This house might have been called both the Savoy and the Gem at various times, but there were houses of those names operating simultaneously in Quincy at one point. A book called Quincy and Adams County History and Representative Men, published in 1919, tells of Peter E. Pinklemann, a transplant from Philadelphia, who “…bought four theaters in Quincy, and now owns the Gem, the Savoy, the Princess and the Family, all popular and well patronized houses, furnishing a large share of the daily entertainment and amusement for Quincy people.”
The Quincy Theatre has been demolished. It was on part of the parking lot between the 7-story bank building at 529 N. Hampshire and the WGEM building at 513 Hampshire. The Illinois Digital Archives has two later photos of the house, both apparently taken after it closed, as the poster cases are empty and the building looks Rather decayed.
The May 15, 1910, issue of The Nickelodeon said that the Bijou Theatre in Quincy would be conducted as a motion picture theater during the summer months. The Bijou opened on January 16, 1905, according to the caption of an early 20th century photo of Hampshire Street at the Illinois Digital Archives. The photo is supposed to include the Bijou, but I certainly can’t make it out.
The “New Theaters” column of the June 15, 1910, issue of The Nickelodeon had an item datelined Quincy, Ill., which said: “Messrs. Dodge and McConnell, of the Bijou Theater, will open a first-class motion picture theater at 520 Hampshire street.”
A couple of early mentions in The Billboard in October, 1908, call this house Delphi’s Electric Theatre, and report that it was “…doing good business with moving pictures and illustrated songs.” The manager was named I. P. Williams.
The July 4, 1914, issue of Construction News had this notice:
“Coggon, Ia.—Theatre, O. O., $6,000. Archt., W. J. Brown, Security bldg., Cedar Rapids. Owner, City of Coggon; M. Savage, chrm. bldg. com. Brk. & tile, 1 sty. and base., 44x 90; seat. cap., 500.”
W. J. Brown is the William Jay Brown who designed the Strand (later the World) Theatre in Cedar Rapids.
The Barnsdall Theatre was renamed the Roxy Theatre in 1950, as reported in the September 2 issue of Boxoffice. The house had recently been purchased by the Tidwell brothers, who were renovating and redecorating inside and out.
This dying web page has a small section with a few paragraphs about the theater. It was originally opened as the Airdome Theatre, sometime early in the silent movie era. It closed in the 1950s, but was briefly reopened in the 1990s. The page used to have two photos of the theater, but all the links are broken and they no longer display.
Another one ground to dust: This Facebook post dated August 10, 2015, has a photo of the Broadmoor Theatre being demolished. It’s still visible for now in Google’s satellite view and in street view from Sanger Street along the south end of the shopping center. A large supermarket was built in front of it, but there is aside view up the alley. The Broadmoor closed sometime after the Internet became available, as it still has pages up at several movie listing sites, though it’s listed as closed.
The opening of G. S. Goffard’s Ritz Theatre was noted in the June 2, 1920, issue of The Film Daily. No details were given.
The Clovis New Mexico Evening News Journal of November 28, 1934, said that the Roosevelt Theatre at Hobbs had been destroyed by fire. Presumably it was rebuilt, or the name was moved to a different theater, as the Roosevelt Theatre suffered another fire in 1951, according to the caption of a photo that no longer appears on a broken web site called HobbsHistory.com.
Linkrot repair: The June 3, 1930, Motion Picture Times article about Mindlin’s Playhouse now starts on this page As the internal links on the web site of Boxoffice not longer work for all browsers, here is a direct link to the second page, which has most of the photos of the theater.
Thomas Tally began exhibiting movies in the curtained-off rear portion of his Phonograph and Vitascope Parlor at 311 S. Spring Street on July 25, 1896. In 1899 he moved his operation to 339 S. Spring Street, which was listed as Tally’s Phonograph & Projectoscope Parlor. As far as I’ve been able to determine, neither Spring Street location was ever operated under the name Tally’s Electric Theatre.
Tally’s Electric Theatre opened at 262 S. Main Street on April 2, 1902, and was the first location which Tally operated as only a theater, rather than as an adjuct to his phonograph parlor. It was later known as the Lyric Theatre and finally Glockner’s Automatic Theatre, the name under which it is listed at Cinema Treasures.
