The surname of one of the architects of the 1926 remodeling of the Robey Theatre is misspelled in the “Firms” field. His correct name was Martin Laurence Millspaugh. I’ve been unable to discover Mr. Carmichael’s first name or initials.
It might have switched to independent and art films in its later years, but when it opened, the Century 25 would have been a first-run house, just like the other domed suburban theaters being built by the Syufy/Century chain during that period.
this undated photo of the Forest Park Theatre shows a Mission style front.
Forest Park was one of the many amusement parks built in the suburban areas of American cities, often by streetcar companies, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The following paragraph is from an Arkansas Timesarticle about Pulaski Heights:
Little Rock streetcar company built Forest Park, a 160-acre amusement park that included a theater, dance pavilion, roller coaster, merry-go-round, bowling alley, roller-skating rink and refreshment stands, at today’s Kavanaugh and University intersection.“
If the Forest Park Theatre closed in 1915 it was probably replaced replaced by a new venue at the park. Issues of The Billboard from 1917 mention vaudeville shows still being presented at Forest Park in Little Rock.
This item from the February 18, 1922, issue of The American Contractor sounds like it could be about the Beacon Theatre:
“Theater (M. P.) Stores (6) & Offices: $150,000. 1 & 2 sty. Main & Grove sts., East Orange, N. J. Archt. Hyman Rosensohn, 188 Market St., Newark. Owner East Orange Amusement Co., Judge J. S. Strahl. pres., 828 Broad st., Newark. Brk. & limestone. Archt. & owner will soon take bids on gen. contr. Drawing plans.”A notice that construction contracts had been let for the project appeared in the March 30 issue of Engineering News-Record.
My comment of July 23, 2012, on the Glendale Theatre page says that the Don Mills Theatre was one of the houses designed by Mandel Sprachman, and cites an item from Boxoffice of October 25, 1965, which mentioned the house. It opened around 1963 and was operated by Odeon.
1915 is both the last year in which I’ve found a Gayety Theatre in Hoboken mentioned in trade publications, and the first year in which I find a Strand mentioned, so that must be the year the house was renamed. An announcement that the Gayety had been sold to an unnamed New York company who planned extensive alterations to the house appeared in the May 8, 1915, issue of The New York Clipper. I found the Gayety mentioned as late as August, 1915, but the Strand was operating by October that year.
Numerous documents, including several photographs, related to the Quartett Club are available online from the Hoboken Historical Society at this web page. A couple of photos depict the building after it was converted into the Gayety Theatre, and one depicts the ceremony for the laying of the cornerstone of the building on October 28, 1891. The description of that photo says that the building became the Gayety Theatre in 1907, and that the apartment house now on the site was built in 1931.
The October 29 issue of The New York Times had an article about the ceremony (online here,) and revealed that the building was built by the Masonic lodge. The formal opening of the club’s new building on December 10, 1892, was announced in the following day’s issue of the New York Press.
Sanford appears to have renumbered its lots at some point, so the historic address we’ve been using is inaccurate. The Cinema Data Project’s page for the State Theatre says that it was “…close to midtown mall,” which is a modern shopping center on the northeast side of Main Street between St. Ignatius Street and Washington Street.
The Project’s description of the photo in the 1941 MGM report says that it shows the theater in a corner block. Our photo above shows a narrow alley next to the theater. If that was the corner referred to, it must have been St. Ignatius Street, which is still very narrow, though it might have been widened a bit when the mall was built. Internet says that the business in the modern building at that location, Gold Rush Party, is at 882 Main Street, so that’s most likely what the address of the State Theatre would be if it were still standing.
A map of a walking tour of Sanford (PDF here) shows the location of the Capitol Theatre to have been at the northeast corner of Main Street (ME-109) and Water Street (US-202.) However, a photo of the Leavitt Theatre published in 1914 (Google Books scan) shows it to have been a mid-block building. It seems likely that Water Street was realigned at some point, though, so the map could be accurate if that location was once a couple of doors east of the old intersection.
Sanford has apparently renumbered its lots at some point, because the modern building nearest the Capitol’s site (and perhaps directly on it,) a 7-11 store, is at modern address 880 Main Street.
