit fancier than the one on the building at 114, and now has the name “Place de la Concorde” on it.
It is not obvious which building is older. However, the building at 111 has a slightly larger footprint, and is also tall enough to have had a balcony, and thus is most likely to have been able to accommodate 410 seats.
The theater opened at one or the other of these locations (my guess would be 111 Concord) in June, 1913. The Saturday, June 14, issue of the Abbeville Progress said that A. O. Landry had opened his new Victor Theatre on Sunday night (presumably the previous Sunday, June 8.) The article also said that the building was new construction.
A. O. Landry’s Victor Theatre was listed in the 1914-1915 edition of Gus Hill’s theatrical directory as a ground floor house with 450 seats, playing road shows, vaudeville, and pictures. The stage was rather small, being but 22 feet deep and 37 feet wide, and a mere 20 feet high, reflecting the absence of a fly tower.
Mr. Landry provided capsule reviews of movies for the “What the Picture Did for Me” columns of various issues of Motography in 1917.
“Find a Grave” reveals that A. O. Landry’s father was named Victor, so the Victor Theatre was most likely named for him.
JohnnyC: They weren’t in operation at the same time. The claim on our page for the Melba Performing Arts Center that the New Melba Theatre which opened in 1938 was a rebuild of the old Melba is mistaken. The New Melba was on a different site. The June 9, 1938, issue of the Houston Herald featured an ad for a furniture store “…located in the old Melba Theatre Building.”
A good rule of thumb to follow at Cinema Treasures is that if dallasmovietheatres makes a claim that contradicts an earlier claim made somewhere on the site, it is probably the earlier claim that is wrong.
Cinematour lists Bridge Theatre as an aka for the earlier Kuo Hwa (aka Edwards San Gabriel/Century) at 330 W. Las Tunas. A comment on our Edwards Century page concurs.
For those wondering about the name, it was most likely named for Yu Kuo-hwa (January 10, 1914 – October 4, 2000) who was the Premier of the Republic of China (Taiwan) from 1984 to 1989.
The Whittier Narrows earthquake struck on the morning of October 1, 1987, so if that event led to the permanent closure of this theater, the last show must have been run on the evening of September 30.
The Los Angeles Times listed the Kuo-Hwa Cinema at 250 W. Valley Boulevard.
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists both the Photoplay Theatre and a Lyric Theatre on Market Street in Duncannon.
Harrisburg district news from the July 3, 1948, issue of Boxoffice includes this brief item:
Given the date, this might have been either a new theater or the Fox restored and reopened. This is the only instance of the name I’ve found in Boxoffice, or anywhere else. After this, Duncannon’s theater history gets rather confusing. Film Daily Yearbook continues to list the Fox Theatre at Duncannon through 1952. Then in 1953 and 1954 it lists a Markan Theater in Duncannon. The Fox reappears in 1956, and then it’s back to the Markan through 1959.The Markan Theatre also shows up in The Perry County Times from New Bloomfield, into the early 1960s, but the Duncannon house most often mentioned in that paper is called the Kanon Theatre, which turns up as late as 1963. The name Kanon never appears in the FDY. The Times sometimes mentions both the Markan and the Kanon in the same issue, but both houses seem to have been running movies only intermittently through the 1950s and later, so were not in competition.
Bizapedia lists the Markan Theatre as a fictitious business name filed on June 7, 1950. I don’t know why the name doesn’t show up in the FDY or the local paper until a few years later. I haven’t found a Bizapedia listing for a Kanon Theatre.
As dallasmovietheaters noted in an earlier comment, the Crystal Theatre on Traer Street and Ingall’s Opera House on N. Second Street were two different theaters. Both were in operation under those names during the period 1914-1921. The Opera house was an older building, in operation at least as early as 1909, but the Crystal was apparently newly built in 1913. Both were ground floor houses, but the Opera House probably had a flat floor, as the local newspaper mentions dances being held there frequently.
The earliest mention of the Crystal I’ve found in the trade journals so far is this item from Motion Picture News of July 13, 1929:
Amos Ingalls was publisher of The Greene County Recorder at least as early as 1910. I don’t know when Mr. Ingalls began operating the Crystal, but both the Crystal and the Opera House were mentioned in the March 17, 1915, issue of the Recorder, and the Crystal had been mentioned in the paper in early 1914.Interestingly, the web site Iowa Opera Houses lists the Opera House in Green as Ingalls' Opera House from around 1914 to 1924. Mr. Ingalls was a busy fellow. He also did a stint as Greene’s postmaster.
