One of the newspaper articles displayed at the above link says that the architect of the Marlow Theatre was Henderson Ryan. The Marlow was one of several theaters built around this time that featured Ryan’s inclined ramp system for access to the balcony and mezzanine.
The trade journals give contradictory information about the theater in Juneau. The November 15, 1947, issue of Motion Picture Herald ran this brief item saying “Carl Neitzel is planning one in Juneau, Wis., which has no theatre.”
However the December 2, 1950, issue of Boxoffice has a short article about the remodeling of the Juno, which says this: “Mr. and Mrs. Carl Neitzel, owners of the house for ten years, recently celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary.”
I suppose it could be that the Juno was a replacement for an earlier theater in Juneau that the Neitzel’s owned.
Boxoffice pf February 4, 1956, reported that Mrs. Ethel K. Walsh, president of the Scott Amusement Company, had turned over management of the Scott Theatre in Scottsburg and the Austin Theatre in Austin to her daughters and their husbands.
The January 22, 1908, issue of The Junction City Union said that the tinners who had been putting the decorative finishes on the new Aurora Theatre had moved on to Topeka to work on a theater of the same name there.
I’ve seen ads for both the Aurora and the Cozy in the Union as early as May, 1913, (the original Cozy most likely opened on May 10, and was at 625 N. Washington) and continuing into 1917. The Aurora often featured live events during this period, but the Cozy ran movies most of the time, though it too had live theater sometimes.
The town also had an Airdome, operated during the summer months. In 1914 the Airdome was taken over from the Aurora Theatre by the operators of the Cozy, according to the April 9 issue of the Union.
The October 16, 1918, issue of the Union had an article about the rebuilt Cozy Theatre, the opening of which had been delayed by a quarantine, probably imposed due to the Spanish Influenza epidemic. The Aurora had been renamed the Cozy in 1917 (change noted in the August 2 issue of the Union), around the time the new Columbia Theatre was opened.
Junction City had an earlier movie house, the Lyric Theatre, opened in March, 1907, at 603 N. Washington, but it appears to have closed not long after the first Cozy opened.
David and Noelle Soren’s list of know Boller Brothers theaters lists a 1917 project by the Bollers in Junction City, but it is listed as the Columbia Theatre.
The list also includes the Junction Theatre, but that is listed as a later aka for the Uptown Theatre that opened in 1928. It also lists Dickinson as another aka for the Uptown/Junction.
I’ve been unable to find an address for the Columbia Theatre, but the September 1, 1919, Daily Union has an ad for the house which includes a drawing (here, but I don’t have an account with Newspapers.com, so it isn’t enlarged.) Wherever it was, it looks like it was a corner location.
The Unique was mentioned in the October 3, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“THE Unique theater at Mankato, Minn., has been reopened by the American Amusement Company and will again be operated in conjunction with the Grand theater. Manager Arthur Erickson of the Grand will have charge of both houses. Erickson has opened a show at Madison Lake, showing Sunday and Wednesday nights in the village hall. Percy Wirig is local manager.”
An issue of MPW later that year noted that Erickson had given up management of the Grand and Unique and had leased Mankato’s Pastime Theatre.
The Mankato Commercial College building that burned in 1915 was located in the 100 block of south Front Street, a location that will no longer map, the neighborhood having been altered by an urban renewal project. As near as I can figure the building was under the footprint of what is now the Holiday Inn that fronts on Main Street, or perhaps the footprint of the municipal parking ramp just north of it, or maybe across Front Street at or near the location of what is now the Loose Moose Saloon and Conference Center.
The judo classes given at the Park Theatre are provided by Racine Youth Sports, a nonprofit volunteer organization. Most of their activities are held in Haban Park.
I don’t know the nature of the group’s arrangement with the theater. I’ve been unable to discover if it is still owned by the Westbury Group LLC, the investment bank that bought it in 2004 with the intention of renovating it for use as a performing arts venue. Thirteen years is an awfully long time for a for-profit company to hang on to a property that can’t bringing in much revenue, if any.
At least the fact that RYS is using the building for kids' classes indicates that it is unlikely to fall down from decay. The promised renovation for theatrical use, however, must be at the very least on hold for now, and has perhaps been abandoned.
