The Springfield architectural firm Butler Rosenbury & Partners designed the 2011 renovation and expansion project for this theater. A thumbnail link to six photos of the Springfield 11 Cinemas can be found on the entertainment projects page of the firm’s web site.
The Gateway 12 in Mesa was designed by TK Architects. There is a slidshow with several photos here at the web site of Luke Draily Construction Co., the contractors.
This PDF of a document prepared for the Colorado State Register of Historic Properties has a fairly extensive history of the Emerson/Sands Theatre. It includes the information that the house opened on March 4, 1916. The house originally seated 360, with 300 seats on the main floor and 60 in a small balcony.
With the addition of a stage and the closing of the balcony in the early 1960s, plus subsequent re-seating with larger seats, the seating capacity of the house has been reduced to 226. The house was renamed the Sands Theatre in 1966.
The October 16, 1915, issue of The American Contractor had this item about the Emerson Theatre:
The Baerresen brothers were active from 1884 until around 1928, and were one of Denver’s more prolific architectural firms of the period. Many of their works are still standing.
Howard Hughes' production Hell’s Angels was released nationwide in late 1930, shortly before the La Nora opened, so this photo probably dates from early 1931 (I’d guess January or February, judging from the amount of snow on the ground.)
The November 20, 1915, issue of The Music Trade Review had this item which was probably about the Strand: “Willingham Tift will erect a new $8,000 moving picture theatre at Tifton.” Henry Tift founded Tifton as a site for his lumber mill in 1872, and the Tift family remained a force in the town’s economic life long after.
The November 20, 1915, issue of The Music Trade Review had an item about this theater:
“The Plaza Theatre Co., of Waterloo, has taken a lease on the Selzer building on Pierce street, in Sioux City, and will convert it into a high class moving picture house.”
The Selzer Building was under construction when it was mentioned in the December, 1905, issue of Engineering Review, so was probably completed in early 1906. It was built for Charles Selzer, son of Rudolph Selzer, a Hessian immigrant who had established Sioux City’s first brewery in 1860.
I don’t know how much the exterior of the Selzer Building was altered in the conversion to a theater (probably very little,) but according to the records of the American Terra Cotta and Ceramic Company the original architect of the 1905 structure was Henry Fisher. I’ve been unable to discover the architect for the 1915-1916 conversion, but it would not have been Fisher, who retired in 1909.
Surprisingly, even without an address to work with Google Maps has put the pin icon for this theater almost exactly at its actual location. The seven-story building prominent in the vintage postcard Don Lewis provided is still standing at the northeast corner of Pierce and 4th Street, and the Theatre was in the second building south of 4th on the same side of Pierce. This block is now mostly parking lot, so we can mark the Plaza Theatre as demolished.
The Plaza Theatre would have been roughly across the street from the entrance of the modern Great Southern Bank building which uses the address 329 N.Pierce, so the theater’s address would probably have been approximately 330 N. Pierce (Google street view estimates the location as 351, but of course it exaggerates.)
Thanks, Ferretman. I see from Google’s satellite view that the entire block the theater was on is now a parking lot, but it looks like there aren’t many places nearby to go to once you’ve parked your car.
norfolk356: What is on the corner now (and extending along Boush Street all the way to College Place) is an enormous building called Harbor Heights. It has retail space on the Boush Street side of the ground floor, with fourteen floors condominiums and lofts above. The parking garage extends east along Tazewell about two thirds of the way to Granby Street, so the Colonial’s site must be under its footprint.
Chestnut Hill is an unincorporated village that is mostly inside the incorporated city of Newton, which is the part of it that the Showcase SuperLux is in. Newton contains all or parts of thirteen villages, but none of those villages are legal entities, just traditional names.
One part of the town of Brookline is also considered part of the village of Chestnut Hill, and Chestnut Hill also spills over into part of the city of Boston itself (parts of the Boston neighborhoods of West Roxbury and Brighton are considered part of the village Chestnut Hill.) Massachusetts is just kind of odd when it comes to place names (so is Pennsylvania, but that’s another story.) Things like that don’t happen in Iowa, by gosh!
Anyway, the Showcase SuperLux should probably be listed as being both in Newton (the incorporated city) and in Chestnut Hill (the unofficial but traditional neighborhood.) If any theaters ever open in the entirely unrelated Chestnut Hill neighborhoods of the Massachusetts towns of Blackstone or Belchertown, well, we’ll just have to figure out what to do about them then.
