And on October 11 & 12 of 1950, they had shown Rossellini’s Open City. Those two programs, exactly one year apart, coincided with Columbus Day and were meant to be cultural presentations for the R.I. Italian-American community. Perhaps the drive-in should have been renamed “Neorealist Auto Theatre.”
In going through microfilm of the Westerly Sun I jotted down a program of the Bliven Opera House from July, 1918: William F. Hart in Wolf Lowry and one from January of 1925 as the New Opera House: North of ‘36 with 4 acts of vaudeville.
A 1936 directory lists a Luna Hall Theatre at 233 Main Avenue. Must have been the same as the Rainbo, with a typo in the address number for one of the listings.
In July of 1917 the Princess at West Broad Street “on the bridge” was showing films. In the 1920s the Lyric (West Broad Sreet, “on the bridge”) is advertised in the Westerly Sun; there is no longer a Princess being advertised. The Princess had been renamed the Lyric. The Lyric and the Central, on the other hand, were separate theatres. They were both advertising in the Sun in 1925 along with the New Opera House, formerly Bliven Opera House.
The first appearance of the Odeon in city directories was in the 1923-1924 edition with the address of 19 Maple. In the 1927-28 edition there is now a Lyric Theatre at that address. In 1933 it is given as 10 Maple…which I think was a typo. Going back to 1913, there was a Lyric Theatre (pictures) at 34 Brow Street; in 1919 the address given is 12 Brow Street. Brow Street is a few miles away from Maple, nearer to Taunton Avenue and not in Riverside. That would give us another theatre in East Providence by the name of Lyric at one time. But I doubt I’ll be able to verify that. The Globe/Lyric on Maple Avenue became the Gilbert Stuart in the 1950s, I believe.
The 1908 Providence City Directory lists the Edisonia, 1911 Westminster Street, with John B. Nash as proprietor. The 1909 directory lists the Pastime, same address, with John B. Nash still proprietor. This had to have been the same theatre with a name change. In 1910 Everett Brophy was the Pastime manager.
I saw it yesterday and agree with the above comments. But then the 1953 version wasn’t involving on any human level either, nor, for that matter, the H. G. Wells novel (and infamous Orson Welles radio broadcast) on which all were based. The whole story is a fear-fest, in any rendition of it you care to choose.
Here is a nice painting (from a photo?) of the Majestic Building with Majestic Theatre vertical sign. The theatre entrance seems to have been actually on the Main Street side, the hotel on the Washington Street side. The church visible just beyond is now called Saints John & James at 20 Washington Street. The Gem Theatre, I believe now, was a separate theatre a few doors down Main Street. I have not seen photos of it. The Palace was up Washington Street, just beyound the church and on the right.
The beginnings of the Majestic…as described by Roger Brett in his 1976 volume on Providence theatres, Temples of Illusion:
“The Majestic seated 3,000, as many people as the Opera House and the Imperial (now Colonial) put together, at least a thousand more than Keith’s. When it opened with five acts of vaudeville and movies on April 9, 1917, it was another Emery challenge to Keith supremacy…. Its stage was the equal of the Imperial and the front of the house was better.
“Once again, the Emery Brothers had commissioned the architectural firm of William Walker and Son to design their Majestic. As usual, the architects turned out a superior piece of work…. The fundamental Italianate mass of this structure is embellished with cornices and rounded entablatures of French influence. A lofty arch rises four storeys at the center of the front. This contains the main entrance doors surmounted by large windows which permit the lobbies to be flooded with outside light. (…)
“The Majestic’s auditorium had a strong art nouveau influence…. Here again, the underlying architecture was Italianate, as revealed in the curve of arches and the solid square lines of boxes. Decorative plaster work of the vast proscenium which encompassed a full third of the auditorium, and the muraled panels of its sounding boards, were typically American art nouveau, circa 1916….
“Gold shades were used…on ornamentation with murals carried out in fairly brilliant hues. Wall surfaces were in deep tints of cream and biege….