According to a 1990 survey form for the Missouri Office of Historic Preservation, the Waldo Opera House was upstairs in a two-story brick building erected in 1908 at the corner of 4th and Cedar Streets, across Cedar Street from the City Hall and a bank.
Today there are no old buildings directly on the corners of that intersection, so it appears that the Waldo Theatre is gone. The upper floor was abandoned in the 1950s due to safety issues with the stairway, and the ground floor was vacated around 1975. The building fell into decay due to weather and vandalism, but was still recommended as a potential candidate for preservation in 1990. Now it isn’t even possible to tell which corner of the intersection the vanished building was on.
The address 204 W. California Avenue will not map any more because the street is gone. It was under what is now either the Cox Convention Center or Myriad Botanical Gardens.
Houses called the Eagle Theatre more often than not shared quarters with lodges (aeries) of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, which was founded in 1898 by six Seattle theater owners, including John Cort and the Considine brothers. In the early years a very large percentage of its members were associated with the theater business.
I’ve searched the FOE web site but the order apparently no longer has a chapter in Council Grove. I’ve also used Google street view to examine the old buildings along Main Street, but see none with an FOE on the parapet, which they usually did have. It has probably been demolished, or at least had its upper floor removed and lower floor modernized, as I see no two-story buildings on Main Street that look like they have been significantly altered.
If somebody can find the address of the FOE’s aerie in Council Grove they’ve most likely found the location of the Eagle Theatre.
This item from the March 22, 1913, issue of Engineering Record is probably about the Colonial Theatre, which opened in April, 1914:
“Laconia, N. H.— The contract for erection of ground floor theater and 3 story business block has been awarded by Benj. Piscopo to Henry Stone, of Laconia: cost about $150,000. Architect, Geo. L. Griffin, of Laconia .”
The Colonial Theatre is undergoing restoration and will be a multi-use theater of 750 seats, as noted in this weblog post. Fundraising for the project continues as well. A web site about the restoration includes this page of “before” photos.
The Rialto was demolished in 2015. The sad story is told in this article from the Omaha World-Herald of June 15 that year. There are photos. The theater had been closed in 2008 due to structural deterioration that had led to leakage and then a partial roof collapse.
An item in the August 28, 1920, issue of The American Contractor describes a theater project at Cozad which fits the description of the Rialto:
“Theater (M. P.) $30,000. 1 sty. 50x132. Cozad, Nebr. Archt. V. F. Beck, North Platte. Owner A. Loibl, Cozad. Brk. & comp. rfg. Plans drawn. Owner & archt. taking bids.”
Victor F. Beck began his career as a brick mason, became a brick contractor around 1910 and began advertising himself as an architect in 1911, first in Omaha and then in North Platte. The brickwork of this theater was quite impressive, and looked to have been in good shape to the end. It’s too bad the roof didn’t hold up as well.
Unless Hutchinson had more than one house called the Deluxe, the name Martin might have been short-lived for this theater. The July 1, 1914, issue of The St. Louis Lumberman made reference to an event held in the “De Luxe” theater at Hutchinson on June 26.
The “New Theatres” column of the January 15, 1938, issue of The Film Daily lists a Roxy Theatre at Council Grove. That’s the only mention of the Roxy I’ve found in the trade journals. The Stella/Ritz and members of the Bratton family were mentioned quite often.
Views at Historic Aerials show that the Palace was still standing in 1960, but had been demolished by 1970. The large auditorium covered what is now the parking lot behind both the site of the demolished theater entrance building and the adjacent three-story building that is tagged on the Google Maps satellite view as the Columbus Dispatch News Bureau.
A newspaper report about the opening of the Palace gave its seating capacity as 1,300, but I suspect that was typical exaggeration. I’ve seen other sources claiming 1,100, which could certainly have been accommodated in the space the auditorium occupied. I’m pretty sure it had more than the one seat we currently list for it in the header (which must have been my mistake when I submitted the theater.)
The Palace originally had a Möller theater organ, but I’ve been unable to find any details about it. The organ was later moved to Lancaster City Hall. The City of Lancaster has since donated the instrument to the Victoria Opera House in the village of Baltimore, Ohio, where it is awaiting restoration.
Thanks for the information, Ken. I know a lot of errors turn up in both the daily and weekly journals, and in the FDY. Theaters changed both owners and names frequently, and the industry journals had rather slapdash communication with theater owners and managers, so it would have been easy for a brief name change to reach one journal and not the others. That might have been the case with the Star, or Strand if it did in fact get that name change and it simply slipped through the cracks at the FDY.