More details about Tally’s earliest forays into movie exhibition can be found on this page of Bill Counter’s web site Historic Los Angeles Theatres.
According to the article on this web page, the Town Theatre was built in 1938 by Dennis Cote, owner of the Cote Theatre. The Town was operated by th Cote family until 1986. In 1989, new owners altered the auditorium floor to accommodate table seating, and added food service. The house was renamed the Main Feature Theatre and Pizza Pub at that time.
The Wisconsin Historical Society provides this page about the Classic Theatre. It was built in 1919-1920, and was renamed the Classic Theatre when it began showing talking pictures in 1927. Although designed to accommodate moves, and was equipped with an organ, the house also had a stage for live theatrical performances. The building is a contributing structure to the Water Street Commercial Historic District, added tot he NRHP in 1992.
The only significant modification to the facade was a pair of stone veneer panels which have since been removed. The facade is a good example of the Prairie Style, an American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) manifestation of the late 19th-early 20th century international movement away from architectural historicism toward a more inventive, modern style, which has come to be known as Art Nouveau.
Otto Bell, the original owner of the house, was planning a theater in Sparta as early as 1916, as reported in the May 6 issue of The Moving Picture World. The architects for the project were Parkinson & Dockendorff, of La Crosse. Despite the three-year delay in construction, I think it likely that the firm’s plans were used for the Bell Theatre. Albert E. Parkinson and Bernard Dockindorff were exponents of the Prairie Style. They designed at least two other theaters, one at La Crosse and one at Waukon, Iowa.
The Cote Theatre was opened in 1913 by Dennis Cote, who had earlier operated a storefront theater,opened in 1910, on East Main Street. The Cote Theatre closed in 1958, according to the article on this web page, which covers the history of all three theaters in Waukon.
The papers of the La Crosse architectural firm Parkinson & Dockendorff include drawings of a theater at Waukon, which though undated are earlier than the drawings of the Bell Theatre in Sparta, Wisconsin, which was designed in 1916 and built in 1919. The client, however, was not named Cote but Bartell (possibly the landlord?) If the Cote Theatre was the project designed by that firm then it was probably a conversion of an existing building, the facade not being characteristic of the firm’s work and, indeed, displaying an architectural style characteristic of small commercial buildings built a decade or two earlier than 1913.
The Internet gives the address of houses called the Dauphin Theatre and Dauphin Cinema as well as the Parkland Cinema as 215 Main St. S., but Parkland appears to have been the last name it operated under.
A book called Dauphin Valley Spans the Years (very large PDF here), published in 1970, gives some of this theater’s history. It was long called the Gay Theatre, but was renovated and reopened as the New Dauphin Theatre in 1965. An earlier Dauphin Theatre opened on North Main Street in 1921, but was gutted by a fire on May 24, 1964, and subsequently demolished.
The Gay Theatre was quite old at the time it became the New Dauphin. This photo of Main Street with the Gay Theatre at left is dated 1910, though I don’t know if that is accurate. The Gay was certainly in operation by 1918, when historic documents indicate that it was showing the popular WWI propaganda film The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin.
The book notes that Dauphin had two other movie theaters operating in the 1910s: the Lyceum, on Main Street, and the Star, on Front Street.
Another theater building lost to neglect. Googling for news reports about the event (but finding none) I came across this page at a site called arch-ive.org (apparently not related to archive.org) which features three photos of the closed Showboat and a 1943 Sanborn map showing its site. Judging from the first photo, the birds of Freeport have lost a splendid communal perch.
Yes, I now think Drive-Ins.com got the dates wrong. I’ve found reliable sources saying that the tornado which destroyed the Sedalia Drive-In happened in 1980, not 1976. My guess would be that the theater reopened as the Sedalia Drive-In in 1976, the year Drive-Ins.com mistakenly said it was destroyed by the tornado.
Web sites recording major weather events in the area don’t list any tornadoes at Sedalia in 1976, but they do list the one in 1980. The site of the Sedalia Drive-In was probably vacant from 1980 until the Galaxy 8 was built on it in 1998.