“The Emery Majestic was a vaudeville house for exactly nine months….Upon opening in April [the Emery brothers] had simply shifted their vaudeville bookings from the two-and-one-half year old Emery to the new house. And the fact that the Majestic could seat almost twice as many customers didn’t necessarily mean that that many more people would show up to buy tickets. (…)
“Over the years, the stage of the Schubert Majestic knew the lights and laughter of Hello, Alexander starring McIntyre and Heath, Cinderella on Broadway, The Whirl of New York, Al Jolson in Sinbad…in Bombo. Chu Chin Chow, largest musical production ever to play a theater in Providence was at the Majestic, elephants and all.
“The Schubert Majestic was the place where everyone wanted to go.”
The address is now a private residence, near the intersection of Main, Buttonwoods, and Inman Avenues. I don’t know what this area was like in the first half of the 20th Century, but there are no businesses around now. It’s a purely residential area and seems like an odd place to have put a cinema. This part of Main Avenue is not far from a runway of T.F. Greene Airport, which serves Providence. There was at least one other Rhode Island theatre that had this same name, and that was the Rainbo in Cranston.
Here are two recent photos of the Park as it undergoes de-triplexing, reconstruction, expansion, and refurbishing. The original proscenium re-appears after decades. PEEKING FROM FRONT PEEKING FROM REAR
re: “A kind of residence.” Um, no, it is actually the Jonah Community Center. Here is a photo I just took. I would guess the two lower side portions of the building were added after its theatre days to create more room. I remember the exterior as being red in the early 1950s.
Charles Allen was a Block Islander. Besides the Scenic Temple and Union (later Fays), he also owned the Scenic Theatre in Pawtucket at 156 Main Street and the Allen Block in Providence at 911 Westminster Street, where he lived. He built the doomed Hippodrome and died in 1915.
The history of the Hippodrome or “Hip” is one of utter disaster. It is recounted by Roger Brett in his Temples of Illusion, and is synthesized here:
“Now, with the Union and Scenic doing well, Charlie Allen once again had a dream. He had been to New York City and had taken in a few shows at the famous Hippodrome, that mammoth pleasure palace on Sixth Avenue that held 5000 people. The stage there was so big that the greatest spectacles ever seen in an American theater were mounted on it… (…)
“As 1913 waned, the local theatrical fraternity had learned that Allen had acquired the entire block bounded by Fountain, Union, Sabin, and Mathewson Streets and was planning to build his own version of the New York Hippodrome…. (…)
“During the fall [1914] , while the Gaiety and Emery were opening, Charlie Allen was having second thoughts about his unfinished Hippodrome. Competetive houses were fairly leaping out of the watery excavations of downtown Providence, and there would soon be another one, a very large one, in the next block at Washington and Union Streets. This one was the Strand, being built by a corporation of businessmen in emulation of New York’s movie palaces.
“(…) Now it was clear to Allen that his Hippodrome was going to require more time and more money. And where were the spectacles going to come from anyway? He had no bookings. There he sat with a foundation, a floor, and walls only one storey high. So…he had the roof trusses set in place at what should have been balcony level, bricked up the proscenium opening…and prepared to open for business as a film theater.
“It opened with a matinee on January 9, 1915, sans fanfare, and with its name shortened to Hip. At least, that’s what the electric sign read that hung over the front entrance on Union Street…. This truly immense theater covered 34,000 square feet with side walls on Fountain and Sabin Streets. The stage, if it had ever been completed, would have had its loading doors on Mathewson Street.
“The Hip is one of the most forgotten of the city’s theaters and there are no known photographs of it. A newspaper report of its opening stated that the exterior had ‘a rambling and fortress-like appearance’ of brick facing on concrete walls. The interior…was described as ‘vast, and in dull red and green with 3,000 leather upholstered seats sweeping between six aisles.’(…) The Hip boasted of having the largest projection booth in the world…. [it] may have been converted from part or all of the balcony framework. Allen’s claims of ‘the largest’ were an attempted cover-up for the aborted condition of the house….