1,268 most likely comes from a Film Daily Yearbook listing. The FDY was not always accurate, but sometimes it was. The MGM reports were probably more accurate, but the one Ron cited was from 1941, and during the war many large, old theaters covered over their disused orchestra pits and added a couple more rows of seats because business was booming and it was very difficult for chains to get new theaters built due to restrictions on new construction, so it was a cheap way to add new capacity.
Seating capacities tended to fluctuate over the years, anyway (re-seating with larger seats and maybe wider rows, part or all of a balcony being closed off as business declined, seats from the front rows being removed to replace broken seats farther back in the house in theaters that couldn’t afford new replacements, etc.,) and theater operators, for various reasons (such as the union regulation that once required two projectionists in houses with more than 1,000 seats, leading managers to sometimes undercount,) didn’t always give accurate counts, so the exact number of seats in any given theater at any given time is often moot. For these reasons I look at the seat counts at Cinema Treasures as usually being no more than ballpark figures.
As for the demolition date, Ron Newman’s comment of March 28, 2006, cites a September 6, 1982, newspaper article saying that the entire block was slated for demolition to make way for an office building, and the Paramount was the last business on the block that was still open, so the closing and demolition most likely took place in late 1982 or early 1983. The 3-story brick office block on the site now has a very 1980s look.
Thanks for the detailed post, macoco. I vaguely remember the day-and-date policy of the big chains in Los Angeles, but by the time I was old enough to pay close attention to which theaters were showing what, the big chains were being divorced from the studios. By the time I started going to movies on my own the Chinese had switched mostly to road shows, and all but one of the big downtown theaters were being run by Sherrill Corwin’s Metropolitan Theatres. Some were still first run houses, but the movies they ran were usually city-wide first runs, showing in maybe two dozen or more houses and drive-ins all over town.
The images Lou Rugani uploaded to this theater’s photo page do not depict the Portland Theatre which opened at 11-13 Preble Street in 1910, but its predecessor, a house at 477 Congress Street, at the corner of Preble, facing Monument Square. The earlier theater was built in 1853 and demolished in 1909, and during its last years was a movie house called The Nickel, which began operating in May, 1907. It’s Cinema Data Project page gives the additional aka Family Theatre, but doesn’t say when the house used that name.
The 1910 house, located next door to the site of the earlier theater, and opened as the New Portland Theatre (Cinema Data Project page,) has also been demolished, though I don’t know when. It was closed in the 1960s, but the building was still standing in the 1990s. This is a photo of the New Portland Theatre from the Maine Historical Society.
This 1924 photo from the Maine Historical Society shows the Strand to have been a second-floor house above a hardware store. The Cinema Data Project page for this theater doesn’t list any aka’s, and the only Nordica Theatres listed for Maine by the Project are the ones in Freeport and Lisbon.
The aka’s appear to have been obtained from this PDF, the penultimate page of which features a small photo of High Street which shows a small sliver of the theater building at left. Despite its Sawyer Street address, the photos show that the entrance to the Strand was on the High Street side of the building, though the doors did face up the block in the direction of Sawyer Street.
The Strand’s auditorium was demolished in 1970, according to This page from The Cinema Data Project. The house is listed under its original name, the Big Nickel Theatre.
The Big Nickel was a large upstairs theater with its entrance on Forest Avenue, and it opened on April 3, 1911. In 1915 it was renamed the Strand Theatre and began showing Paramount pictures, with music provided by an organ said to have cost $25,000 (a 1917 source reveals this instrument to have been a 3-manual Austin.) In 1917 the owners acquired the building on Congress Street which would house the rebuilt Strand’s entrance, and the vacant land between that building and the Big Nickel.
The theater was closed in September, 1917, and the original building gutted and rebuilt as a ground floor house, and expanded to reach the Congress Street structure, which was given a new facade. The architects for the project were Thomas Lamb and local architect Austin Pease, with New York theater specialists M. Shapiro and Sons supervising construction.