The official web site says “CLOSED as of 12/7/2015 UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE” As the web site is still up, they probably plan to reopen the theater at some point, but such plans don’t always work out. I can’t find anything on the Internet about why the house is closed.
At some point two more screens were added to this multiplex. It is now called the Galaxy 10. The Galaxy 8 was built in 1998 by the Wagenknecht family. Margie Wagenknecht donated the Uptown Theatre, which had been built in 1936 by her father, J. T. Ghosen, to Sedalia Downtown Development, Inc., in 2006. The Uptown is now undergoing restoration.
Tp is correct. The drive-in at 4104 W. Main Street closed as the Sedalia Drive-In. According to Drive-Ins.com, it opened in 1949 as the 50 Hi-Way Drive-In, became simply the 50 Drive-In in 1955, was closed following a destruction tornado in 1976, and was reopened in 1990 as the Sedalia Drive-In. It has since been demolished and its site is now the location of the indoor Galaxy 10 Cinema, which was built as an 8-screen house in 1998.
CinemaTour lists the Starzz Drive-In on Whitfield Road as the Diamond Drive-In, with Starzz as an aka. Adam Martin posted photos of it.
The September 17, 1938, issue of Motion Picture Herald said that C. B. King, who had recently opened the Lincoln Theatre in Mobile, was also the operator of the Pike Theatre in that city.
The September 17, 1938, issue of Motion Picture Herald said that Central States Theatres had opened their new Clarion Theatre at Clarion. The $50,000 project had been designed by Des Moines architects Wetherell & Harrison.
Some way down This web page is some information about this building, and several photos. The building was designed by architect Fred J. James, and was built for the Sicilian Club in 1928-29. The theater was first called the Sicilia, and then became the Cazin, but one vintage photo on the page shows the facade with a small vertical sign reading Cazin Theatre, but the name Cazin Sicilia on the front of the marquee, and the name New Sicilian in portable letters on the end attraction board. Several other photos also show the vertical and marquee front names.
This house might have been called both the Savoy and the Gem at various times, but there were houses of those names operating simultaneously in Quincy at one point. A book called Quincy and Adams County History and Representative Men, published in 1919, tells of Peter E. Pinklemann, a transplant from Philadelphia, who “…bought four theaters in Quincy, and now owns the Gem, the Savoy, the Princess and the Family, all popular and well patronized houses, furnishing a large share of the daily entertainment and amusement for Quincy people.”
The Quincy Theatre has been demolished. It was on part of the parking lot between the 7-story bank building at 529 N. Hampshire and the WGEM building at 513 Hampshire. The Illinois Digital Archives has two later photos of the house, both apparently taken after it closed, as the poster cases are empty and the building looks Rather decayed.
First photo.
Second photo.
There is also this photo dated 1915, when the house had a more ornate front.
The May 15, 1910, issue of The Nickelodeon said that the Bijou Theatre in Quincy would be conducted as a motion picture theater during the summer months. The Bijou opened on January 16, 1905, according to the caption of an early 20th century photo of Hampshire Street at the Illinois Digital Archives. The photo is supposed to include the Bijou, but I certainly can’t make it out.
The Nickelette (correct spelling) Theater was in operation by 1909, when this advertisement ran in the May 29 issue of a local newspaper.
The “New Theaters” column of the June 15, 1910, issue of The Nickelodeon had an item datelined Quincy, Ill., which said: “Messrs. Dodge and McConnell, of the Bijou Theater, will open a first-class motion picture theater at 520 Hampshire street.”
A couple of early mentions in The Billboard in October, 1908, call this house Delphi’s Electric Theatre, and report that it was “…doing good business with moving pictures and illustrated songs.” The manager was named I. P. Williams.
Here is a photo of the house from somewhat later, when it was called the Crystal Theatre.
The July 4, 1914, issue of Construction News had this notice:
W. J. Brown is the William Jay Brown who designed the Strand (later the World) Theatre in Cedar Rapids.The Barnsdall Theatre was renamed the Roxy Theatre in 1950, as reported in the September 2 issue of Boxoffice. The house had recently been purchased by the Tidwell brothers, who were renovating and redecorating inside and out.