When you add to that the likelihood of editing errors in publications that were compiled quickly, and which covered wide areas without professional journalists on the ground, it’s difficult to unravel a lot of these puzzles. Someone at Motion Picture News might have just gotten the theater name wrong in that item I cited. That’s why I like to rely more on local newspapers when they are available, but I’ve been unable to find any from Moorhead. Being a very small town in a very poor region, its newspaper might have vanished without a trace, so we might never find it.
There might have been more than one Strand in Moorhead, or the name might have been temporarily changed to Regent. This item is from the April 20, 1929, issue of Motion Picture News:
“Moorehead, [sic] Miss., will have a new theatre, the Regent, remodeled from the former Strand, when P. E. Morris completes plans now under way. Morris now operates the Regent at Indianola, Miss.”
Assuming the Strand of 1929 was the same house that was the Strand in the 1940s, and that the name change to Regent had indeed taken place, the name Strand had been restored by 1939. The Strand placed courtesy advertisements in the 1939, 1940, and 1941 editions of Retrospect, the yearbook of Sunflower Junior College and Agricultural High School in Moorhead.
SethG is probably correct about the theater being at 108 W. Main. Views at Historic Aerials show the building at 108 W. Main being somewhat deeper than most of its neighbors, while still not extending all the way back the the alley, yet certainly big enough to have held a 350-seat theater. It was still standing in 1998, but gone by 2005.
This web page is about Elsie Magin who, with her husband Howard, was the last owner of the Amus-U Theatre, having bought it from Ralph Todd in 1952. It says that after converting the theater into a bowling alley in 1958, the Magins had to adopt an early closing time due to complaints from residents of the apartments upstairs about the noise.
The January 12, 1957, issue of Boxoffice said that Leo Kessel, operator of the Broad Theatre, had sold his 99-year lease on the property to the Equitable Federal Savings & Loan Association. The bank planned to undertake an expansion which would also include the properties occupied by an adjacent shoe store and women’s wear shop.
Both of the shops (Blazer’s Shoes and Milady’s) can be seen in the vintage photo of the theater uploaded by Khnemu. The building that replaced them and the theater is currently occupied by Chase Bank.
The October 31, 1940, issue of the New Philadelphia Daily Times said that the new Quaker Theatre would open the following night. Among the many congratulatory advertisements in this issue of the Times was one from Harry C. Holbrook, the architect.
Link & Haire, original architects.
One of the newspaper articles displayed at the above link says that the architect of the Marlow Theatre was Henderson Ryan. The Marlow was one of several theaters built around this time that featured Ryan’s inclined ramp system for access to the balcony and mezzanine.
Henderson Ryan was the architect of the People’s Theatre. The house featured his patented incline ramps for balcony and mezzanine access.
The trade journals give contradictory information about the theater in Juneau. The November 15, 1947, issue of Motion Picture Herald ran this brief item saying “Carl Neitzel is planning one in Juneau, Wis., which has no theatre.”
However the December 2, 1950, issue of Boxoffice has a short article about the remodeling of the Juno, which says this: “Mr. and Mrs. Carl Neitzel, owners of the house for ten years, recently celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary.”
I suppose it could be that the Juno was a replacement for an earlier theater in Juneau that the Neitzel’s owned.
Boxoffice pf February 4, 1956, reported that Mrs. Ethel K. Walsh, president of the Scott Amusement Company, had turned over management of the Scott Theatre in Scottsburg and the Austin Theatre in Austin to her daughters and their husbands.
The May 13, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World noted that the Scenic Theater Company of Scottsburg, Indiana, had filed articles of incorporation.
The January 22, 1908, issue of The Junction City Union said that the tinners who had been putting the decorative finishes on the new Aurora Theatre had moved on to Topeka to work on a theater of the same name there.
I’ve seen ads for both the Aurora and the Cozy in the Union as early as May, 1913, (the original Cozy most likely opened on May 10, and was at 625 N. Washington) and continuing into 1917. The Aurora often featured live events during this period, but the Cozy ran movies most of the time, though it too had live theater sometimes.
The town also had an Airdome, operated during the summer months. In 1914 the Airdome was taken over from the Aurora Theatre by the operators of the Cozy, according to the April 9 issue of the Union.