The rebuilt Strand, equipped with a large stage 90 feet wide and 34 feet deep, opened on June 3, 1918. The opening film was the Mary Pickford feature M'liss. The Strand was closed for refurbishment in the spring of 1930, reopening in June that year with Colonial style decor. The Strand closed permanently in 1963.
A photo of the rather restrained auditorium of the Lee Theatre illustrates an ad for the Celotex Corporation on this page of the May 31, 1941, issue of Motion Picture Herald The caption says that the Lee Theatre was designed by a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, architectural firm, the J. P. Hampson Co.
The Patricia was most likely the proposed theater that was the subject of this brief item inThe Film Daily of October 30, 1937:
“Ram Plans Aiken House
“Aiken, S. C. — Working drawings have been started on a one-story motion picture theater building here for H. B. Ram. It will have brick walls and a carrara glass front.”
Herbert Ram also operated the State Theatre in Aiken.
Thanks for the extensive research, norfolk356. So we have this house opening as the Lyceum Theatre in 1900, being renamed the Orpheum sometime between 1907 and 1909, and being rebuilt following major fire damage in 1922. It’s interesting that in 1931 architect Charles M. Major, who drew the plans for the 1922 project, still had his practice in the office portion of the building.
A drawing of the Colonial No. 1 and a photo of the Colonial No. 2 have been uploaded to this theater’s photo page by CharmaineZoe, plus there is an architect’s drawing of the Colonial No. 2 which I uploaded. They indicate that Brooksie is mistaken. The Colonial No. 1 had an alley to the right, as does the Plaza Theatre, and Colonial No. 2 had an alley to the left, as did the Rapallo Theatre. It must have been the Plaza that was built on the site of the Colonial No. 1.
This post from Cezar Del Valle’s Bijou Dream weblog is also a bit confused. The heading gives the address of the Colonial No. 2, at 525 George Street, but I believe that the photo on the page actually depicts the Colonial No. 1, and on the bottom of that photo it says “Australia’s first continuous moving picture show” and then “J. D. Williams Ams. Co., 610 George St. Sydney.”
610 George Street would be under the footprint of the Plaza Theatre. The Colonial No. 1 was an existing theater that J. D. Williams acquired in 1910, and which he then remodeled. The MPW photo must depict the house pre-remodel. The entrance is wider and the decorative details are different in CharmaineZoe’s drawing, so it must be a post-remodel view.
610 George Street was the main office of the J. D. Williams Amusement Company, according to an advertisement for the company that is one of many illustrations in a photo essay by Ross Thorne (PDF here.) The essay features vintage photos of the Colonial after it had been renamed Empress and the Victory after it had been renamed Rapallo.
There are also numerous color photos of the Victory/Rapallo by the author. Despite numerous Art Deco features, especially on the facade, the Victory was a very streamlined theater. Its interior could serve as a textbook example of the transition from Art Deco to Streamline Modern that took place through the 1930s.
An L-shaped hotel with the theater tucked into the L seems most likely. But as the long side of the building was along Court Street, I think it’s likely that the theater ran north and south, with the stage at the north end and a side entrance for the stage at the northeast corner, behind the Woolworth building.
The July 26, 1922, issue of Fire and Water Engineering had a brief article about the fire that had recently occurred in the Orpheum. It doesn’t mention the hotel at all, though it gives the dimensions of the building as 100 X 25, which is surely an error and was probably meant to have read 100 x 125, which is what I’d say the modern building on the site is.
The listing for the Orpheum in the 1909-1910 Cahn guide says that it had 1,000 seats. The stage was 53 feet 6 inches between the sidewalls (which was probably the same width as the auditorium) and the distance from the footlights to the back wall of the stage was 27 feet 6 inches. Given those dimensions, and a lot 125 feet deep from High Street and only 100 feet deep from Court Street, plus the need to accommodate hotel rooms along both frontages, a north-south auditorium with the stage at the north end is more likely than an east-west configuration.