This dying web page has a small section with a few paragraphs about the theater. It was originally opened as the Airdome Theatre, sometime early in the silent movie era. It closed in the 1950s, but was briefly reopened in the 1990s. The page used to have two photos of the theater, but all the links are broken and they no longer display.
Another one ground to dust: This Facebook post dated August 10, 2015, has a photo of the Broadmoor Theatre being demolished. It’s still visible for now in Google’s satellite view and in street view from Sanger Street along the south end of the shopping center. A large supermarket was built in front of it, but there is aside view up the alley. The Broadmoor closed sometime after the Internet became available, as it still has pages up at several movie listing sites, though it’s listed as closed.
The opening of G. S. Goffard’s Ritz Theatre was noted in the June 2, 1920, issue of The Film Daily. No details were given.
The Clovis New Mexico Evening News Journal of November 28, 1934, said that the Roosevelt Theatre at Hobbs had been destroyed by fire. Presumably it was rebuilt, or the name was moved to a different theater, as the Roosevelt Theatre suffered another fire in 1951, according to the caption of a photo that no longer appears on a broken web site called HobbsHistory.com.
Linkrot repair: The June 3, 1930, Motion Picture Times article about Mindlin’s Playhouse now starts on this page As the internal links on the web site of Boxoffice not longer work for all browsers, here is a direct link to the second page, which has most of the photos of the theater.
Thomas Tally began exhibiting movies in the curtained-off rear portion of his Phonograph and Vitascope Parlor at 311 S. Spring Street on July 25, 1896. In 1899 he moved his operation to 339 S. Spring Street, which was listed as Tally’s Phonograph & Projectoscope Parlor. As far as I’ve been able to determine, neither Spring Street location was ever operated under the name Tally’s Electric Theatre.
Tally’s Electric Theatre opened at 262 S. Main Street on April 2, 1902, and was the first location which Tally operated as only a theater, rather than as an adjuct to his phonograph parlor. It was later known as the Lyric Theatre and finally Glockner’s Automatic Theatre, the name under which it is listed at Cinema Treasures.
More details about Tally’s earliest forays into movie exhibition can be found on this page of Bill Counter’s web site Historic Los Angeles Theatres.
According to the article on this web page, the Town Theatre was built in 1938 by Dennis Cote, owner of the Cote Theatre. The Town was operated by th Cote family until 1986. In 1989, new owners altered the auditorium floor to accommodate table seating, and added food service. The house was renamed the Main Feature Theatre and Pizza Pub at that time.
The Wisconsin Historical Society provides this page about the Classic Theatre. It was built in 1919-1920, and was renamed the Classic Theatre when it began showing talking pictures in 1927. Although designed to accommodate moves, and was equipped with an organ, the house also had a stage for live theatrical performances. The building is a contributing structure to the Water Street Commercial Historic District, added tot he NRHP in 1992.
The only significant modification to the facade was a pair of stone veneer panels which have since been removed. The facade is a good example of the Prairie Style, an American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) manifestation of the late 19th-early 20th century international movement away from architectural historicism toward a more inventive, modern style, which has come to be known as Art Nouveau.
Otto Bell, the original owner of the house, was planning a theater in Sparta as early as 1916, as reported in the May 6 issue of The Moving Picture World. The architects for the project were Parkinson & Dockendorff, of La Crosse. Despite the three-year delay in construction, I think it likely that the firm’s plans were used for the Bell Theatre. Albert E. Parkinson and Bernard Dockindorff were exponents of the Prairie Style. They designed at least two other theaters, one at La Crosse and one at Waukon, Iowa.
The Cote Theatre was opened in 1913 by Dennis Cote, who had earlier operated a storefront theater,opened in 1910, on East Main Street. The Cote Theatre closed in 1958, according to the article on this web page, which covers the history of all three theaters in Waukon.
The papers of the La Crosse architectural firm Parkinson & Dockendorff include drawings of a theater at Waukon, which though undated are earlier than the drawings of the Bell Theatre in Sparta, Wisconsin, which was designed in 1916 and built in 1919. The client, however, was not named Cote but Bartell (possibly the landlord?) If the Cote Theatre was the project designed by that firm then it was probably a conversion of an existing building, the facade not being characteristic of the firm’s work and, indeed, displaying an architectural style characteristic of small commercial buildings built a decade or two earlier than 1913.