“The newspaper report continued…,‘the largest theater lobby in the world…runs the entire width of the front with many doors opening on all sides.’ (…) The only stairs…were two flights that led to nowhere…on each side of the stage. (…)
“[Allen] advertised the Hip as ‘the largest one floor theater in the world, 3,000 seats for 10¢.’ It was a final attempt at face-saving but it didn’t work. The few people who did attend thought it was just too depressing to watch a movie surrounded by a sea of empty seats….
“The Strand…made its appearance on June 12, 1915…the man in the street and his missus favored the Strand and so sealed the doom of the Hippodrome. There would be no more dreams of grandeur for 73-year-old Charlie Allen and he passed away on November 27th of that year. (…) The Hip closed after two years, the seats were taken out, and it became a parking garage, still named the Hip.”
The site of the Hippodrome is where the Providence Journal Building is today.
Great! After the Music Hall in Providence burned in 1905, it was closed as an entertainment facility, repaired, and reopened as the Providence Public Market. It stood until 1955, and as a youth I must have seen it (I used to go to the R.K.O. Albee down the street) and not taken notice.
The Midway was listed in 1948 and 1952 Warwick City directories as being owned by one Joseph L. Cariolo. A 1963 directory listed it as vacant. I no longer believe the theatre was demolished, because I drove up there today and saw that a building, resembling a former wooden-structure theatre, is still there at 830 Oakland Beach Avenue, at the start of the lane with the food stands, bars, and restaurants. It seems to be some kind of residence. References to the Scenic Theatre (with the specification “photoplays”) abound in city directories from the 1920s, disappear pretty much in the 1930s. No street number is ever given, just Oakland Beach Avenue; so I cannot determine whether the Scenic was an earlier name for the Midway Theatre. My hunch is it was.
In Temples of Illusion Roger Brett wrote of the beginnings of the Scenic Temple [later Rialto]:
“In the summer of 1906, [Charles] Allen counted the number of people going into the Nickel and checked the cost of film rentals. The margin of profit looked good and the work of converting roller rink to theater commenced immediately. On December 31, 1906, the Scenic Temple threw open its doors. Like the Nickel, it had movies and illustrated songs. Unlike the Nickel, it also had four acts of vaudeville. Hours were from 1:30 to 10:30, six days a week, with new shows every Monday and Thursday. Admission was 10¢.
“The old church [Westminster Congregational, 1829] made a theater of respectable size….It probably sat 700 on the orchestra floor and another 200 in the balcony…. Allen’s modifications were minimal. He covered up the windows but the floor remained flat…,and, while he did put in a stage, it had no curtain. A vertical sign with lightbulbs spelling out the word "Scenic” was suspended over the sidewalk in front of the minuscule entrance lobby.
“The Scenic Temple did well with movies, small time vaudeville, and illustrated songs, but its great success came between 1911 and 1913 when it played host to Homan’s Musical Stock Company.”
re: “The building was razed in 1970 for the second pass of the Downtown Revitalization Project.”
I don’t understand the lunatic thinking in a phrase like “Downtown Revitalization Project,” when it refers to the wanton destruction of a great historic building. Do you know if the upstairs theatre part remained during the Peerless years or did that become converted to other uses as well?
During the week of February 17, 1935, the film programs of the Music Hall included the following: Sun.-Tues., Let’s Talk it Over with Chester Morris and Mae Clark & Managed Money, a short with Shirley Temple, & King of the Jungle with Buster Crabbe; Wed.-Thurs., Romance in the Rain with Robert Pryor, Heather Angel & Five Bad Men with Noah Beery, Jr., Art Mix, Bill Patton; Fri.-Sat.: Dames with Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell & The Man Trailer with Buck Jones.
Quite an assortment, with an emphasis on B-films, apart from Dames, which was an A-type Busby Berkeley musical.
And on October 11 & 12 of 1950, they had shown Rossellini’s Open City. Those two programs, exactly one year apart, coincided with Columbus Day and were meant to be cultural presentations for the R.I. Italian-American community. Perhaps the drive-in should have been renamed “Neorealist Auto Theatre.”