A guidebook published in 1907 lists a 900-seat theater called the Lyceum at 322 High Street in Portsmouth, and doesn’t mention an Orpheum Theatre. The Lyceum had to have been this house. The 1922 article about the fire says that the Orpheum building was 46 years old, which would give a build date of about 1876. I found the Lyceum mentioned in several publications from 1900, but so far none earlier. The house might have had a different name prior to that. It became the Orpheum sometime between 1907 and 1909.
I forgot to mention my source for the date. It was Robert Brooke Albertson’s Portsmouth Virginia (Google Books preview,) which features an early drawing of the hotel on page 27. The building was originally four storys, which is why there was a cornice at the top of the fourth floor, as seen in later photos. The top floor was a later addition, though why the new floor got no cornice atop it I don’t know.
The facade of the building is actually pretty characteristic of the commercial structures of the 1850s, being fairly plain and having smaller windows than later buildings usually had. As the 19th century progressed architecture not only became ever more elaborate, but windows tended to take up an ever larger proportion of the facades.
I had hoped to discover how the theater was configured (either it had been inserted into the hotel building, or the entrance ran through the hotel building to a new auditorium built behind the hotel, possibly extending all the way to Queen Street) but the oldest aerial view of the site from Historic Aerials dates from 1963, six years after the entire building was destroyed by fire on August 9, 1957. Maybe somebody who attended the theater will show up to tell us how the building was laid out.
The Hotel Monroe building did indeed date from the mid-19th century, having been completed in 1855. It was originally called the Ocean House Hotel. I haven’t been able to discover when the theater opened, but the old Orpheum was in operation at this location by 1906.
The Magic Lantern Theatre is no longer in the same building that was described in the 1941 MGM report. The history section of the theater’s web site says that the original building was demolished in February, 2007, and the last movies had been shown on October 8, 2005, ending 75 years of operation (actually 76 years, the house having opened as the Meserve Theatre on June 5, 1929.) The history page has a small vintage photo, probably dating from the 1930s.
The modern theater uses the address 9 Depot Street, but the original Theatre fronted on Main Street. Depot Street intersects Main Street twice, and the theater is on the southwest corner of the westernmost of those intersections. The original theater’s entrance was probably just about directly across the street from the end of Nulty Street, which is between addresses 132 and 140 Main Street. I would expect the theater’s historic address to have been approximately 135 Main, but Google street view fetches the address 79 US-302 for the location.
The surname of one of the architects of the 1926 remodeling of the Robey Theatre is misspelled in the “Firms” field. His correct name was Martin Laurence Millspaugh. I’ve been unable to discover Mr. Carmichael’s first name or initials.
It might have switched to independent and art films in its later years, but when it opened, the Century 25 would have been a first-run house, just like the other domed suburban theaters being built by the Syufy/Century chain during that period.
The LaRoy Theatre opened with a three-manual Bennett organ, opus 952. The fate of the instrument is unknown at this time.
this undated photo of the Forest Park Theatre shows a Mission style front.
Forest Park was one of the many amusement parks built in the suburban areas of American cities, often by streetcar companies, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The following paragraph is from an Arkansas Times article about Pulaski Heights:
If the Forest Park Theatre closed in 1915 it was probably replaced replaced by a new venue at the park. Issues of The Billboard from 1917 mention vaudeville shows still being presented at Forest Park in Little Rock.This item from the February 18, 1922, issue of The American Contractor sounds like it could be about the Beacon Theatre:
My comment of July 23, 2012, on the Glendale Theatre page says that the Don Mills Theatre was one of the houses designed by Mandel Sprachman, and cites an item from Boxoffice of October 25, 1965, which mentioned the house. It opened around 1963 and was operated by Odeon.
1915 is both the last year in which I’ve found a Gayety Theatre in Hoboken mentioned in trade publications, and the first year in which I find a Strand mentioned, so that must be the year the house was renamed. An announcement that the Gayety had been sold to an unnamed New York company who planned extensive alterations to the house appeared in the May 8, 1915, issue of The New York Clipper. I found the Gayety mentioned as late as August, 1915, but the Strand was operating by October that year.
Numerous documents, including several photographs, related to the Quartett Club are available online from the Hoboken Historical Society at this web page. A couple of photos depict the building after it was converted into the Gayety Theatre, and one depicts the ceremony for the laying of the cornerstone of the building on October 28, 1891. The description of that photo says that the building became the Gayety Theatre in 1907, and that the apartment house now on the site was built in 1931.