The Internet gives the address of houses called the Dauphin Theatre and Dauphin Cinema as well as the Parkland Cinema as 215 Main St. S., but Parkland appears to have been the last name it operated under.
A book called Dauphin Valley Spans the Years (very large PDF here), published in 1970, gives some of this theater’s history. It was long called the Gay Theatre, but was renovated and reopened as the New Dauphin Theatre in 1965. An earlier Dauphin Theatre opened on North Main Street in 1921, but was gutted by a fire on May 24, 1964, and subsequently demolished.
The Gay Theatre was quite old at the time it became the New Dauphin. This photo of Main Street with the Gay Theatre at left is dated 1910, though I don’t know if that is accurate. The Gay was certainly in operation by 1918, when historic documents indicate that it was showing the popular WWI propaganda film The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin.
The book notes that Dauphin had two other movie theaters operating in the 1910s: the Lyceum, on Main Street, and the Star, on Front Street.
Another theater building lost to neglect. Googling for news reports about the event (but finding none) I came across this page at a site called arch-ive.org (apparently not related to archive.org) which features three photos of the closed Showboat and a 1943 Sanborn map showing its site. Judging from the first photo, the birds of Freeport have lost a splendid communal perch.
Yes, I now think Drive-Ins.com got the dates wrong. I’ve found reliable sources saying that the tornado which destroyed the Sedalia Drive-In happened in 1980, not 1976. My guess would be that the theater reopened as the Sedalia Drive-In in 1976, the year Drive-Ins.com mistakenly said it was destroyed by the tornado.
Web sites recording major weather events in the area don’t list any tornadoes at Sedalia in 1976, but they do list the one in 1980. The site of the Sedalia Drive-In was probably vacant from 1980 until the Galaxy 8 was built on it in 1998.
The official web site says “CLOSED as of 12/7/2015 UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE” As the web site is still up, they probably plan to reopen the theater at some point, but such plans don’t always work out. I can’t find anything on the Internet about why the house is closed.
At some point two more screens were added to this multiplex. It is now called the Galaxy 10. The Galaxy 8 was built in 1998 by the Wagenknecht family. Margie Wagenknecht donated the Uptown Theatre, which had been built in 1936 by her father, J. T. Ghosen, to Sedalia Downtown Development, Inc., in 2006. The Uptown is now undergoing restoration.
Tp is correct. The drive-in at 4104 W. Main Street closed as the Sedalia Drive-In. According to Drive-Ins.com, it opened in 1949 as the 50 Hi-Way Drive-In, became simply the 50 Drive-In in 1955, was closed following a destruction tornado in 1976, and was reopened in 1990 as the Sedalia Drive-In. It has since been demolished and its site is now the location of the indoor Galaxy 10 Cinema, which was built as an 8-screen house in 1998.
CinemaTour lists the Starzz Drive-In on Whitfield Road as the Diamond Drive-In, with Starzz as an aka. Adam Martin posted photos of it.
The September 17, 1938, issue of Motion Picture Herald said that C. B. King, who had recently opened the Lincoln Theatre in Mobile, was also the operator of the Pike Theatre in that city.
The September 17, 1938, issue of Motion Picture Herald said that Central States Theatres had opened their new Clarion Theatre at Clarion. The $50,000 project had been designed by Des Moines architects Wetherell & Harrison.
Some way down This web page is some information about this building, and several photos. The building was designed by architect Fred J. James, and was built for the Sicilian Club in 1928-29. The theater was first called the Sicilia, and then became the Cazin, but one vintage photo on the page shows the facade with a small vertical sign reading Cazin Theatre, but the name Cazin Sicilia on the front of the marquee, and the name New Sicilian in portable letters on the end attraction board. Several other photos also show the vertical and marquee front names.
The recent opening of the Howard Theatre in West Tampa by operator Butler Gore was noted in the September 17, 1938, issue of Motion Picture Herald.