In going through microfilm of the Westerly Sun I jotted down a program of the Bliven Opera House from July, 1918: William F. Hart in Wolf Lowry and one from January of 1925 as the New Opera House: North of ‘36 with 4 acts of vaudeville.
A 1936 directory lists a Luna Hall Theatre at 233 Main Avenue. Must have been the same as the Rainbo, with a typo in the address number for one of the listings.
In July of 1917 the Princess at West Broad Street “on the bridge” was showing films. In the 1920s the Lyric (West Broad Sreet, “on the bridge”) is advertised in the Westerly Sun; there is no longer a Princess being advertised. The Princess had been renamed the Lyric. The Lyric and the Central, on the other hand, were separate theatres. They were both advertising in the Sun in 1925 along with the New Opera House, formerly Bliven Opera House.
Another city directory lists this theatre, 30 Broad Street, as Keith’s New Theatre.
The first appearance of the Odeon in city directories was in the 1923-1924 edition with the address of 19 Maple. In the 1927-28 edition there is now a Lyric Theatre at that address. In 1933 it is given as 10 Maple…which I think was a typo. Going back to 1913, there was a Lyric Theatre (pictures) at 34 Brow Street; in 1919 the address given is 12 Brow Street. Brow Street is a few miles away from Maple, nearer to Taunton Avenue and not in Riverside. That would give us another theatre in East Providence by the name of Lyric at one time. But I doubt I’ll be able to verify that. The Globe/Lyric on Maple Avenue became the Gilbert Stuart in the 1950s, I believe.
The 1908 Providence City Directory lists the Edisonia, 1911 Westminster Street, with John B. Nash as proprietor. The 1909 directory lists the Pastime, same address, with John B. Nash still proprietor. This had to have been the same theatre with a name change. In 1910 Everett Brophy was the Pastime manager.
I saw it yesterday and agree with the above comments. But then the 1953 version wasn’t involving on any human level either, nor, for that matter, the H. G. Wells novel (and infamous Orson Welles radio broadcast) on which all were based. The whole story is a fear-fest, in any rendition of it you care to choose.
Here is a nice painting (from a photo?) of the Majestic Building with Majestic Theatre vertical sign. The theatre entrance seems to have been actually on the Main Street side, the hotel on the Washington Street side. The church visible just beyond is now called Saints John & James at 20 Washington Street. The Gem Theatre, I believe now, was a separate theatre a few doors down Main Street. I have not seen photos of it. The Palace was up Washington Street, just beyound the church and on the right.
The beginnings of the Majestic…as described by Roger Brett in his 1976 volume on Providence theatres, Temples of Illusion:
“The Majestic seated 3,000, as many people as the Opera House and the Imperial (now Colonial) put together, at least a thousand more than Keith’s. When it opened with five acts of vaudeville and movies on April 9, 1917, it was another Emery challenge to Keith supremacy…. Its stage was the equal of the Imperial and the front of the house was better.
“Once again, the Emery Brothers had commissioned the architectural firm of William Walker and Son to design their Majestic. As usual, the architects turned out a superior piece of work…. The fundamental Italianate mass of this structure is embellished with cornices and rounded entablatures of French influence. A lofty arch rises four storeys at the center of the front. This contains the main entrance doors surmounted by large windows which permit the lobbies to be flooded with outside light. (…)
“The Majestic’s auditorium had a strong art nouveau influence…. Here again, the underlying architecture was Italianate, as revealed in the curve of arches and the solid square lines of boxes. Decorative plaster work of the vast proscenium which encompassed a full third of the auditorium, and the muraled panels of its sounding boards, were typically American art nouveau, circa 1916….
“Gold shades were used…on ornamentation with murals carried out in fairly brilliant hues. Wall surfaces were in deep tints of cream and biege….