The October 29 issue of The New York Times had an article about the ceremony (online here,) and revealed that the building was built by the Masonic lodge. The formal opening of the club’s new building on December 10, 1892, was announced in the following day’s issue of the New York Press.
Sanford appears to have renumbered its lots at some point, so the historic address we’ve been using is inaccurate. The Cinema Data Project’s page for the State Theatre says that it was “…close to midtown mall,” which is a modern shopping center on the northeast side of Main Street between St. Ignatius Street and Washington Street.
The Project’s description of the photo in the 1941 MGM report says that it shows the theater in a corner block. Our photo above shows a narrow alley next to the theater. If that was the corner referred to, it must have been St. Ignatius Street, which is still very narrow, though it might have been widened a bit when the mall was built. Internet says that the business in the modern building at that location, Gold Rush Party, is at 882 Main Street, so that’s most likely what the address of the State Theatre would be if it were still standing.
A map of a walking tour of Sanford (PDF here) shows the location of the Capitol Theatre to have been at the northeast corner of Main Street (ME-109) and Water Street (US-202.) However, a photo of the Leavitt Theatre published in 1914 (Google Books scan) shows it to have been a mid-block building. It seems likely that Water Street was realigned at some point, though, so the map could be accurate if that location was once a couple of doors east of the old intersection.
Sanford has apparently renumbered its lots at some point, because the modern building nearest the Capitol’s site (and perhaps directly on it,) a 7-11 store, is at modern address 880 Main Street.
1,268 most likely comes from a Film Daily Yearbook listing. The FDY was not always accurate, but sometimes it was. The MGM reports were probably more accurate, but the one Ron cited was from 1941, and during the war many large, old theaters covered over their disused orchestra pits and added a couple more rows of seats because business was booming and it was very difficult for chains to get new theaters built due to restrictions on new construction, so it was a cheap way to add new capacity.
Seating capacities tended to fluctuate over the years, anyway (re-seating with larger seats and maybe wider rows, part or all of a balcony being closed off as business declined, seats from the front rows being removed to replace broken seats farther back in the house in theaters that couldn’t afford new replacements, etc.,) and theater operators, for various reasons (such as the union regulation that once required two projectionists in houses with more than 1,000 seats, leading managers to sometimes undercount,) didn’t always give accurate counts, so the exact number of seats in any given theater at any given time is often moot. For these reasons I look at the seat counts at Cinema Treasures as usually being no more than ballpark figures.
As for the demolition date, Ron Newman’s comment of March 28, 2006, cites a September 6, 1982, newspaper article saying that the entire block was slated for demolition to make way for an office building, and the Paramount was the last business on the block that was still open, so the closing and demolition most likely took place in late 1982 or early 1983. The 3-story brick office block on the site now has a very 1980s look.
Thanks for the detailed post, macoco. I vaguely remember the day-and-date policy of the big chains in Los Angeles, but by the time I was old enough to pay close attention to which theaters were showing what, the big chains were being divorced from the studios. By the time I started going to movies on my own the Chinese had switched mostly to road shows, and all but one of the big downtown theaters were being run by Sherrill Corwin’s Metropolitan Theatres. Some were still first run houses, but the movies they ran were usually city-wide first runs, showing in maybe two dozen or more houses and drive-ins all over town.
The images Lou Rugani uploaded to this theater’s photo page do not depict the Portland Theatre which opened at 11-13 Preble Street in 1910, but its predecessor, a house at 477 Congress Street, at the corner of Preble, facing Monument Square. The earlier theater was built in 1853 and demolished in 1909, and during its last years was a movie house called The Nickel, which began operating in May, 1907. It’s Cinema Data Project page gives the additional aka Family Theatre, but doesn’t say when the house used that name.
The 1910 house, located next door to the site of the earlier theater, and opened as the New Portland Theatre (Cinema Data Project page,) has also been demolished, though I don’t know when. It was closed in the 1960s, but the building was still standing in the 1990s. This is a photo of the New Portland Theatre from the Maine Historical Society.