The vaudeville program at the Central Square Theatre in Lynn starting October 23 had done good business, according to an item in the October 28, 1911, issue of The New York Clipper.
An item from an issue of The Moving Picture World earlier that year (which I’ve been unable to date exactly) had said that the Central Square Theatre had opened on December 29. A late 1910 opening matches up nicely with the item in The American Architect of March 3, 1910, which said that plans for the proposed Central Square Theatre in Lynn had been prepared by Boston architect E. W. Maynard.
The Rowland Theatre was to open on October 23, according to a belated item in the October 28, 1911, issue of The New York Clipper. The item said that the new house, which would open with vaudeville, had been “…modeled after Maxine Elliot’s playhouse in New York.”
I’ve been unable to find much about Stotser & Associates on the Internet. They have no web site of their own that I can find, and the business web sites that have pages for the firm give very little information about them. They are an architectural or architectural engineering firm headquartered in Columbus, Georgia, and have the aka R S E International, presumably an acronym for partners Ron Stotser and Sia Etemadi. The firm was established in 1993 and all the business sites agree it is rather small, though more recent postings show higher revenues and more personnel than earlier postings so it must be growing rapidly.
I have found a few construction related web sites that list Stotser & Associates as architects of various multiplex theaters, especially for the Rave Cinema chain (page at Continental Building Systems), but construction companies often deal only with supervising architects, who are not necessarily the actual designers of the projects they oversee.
Still, I don’t see why a small firm in Georgia would be supervising construction of a large project in Massachusetts, or other distant locations that have had projects attributed to them. Supervising architects are usually small firms with their only office near a given project, or larger firms with a branch office near that project. It’s a bit puzzling, and I’m not sure what function Stotser & Associates fulfilled in the Showcase SuperLux project, while the two firms named in my previous comment were undoubtedly both major players in it.
This article about The Street in the New England Real Estate Journal says that the Cambridge architectural firm Prellwitz Chilinski Associates (PCA) designed the reconstruction of the old Chestnut Hill Shopping Center into The Street. PCA also designed the Legacy Center, site of one of National Amusement’s earlier multiplexes.
The interiors of the Showcase SuperLux itself are the work of the British firm Julian Taylor Design Associates, with offices in the market town of Romsey, Hampshire, England. Their web site features a slide show with nine photos of the project.
Thanks for that link, Howard. It’s remarkable that the Playhouse building has not only survived for so many decades after the theater closed, but will now have a second life as an entertainment venue.
The vaulted auditorium ceiling as seen in the slide show must have been original to the theater, though there is a possibility that the circular reveals for indirect lighting could have been added in a later remodeling while the theater was still in operation.
Bill Counter’s page for the Playhouse has a photo from 2009, when the auditorium was being used as a church by Victory Outreach. There is also a 2014 photo taken during the conversion of the space to the Teragram Ballroom. The stage seen in both photos must have been added by the church, but the ballroom’s developer has added a traditional proscenium to it as part of the renovation. The side wall decoration is also modern.
Counter has discovered that the auditorium served as a print shop for some time after the Playhouse closed. My family was in the printing business so I know that presses are very heavy, so when the floor was leveled it must have been done with a very thick pour of concrete. The Ballroom must have kept that floor. It would have been prohibitively expensive to dig it out. But even though the ceiling is likely all that remains of the Playhouse’s original interior, it’s nice to know that the building has entered its second century still standing, and is once again providing entertainment.
A June 15 opening means that the Chelsea Theatre presented its last show on the 28th anniversary of its opening.
Even numbered addresses are on the north side of 4th Street, so the Chelsea was on the site of the glassy, four story building at the northwest corner of 4th and Wyandotte Street.
A more detailed history of the Lyric Theatre can be found in this PDF of another Hartford Historical Society newsletter, from 1995. It includes a map showing that the Lyric was indeed on the west side of North Main Street a short distance north of Bridge Street.
The grainy photo of the Lyric in the 1994 newsletter Ron referred to (PDF here also shows the building next door to the south. Though there is not much detail in it, I’m pretty sure the neighboring building is the three-story brick commercial structure still standing at 42 North Main Street, on the northwest corner of North Main and Bridge Street.
That means that the theater would have been on one of the lots now occupied by a larger, post-modern structure called the Dreamland Building, which is at 58 North Main Street. The theater’s actual address probably would have been lower than 58, say approximately 50 N. Main.