“The Emery Majestic was a vaudeville house for exactly nine months….Upon opening in April [the Emery brothers] had simply shifted their vaudeville bookings from the two-and-one-half year old Emery to the new house. And the fact that the Majestic could seat almost twice as many customers didn’t necessarily mean that that many more people would show up to buy tickets. (…)
“Over the years, the stage of the Schubert Majestic knew the lights and laughter of Hello, Alexander starring McIntyre and Heath, Cinderella on Broadway, The Whirl of New York, Al Jolson in Sinbad…in Bombo. Chu Chin Chow, largest musical production ever to play a theater in Providence was at the Majestic, elephants and all.
“The Schubert Majestic was the place where everyone wanted to go.”
The address is now a private residence, near the intersection of Main, Buttonwoods, and Inman Avenues. I don’t know what this area was like in the first half of the 20th Century, but there are no businesses around now. It’s a purely residential area and seems like an odd place to have put a cinema. This part of Main Avenue is not far from a runway of T.F. Greene Airport, which serves Providence. There was at least one other Rhode Island theatre that had this same name, and that was the Rainbo in Cranston.
Here are two recent photos of the Park as it undergoes de-triplexing, reconstruction, expansion, and refurbishing. The original proscenium re-appears after decades.
PEEKING FROM FRONT
PEEKING FROM REAR
re: “A kind of residence.” Um, no, it is actually the Jonah Community Center. Here is a photo I just took. I would guess the two lower side portions of the building were added after its theatre days to create more room. I remember the exterior as being red in the early 1950s.
Charles Allen was a Block Islander. Besides the Scenic Temple and Union (later Fays), he also owned the Scenic Theatre in Pawtucket at 156 Main Street and the Allen Block in Providence at 911 Westminster Street, where he lived. He built the doomed Hippodrome and died in 1915.
The history of the Hippodrome or “Hip” is one of utter disaster. It is recounted by Roger Brett in his Temples of Illusion, and is synthesized here:
“Now, with the Union and Scenic doing well, Charlie Allen once again had a dream. He had been to New York City and had taken in a few shows at the famous Hippodrome, that mammoth pleasure palace on Sixth Avenue that held 5000 people. The stage there was so big that the greatest spectacles ever seen in an American theater were mounted on it… (…)
“As 1913 waned, the local theatrical fraternity had learned that Allen had acquired the entire block bounded by Fountain, Union, Sabin, and Mathewson Streets and was planning to build his own version of the New York Hippodrome…. (…)
“During the fall [1914] , while the Gaiety and Emery were opening, Charlie Allen was having second thoughts about his unfinished Hippodrome. Competetive houses were fairly leaping out of the watery excavations of downtown Providence, and there would soon be another one, a very large one, in the next block at Washington and Union Streets. This one was the Strand, being built by a corporation of businessmen in emulation of New York’s movie palaces.
“(…) Now it was clear to Allen that his Hippodrome was going to require more time and more money. And where were the spectacles going to come from anyway? He had no bookings. There he sat with a foundation, a floor, and walls only one storey high. So…he had the roof trusses set in place at what should have been balcony level, bricked up the proscenium opening…and prepared to open for business as a film theater.
“It opened with a matinee on January 9, 1915, sans fanfare, and with its name shortened to Hip. At least, that’s what the electric sign read that hung over the front entrance on Union Street…. This truly immense theater covered 34,000 square feet with side walls on Fountain and Sabin Streets. The stage, if it had ever been completed, would have had its loading doors on Mathewson Street.
“The Hip is one of the most forgotten of the city’s theaters and there are no known photographs of it. A newspaper report of its opening stated that the exterior had ‘a rambling and fortress-like appearance’ of brick facing on concrete walls. The interior…was described as ‘vast, and in dull red and green with 3,000 leather upholstered seats sweeping between six aisles.’(…) The Hip boasted of having the largest projection booth in the world…. [it] may have been converted from part or all of the balcony framework. Allen’s claims of ‘the largest’ were an attempted cover-up for the aborted condition of the house….
“The newspaper report continued…,‘the largest theater lobby in the world…runs the entire width of the front with many doors opening on all sides.’ (…) The only stairs…were two flights that led to nowhere…on each side of the stage. (…)
“[Allen] advertised the Hip as ‘the largest one floor theater in the world, 3,000 seats for 10¢.’ It was a final attempt at face-saving but it didn’t work. The few people who did attend thought it was just too depressing to watch a movie surrounded by a sea of empty seats….