This 1924 photo from the Maine Historical Society shows the Strand to have been a second-floor house above a hardware store. The Cinema Data Project page for this theater doesn’t list any aka’s, and the only Nordica Theatres listed for Maine by the Project are the ones in Freeport and Lisbon.
The aka’s appear to have been obtained from this PDF, the penultimate page of which features a small photo of High Street which shows a small sliver of the theater building at left. Despite its Sawyer Street address, the photos show that the entrance to the Strand was on the High Street side of the building, though the doors did face up the block in the direction of Sawyer Street.
The Strand’s auditorium was demolished in 1970, according to This page from The Cinema Data Project. The house is listed under its original name, the Big Nickel Theatre.
The Big Nickel was a large upstairs theater with its entrance on Forest Avenue, and it opened on April 3, 1911. In 1915 it was renamed the Strand Theatre and began showing Paramount pictures, with music provided by an organ said to have cost $25,000 (a 1917 source reveals this instrument to have been a 3-manual Austin.) In 1917 the owners acquired the building on Congress Street which would house the rebuilt Strand’s entrance, and the vacant land between that building and the Big Nickel.
The theater was closed in September, 1917, and the original building gutted and rebuilt as a ground floor house, and expanded to reach the Congress Street structure, which was given a new facade. The architects for the project were Thomas Lamb and local architect Austin Pease, with New York theater specialists M. Shapiro and Sons supervising construction.
The rebuilt Strand, equipped with a large stage 90 feet wide and 34 feet deep, opened on June 3, 1918. The opening film was the Mary Pickford feature M'liss. The Strand was closed for refurbishment in the spring of 1930, reopening in June that year with Colonial style decor. The Strand closed permanently in 1963.
A photo of the rather restrained auditorium of the Lee Theatre illustrates an ad for the Celotex Corporation on this page of the May 31, 1941, issue of Motion Picture Herald The caption says that the Lee Theatre was designed by a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, architectural firm, the J. P. Hampson Co.
The May 31, 1941, issue of Motion Picture Herald featured a page of photos of the Oswego Theatre.
Additional photos appeared in this ad for the Formica company.
The splash panel over one of the Oswego’s two drinking fountains can be seen at the upper left of this page of the magazine.
A view of the Oswego’s auditorium can be seen illustrating an article about theater seats on this page of the same magazine’s May 3 issue.
The Patricia was most likely the proposed theater that was the subject of this brief item inThe Film Daily of October 30, 1937:
Herbert Ram also operated the State Theatre in Aiken.Thanks for the extensive research, norfolk356. So we have this house opening as the Lyceum Theatre in 1900, being renamed the Orpheum sometime between 1907 and 1909, and being rebuilt following major fire damage in 1922. It’s interesting that in 1931 architect Charles M. Major, who drew the plans for the 1922 project, still had his practice in the office portion of the building.
A drawing of the Colonial No. 1 and a photo of the Colonial No. 2 have been uploaded to this theater’s photo page by CharmaineZoe, plus there is an architect’s drawing of the Colonial No. 2 which I uploaded. They indicate that Brooksie is mistaken. The Colonial No. 1 had an alley to the right, as does the Plaza Theatre, and Colonial No. 2 had an alley to the left, as did the Rapallo Theatre. It must have been the Plaza that was built on the site of the Colonial No. 1.
This post from Cezar Del Valle’s Bijou Dream weblog is also a bit confused. The heading gives the address of the Colonial No. 2, at 525 George Street, but I believe that the photo on the page actually depicts the Colonial No. 1, and on the bottom of that photo it says “Australia’s first continuous moving picture show” and then “J. D. Williams Ams. Co., 610 George St. Sydney.”
610 George Street would be under the footprint of the Plaza Theatre. The Colonial No. 1 was an existing theater that J. D. Williams acquired in 1910, and which he then remodeled. The MPW photo must depict the house pre-remodel. The entrance is wider and the decorative details are different in CharmaineZoe’s drawing, so it must be a post-remodel view.