The October 16, 1918, issue of the Union had an article about the rebuilt Cozy Theatre, the opening of which had been delayed by a quarantine, probably imposed due to the Spanish Influenza epidemic. The Aurora had been renamed the Cozy in 1917 (change noted in the August 2 issue of the Union), around the time the new Columbia Theatre was opened.
Junction City had an earlier movie house, the Lyric Theatre, opened in March, 1907, at 603 N. Washington, but it appears to have closed not long after the first Cozy opened.
David and Noelle Soren’s list of know Boller Brothers theaters lists a 1917 project by the Bollers in Junction City, but it is listed as the Columbia Theatre.
The list also includes the Junction Theatre, but that is listed as a later aka for the Uptown Theatre that opened in 1928. It also lists Dickinson as another aka for the Uptown/Junction.
I’ve been unable to find an address for the Columbia Theatre, but the September 1, 1919, Daily Union has an ad for the house which includes a drawing (here, but I don’t have an account with Newspapers.com, so it isn’t enlarged.) Wherever it was, it looks like it was a corner location.
The Unique was mentioned in the October 3, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World:
An issue of MPW later that year noted that Erickson had given up management of the Grand and Unique and had leased Mankato’s Pastime Theatre.The Mankato Commercial College building that burned in 1915 was located in the 100 block of south Front Street, a location that will no longer map, the neighborhood having been altered by an urban renewal project. As near as I can figure the building was under the footprint of what is now the Holiday Inn that fronts on Main Street, or perhaps the footprint of the municipal parking ramp just north of it, or maybe across Front Street at or near the location of what is now the Loose Moose Saloon and Conference Center.
The judo classes given at the Park Theatre are provided by Racine Youth Sports, a nonprofit volunteer organization. Most of their activities are held in Haban Park.
I don’t know the nature of the group’s arrangement with the theater. I’ve been unable to discover if it is still owned by the Westbury Group LLC, the investment bank that bought it in 2004 with the intention of renovating it for use as a performing arts venue. Thirteen years is an awfully long time for a for-profit company to hang on to a property that can’t bringing in much revenue, if any.
At least the fact that RYS is using the building for kids' classes indicates that it is unlikely to fall down from decay. The promised renovation for theatrical use, however, must be at the very least on hold for now, and has perhaps been abandoned.
According to a 1990 survey form for the Missouri Office of Historic Preservation, the Waldo Opera House was upstairs in a two-story brick building erected in 1908 at the corner of 4th and Cedar Streets, across Cedar Street from the City Hall and a bank.
Today there are no old buildings directly on the corners of that intersection, so it appears that the Waldo Theatre is gone. The upper floor was abandoned in the 1950s due to safety issues with the stairway, and the ground floor was vacated around 1975. The building fell into decay due to weather and vandalism, but was still recommended as a potential candidate for preservation in 1990. Now it isn’t even possible to tell which corner of the intersection the vanished building was on.
The address 204 W. California Avenue will not map any more because the street is gone. It was under what is now either the Cox Convention Center or Myriad Botanical Gardens.
Houses called the Eagle Theatre more often than not shared quarters with lodges (aeries) of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, which was founded in 1898 by six Seattle theater owners, including John Cort and the Considine brothers. In the early years a very large percentage of its members were associated with the theater business.
I’ve searched the FOE web site but the order apparently no longer has a chapter in Council Grove. I’ve also used Google street view to examine the old buildings along Main Street, but see none with an FOE on the parapet, which they usually did have. It has probably been demolished, or at least had its upper floor removed and lower floor modernized, as I see no two-story buildings on Main Street that look like they have been significantly altered.
If somebody can find the address of the FOE’s aerie in Council Grove they’ve most likely found the location of the Eagle Theatre.
This item from the March 22, 1913, issue of Engineering Record is probably about the Colonial Theatre, which opened in April, 1914:
The Colonial Theatre is undergoing restoration and will be a multi-use theater of 750 seats, as noted in this weblog post. Fundraising for the project continues as well. A web site about the restoration includes this page of “before” photos.The movie on the Colonial’s marquee in this photo, Men of the Fighting Lady, was released in May, 1954.
The Rialto was demolished in 2015. The sad story is told in this article from the Omaha World-Herald of June 15 that year. There are photos. The theater had been closed in 2008 due to structural deterioration that had led to leakage and then a partial roof collapse.