I found another photo of the Crystal at Twitter. The building had 1913 on its parapet, so that was probably the opening year.
Here is an item about the Capitol from the September 8, 1934, issue of Motion Picture Herald:
Back in 1947 when C. E. Means, owner of the Lux Theatre, announced plans to build a new theater in Grants, the October 11 issue of Boxoffice said that the new house was to be designed by Albuquerque architect Gordon Ferguson.
Given the fact that only the walls of the new theater were built until J. C. West completed it in 1959, I don’t know if Ferguson’s original plans were used for West’s completion or not, but he might have been involved in the project at that final stage as he continued to practice in Albuquerque into the 1970s.
A small photo of the Park Theatre can be seen on this page at the auction site Worthpoint. There is also a photo of another of Lehighton’s movie houses, the Classic Theatre, which was on Iron Street at First Street.
I’ve come across conflicting reports about a theater in Lehighton built in the early 1920s. Sources from 1922 indicate that the Bayer family, operators since around 1908 of the Grand Opera House in Lehighton, were planning to build a new theater. Notices in The American Contractor gave the location as South First Street. Construction was set to begin in April.
However, the Park Theatre didn’t open until 1923, when a notice of the event appeared in the July 31 issue of The Film Daily. But the theater, though operated by the Bayers, was not on First Street. It was located at 100 S. Second Street, where the building is still standing, the auditorium now housing a bowling alley, and the stage house occupied by a dance school.
The 1922 construction journal notices named the Allentown architectural, engineering, and construction firm the Tilghman Moyer Co. as designers of the Bayers' theater project, but I don’t know if that company’s design was kept when the project was built a year later on Second Street.
The June 9, 1962, issue of The Circleville Herald had an article about the closing of the Grand Theatre. The June 26 issue of the paper said that the building had been sold at auction, the winner being a local bank with plans to demolish the theater and establish a drive-up teller service.
The June 9 article said that the Grand Opera House had opened in 1888. Chakeres Theatres took over operation at the beginning of 1939. The theater was located at the corner of N. Court Street and Pinckney Street.
The advertising truck in the vintage photo DavidZornig uploaded was parked in front of the theater, which is itself out of the frame. A new building for The Savings Bank has been built on the theater’s site and uses the address 118 N. Court Street.
The building’s address is 501-503 Main Street.
Actually there is quite a bit of information about this theater on the Internet. It was built in 1902 by the Harry Brothers, who operated a hardware store on the ground floor. The Ralston Opera House occupied the entire upper floor. The theater ran movies into the 1920s, but closed before the end of that decade.
After sitting disused for about sixty years, it was bought by Bill Hiser in the mid-1980s, as noted in this article from NewsOK. Hiser began the restoration of the house, but died before it was completed. Despite being listed on the NRHP, the Opera House building is deteriorating and is in danger of being demolished. Local citizens attempting to save it have launched a Go Fund Me site for the project.
This web page has many recent photos of the building, quite a few of them depicting the Opera House interior. The auditorium still has seats in it, though the floor is flat, which was customary in small town opera houses of the period, which were intended for multiple uses. There is no projection booth.
I’ve also found mention of a movie house called the People’s Theatre operating in Ralston in the early 1920s. As the Opera House was open at the same time, the People’s must have been a different theater, perhaps a storefront conversion.
Google Maps didn’t send their camera car along the block the Roxy was on, but Bing Maps Streetside shows the site.
Townline Plaza has been renamed Parkway Plaza, though the access road running in front of the stores is still called Townline Plaza on some maps, and some shops still have Townline Plaza addresses on the Internet while others use Parkway Plaza addresses.
The center is located on the south side of Eastern Boulevard east of Booth Street. Much of Eastern Boulevard is both U.S. Highway 20 and State Highway 5, which is probably why the address we have listed is fetching the wrong location from Google Maps. The entire development was renovated in 2013, which may account for inconsistencies in maps and addresses on the Internet.
I wouldn’t even guess which building the theater was in, or even if the theater building is still standing. But I find that putting the name Parkway Plaza into Google Maps fetches the right general location. The shopping center itself uses the collective address 39 Eastern Boulevard.