610 George Street was the main office of the J. D. Williams Amusement Company, according to an advertisement for the company that is one of many illustrations in a photo essay by Ross Thorne (PDF here.) The essay features vintage photos of the Colonial after it had been renamed Empress and the Victory after it had been renamed Rapallo.
There are also numerous color photos of the Victory/Rapallo by the author. Despite numerous Art Deco features, especially on the facade, the Victory was a very streamlined theater. Its interior could serve as a textbook example of the transition from Art Deco to Streamline Modern that took place through the 1930s.
An L-shaped hotel with the theater tucked into the L seems most likely. But as the long side of the building was along Court Street, I think it’s likely that the theater ran north and south, with the stage at the north end and a side entrance for the stage at the northeast corner, behind the Woolworth building.
The July 26, 1922, issue of Fire and Water Engineering had a brief article about the fire that had recently occurred in the Orpheum. It doesn’t mention the hotel at all, though it gives the dimensions of the building as 100 X 25, which is surely an error and was probably meant to have read 100 x 125, which is what I’d say the modern building on the site is.
The listing for the Orpheum in the 1909-1910 Cahn guide says that it had 1,000 seats. The stage was 53 feet 6 inches between the sidewalls (which was probably the same width as the auditorium) and the distance from the footlights to the back wall of the stage was 27 feet 6 inches. Given those dimensions, and a lot 125 feet deep from High Street and only 100 feet deep from Court Street, plus the need to accommodate hotel rooms along both frontages, a north-south auditorium with the stage at the north end is more likely than an east-west configuration.
A guidebook published in 1907 lists a 900-seat theater called the Lyceum at 322 High Street in Portsmouth, and doesn’t mention an Orpheum Theatre. The Lyceum had to have been this house. The 1922 article about the fire says that the Orpheum building was 46 years old, which would give a build date of about 1876. I found the Lyceum mentioned in several publications from 1900, but so far none earlier. The house might have had a different name prior to that. It became the Orpheum sometime between 1907 and 1909.
I forgot to mention my source for the date. It was Robert Brooke Albertson’s Portsmouth Virginia (Google Books preview,) which features an early drawing of the hotel on page 27. The building was originally four storys, which is why there was a cornice at the top of the fourth floor, as seen in later photos. The top floor was a later addition, though why the new floor got no cornice atop it I don’t know.
The facade of the building is actually pretty characteristic of the commercial structures of the 1850s, being fairly plain and having smaller windows than later buildings usually had. As the 19th century progressed architecture not only became ever more elaborate, but windows tended to take up an ever larger proportion of the facades.
I had hoped to discover how the theater was configured (either it had been inserted into the hotel building, or the entrance ran through the hotel building to a new auditorium built behind the hotel, possibly extending all the way to Queen Street) but the oldest aerial view of the site from Historic Aerials dates from 1963, six years after the entire building was destroyed by fire on August 9, 1957. Maybe somebody who attended the theater will show up to tell us how the building was laid out.
The Hotel Monroe building did indeed date from the mid-19th century, having been completed in 1855. It was originally called the Ocean House Hotel. I haven’t been able to discover when the theater opened, but the old Orpheum was in operation at this location by 1906.
The Magic Lantern Theatre is no longer in the same building that was described in the 1941 MGM report. The history section of the theater’s web site says that the original building was demolished in February, 2007, and the last movies had been shown on October 8, 2005, ending 75 years of operation (actually 76 years, the house having opened as the Meserve Theatre on June 5, 1929.) The history page has a small vintage photo, probably dating from the 1930s.
The modern theater uses the address 9 Depot Street, but the original Theatre fronted on Main Street. Depot Street intersects Main Street twice, and the theater is on the southwest corner of the westernmost of those intersections. The original theater’s entrance was probably just about directly across the street from the end of Nulty Street, which is between addresses 132 and 140 Main Street. I would expect the theater’s historic address to have been approximately 135 Main, but Google street view fetches the address 79 US-302 for the location.
Mike, I think you forgot to close the space between the ] and the ( in the markdown code. Here’s a clickable link: Jewel theatre opening