An item in the August 28, 1920, issue of The American Contractor describes a theater project at Cozad which fits the description of the Rialto:
Victor F. Beck began his career as a brick mason, became a brick contractor around 1910 and began advertising himself as an architect in 1911, first in Omaha and then in North Platte. The brickwork of this theater was quite impressive, and looked to have been in good shape to the end. It’s too bad the roof didn’t hold up as well.Unless Hutchinson had more than one house called the Deluxe, the name Martin might have been short-lived for this theater. The July 1, 1914, issue of The St. Louis Lumberman made reference to an event held in the “De Luxe” theater at Hutchinson on June 26.
The “New Theatres” column of the January 15, 1938, issue of The Film Daily lists a Roxy Theatre at Council Grove. That’s the only mention of the Roxy I’ve found in the trade journals. The Stella/Ritz and members of the Bratton family were mentioned quite often.
Views at Historic Aerials show that the Palace was still standing in 1960, but had been demolished by 1970. The large auditorium covered what is now the parking lot behind both the site of the demolished theater entrance building and the adjacent three-story building that is tagged on the Google Maps satellite view as the Columbus Dispatch News Bureau.
A newspaper report about the opening of the Palace gave its seating capacity as 1,300, but I suspect that was typical exaggeration. I’ve seen other sources claiming 1,100, which could certainly have been accommodated in the space the auditorium occupied. I’m pretty sure it had more than the one seat we currently list for it in the header (which must have been my mistake when I submitted the theater.)
The Palace originally had a Möller theater organ, but I’ve been unable to find any details about it. The organ was later moved to Lancaster City Hall. The City of Lancaster has since donated the instrument to the Victoria Opera House in the village of Baltimore, Ohio, where it is awaiting restoration.
Thanks for the information, Ken. I know a lot of errors turn up in both the daily and weekly journals, and in the FDY. Theaters changed both owners and names frequently, and the industry journals had rather slapdash communication with theater owners and managers, so it would have been easy for a brief name change to reach one journal and not the others. That might have been the case with the Star, or Strand if it did in fact get that name change and it simply slipped through the cracks at the FDY.
When you add to that the likelihood of editing errors in publications that were compiled quickly, and which covered wide areas without professional journalists on the ground, it’s difficult to unravel a lot of these puzzles. Someone at Motion Picture News might have just gotten the theater name wrong in that item I cited. That’s why I like to rely more on local newspapers when they are available, but I’ve been unable to find any from Moorhead. Being a very small town in a very poor region, its newspaper might have vanished without a trace, so we might never find it.
There might have been more than one Strand in Moorhead, or the name might have been temporarily changed to Regent. This item is from the April 20, 1929, issue of Motion Picture News:
Assuming the Strand of 1929 was the same house that was the Strand in the 1940s, and that the name change to Regent had indeed taken place, the name Strand had been restored by 1939. The Strand placed courtesy advertisements in the 1939, 1940, and 1941 editions of Retrospect, the yearbook of Sunflower Junior College and Agricultural High School in Moorhead.SethG is probably correct about the theater being at 108 W. Main. Views at Historic Aerials show the building at 108 W. Main being somewhat deeper than most of its neighbors, while still not extending all the way back the the alley, yet certainly big enough to have held a 350-seat theater. It was still standing in 1998, but gone by 2005.
This web page is about Elsie Magin who, with her husband Howard, was the last owner of the Amus-U Theatre, having bought it from Ralph Todd in 1952. It says that after converting the theater into a bowling alley in 1958, the Magins had to adopt an early closing time due to complaints from residents of the apartments upstairs about the noise.
The January 12, 1957, issue of Boxoffice said that Leo Kessel, operator of the Broad Theatre, had sold his 99-year lease on the property to the Equitable Federal Savings & Loan Association. The bank planned to undertake an expansion which would also include the properties occupied by an adjacent shoe store and women’s wear shop.
Both of the shops (Blazer’s Shoes and Milady’s) can be seen in the vintage photo of the theater uploaded by Khnemu. The building that replaced them and the theater is currently occupied by Chase Bank.
The October 31, 1940, issue of the New Philadelphia Daily Times said that the new Quaker Theatre would open the following night. Among the many congratulatory advertisements in this issue of the Times was one from Harry C. Holbrook, the architect.