“The Strand…made its appearance on June 12, 1915…the man in the street and his missus favored the Strand and so sealed the doom of the Hippodrome. There would be no more dreams of grandeur for 73-year-old Charlie Allen and he passed away on November 27th of that year. (…) The Hip closed after two years, the seats were taken out, and it became a parking garage, still named the Hip.”
The site of the Hippodrome is where the Providence Journal Building is today.
Great! After the Music Hall in Providence burned in 1905, it was closed as an entertainment facility, repaired, and reopened as the Providence Public Market. It stood until 1955, and as a youth I must have seen it (I used to go to the R.K.O. Albee down the street) and not taken notice.
At various times in the 1930s and 1940s this place was listed in the city directory as the Greenwich Picture House or else the Greenwich Playhouse.
A 1914 City Directory refers to a Miller Mathewson Hall (moving pictures) in North Kingstown. I wonder if this was the same place.
The Midway was listed in 1948 and 1952 Warwick City directories as being owned by one Joseph L. Cariolo. A 1963 directory listed it as vacant. I no longer believe the theatre was demolished, because I drove up there today and saw that a building, resembling a former wooden-structure theatre, is still there at 830 Oakland Beach Avenue, at the start of the lane with the food stands, bars, and restaurants. It seems to be some kind of residence. References to the Scenic Theatre (with the specification “photoplays”) abound in city directories from the 1920s, disappear pretty much in the 1930s. No street number is ever given, just Oakland Beach Avenue; so I cannot determine whether the Scenic was an earlier name for the Midway Theatre. My hunch is it was.
In Temples of Illusion Roger Brett wrote of the beginnings of the Scenic Temple [later Rialto]:
“In the summer of 1906, [Charles] Allen counted the number of people going into the Nickel and checked the cost of film rentals. The margin of profit looked good and the work of converting roller rink to theater commenced immediately. On December 31, 1906, the Scenic Temple threw open its doors. Like the Nickel, it had movies and illustrated songs. Unlike the Nickel, it also had four acts of vaudeville. Hours were from 1:30 to 10:30, six days a week, with new shows every Monday and Thursday. Admission was 10¢.
“The old church [Westminster Congregational, 1829] made a theater of respectable size….It probably sat 700 on the orchestra floor and another 200 in the balcony…. Allen’s modifications were minimal. He covered up the windows but the floor remained flat…,and, while he did put in a stage, it had no curtain. A vertical sign with lightbulbs spelling out the word "Scenic” was suspended over the sidewalk in front of the minuscule entrance lobby.
“The Scenic Temple did well with movies, small time vaudeville, and illustrated songs, but its great success came between 1911 and 1913 when it played host to Homan’s Musical Stock Company.”
re: “The building was razed in 1970 for the second pass of the Downtown Revitalization Project.”
I don’t understand the lunatic thinking in a phrase like “Downtown Revitalization Project,” when it refers to the wanton destruction of a great historic building. Do you know if the upstairs theatre part remained during the Peerless years or did that become converted to other uses as well?
Of course it was…you say it in your description.
Great pictures! I’m assuming that the auditorium itself was not on the ground floor but up a flight, as with the Providence Music Hall.
Roland just posted an entry on the Music Hall with some incredible photos! Click and check it out.
During the week of February 17, 1935, the film programs of the Music Hall included the following: Sun.-Tues., Let’s Talk it Over with Chester Morris and Mae Clark & Managed Money, a short with Shirley Temple, & King of the Jungle with Buster Crabbe; Wed.-Thurs., Romance in the Rain with Robert Pryor, Heather Angel & Five Bad Men with Noah Beery, Jr., Art Mix, Bill Patton; Fri.-Sat.: Dames with Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell & The Man Trailer with Buck Jones.
Quite an assortment, with an emphasis on B-films, apart from Dames, which was an A-type Busby Berkeley musical.