Allen J. Singer’s Stepping Out in Cincinnati: Queen City Entertainment 1900-1960 (Google Books preview) says that the Empress ran “B” movies in between burlesque shows. That was pretty much standard for most burlesque houses by the 1940s, probably done more to give the performers and the band some break time than to bring in paying customers.
By the 1950s most burlesque theaters, including the two that I remember were still operating on Main Street in Los Angeles, were running what then passed for erotic movies as part of every show. The handful of strictly live burlesque theaters operated as two-a-day (or three-a-day) houses, going dark between the afternoon and evening performances. Singer says that the Empress ran six shows a day, so it must have been continuous.
On February 10, 2014, the Evansville Courier & Press posted this obituary of Larry Aiken, who had renovated the Rosedale Theatre into the Theatre A. At the same time, Aiken launched The Pub in the building next door, intending it as a place where theater patrons could get a drink before or after the show, but The Pub proved so popular that it eventually displaced the theater.
The Washington was run by the local circuit, Premier Theatres, for many years, but in 1965 was taken over by Ted Graulich, operator of the Family Drive-In at Evansville. He took over the Ross Theatre at the same time.
After remodeling the Washington, as reported in Boxoffice, February 21, 1966 (page one, with auditorium photo, page two with marquee photo), Graulich renamed the house the Cinema 35. Seating had been reduced to 605.
The April 3, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World had an item about a Dreamland Theatre located on Washington Street in Boston, but I don’t know if it was this house or not. The item said that the building housing the theater was to be demolished:
“On April 5, the Dreamland on Washington street, Boston, will be compelled to close its doors. This theater is one of the oldest exclusive picture theaters in the city. The owners of the land and the building have decided to raze the structure to make room for a modern business block. Herman Sivovolos, who has been the manager of the house for the past five years, has resigned from his position and is now affiliated with the American Feature Company as a roadman.”
Perhaps the owners of the building changed their minds about demolishing it. I haven’t found any later items about the project.
An article about Crowley’s theaters in the June 16, 2013, issue of The Crowley Post-Signal (PDF here) says that the Trail Drive-In opened on Sunday, July 3, 1949, with the James Cagney movie Blood on the Sun. The house advertised two shows nightly, at dusk and at 10:00 PM.
The Trail Drive-In remained open until late September, 1968. Though it advertised at that time that it was closing temporarily for repairs, it appears to have never reopened.
An article about Crowley’s theaters in the June 16, 2013, issue of The Crowley Post-Signal (PDF here) says that the Bruce Theatre was an independently operated house that was open from 1940 to 1956. There is also a photo of the front of the theater.
The Springfield architectural firm Butler Rosenbury & Partners designed the 2011 renovation and expansion project for this theater. A thumbnail link to six photos of the Springfield 11 Cinemas can be found on the entertainment projects page of the firm’s web site.
The Gateway 12 in Mesa was designed by TK Architects. There is a slidshow with several photos here at the web site of Luke Draily Construction Co., the contractors.
This PDF of a document prepared for the Colorado State Register of Historic Properties has a fairly extensive history of the Emerson/Sands Theatre. It includes the information that the house opened on March 4, 1916. The house originally seated 360, with 300 seats on the main floor and 60 in a small balcony.
With the addition of a stage and the closing of the balcony in the early 1960s, plus subsequent re-seating with larger seats, the seating capacity of the house has been reduced to 226. The house was renamed the Sands Theatre in 1966.
The October 16, 1915, issue of The American Contractor had this item about the Emerson Theatre:
The Baerresen brothers were active from 1884 until around 1928, and were one of Denver’s more prolific architectural firms of the period. Many of their works are still standing.Howard Hughes' production Hell’s Angels was released nationwide in late 1930, shortly before the La Nora opened, so this photo probably dates from early 1931 (I’d guess January or February, judging from the amount of snow on the ground.)
The November 20, 1915, issue of The Music Trade Review had this item which was probably about the Strand: “Willingham Tift will erect a new $8,000 moving picture theatre at Tifton.” Henry Tift founded Tifton as a site for his lumber mill in 1872, and the Tift family remained a force in the town’s economic life long after.
The November 20, 1915, issue of The Music Trade Review had an item about this theater:
The Selzer Building was under construction when it was mentioned in the December, 1905, issue of Engineering Review, so was probably completed in early 1906. It was built for Charles Selzer, son of Rudolph Selzer, a Hessian immigrant who had established Sioux City’s first brewery in 1860.I don’t know how much the exterior of the Selzer Building was altered in the conversion to a theater (probably very little,) but according to the records of the American Terra Cotta and Ceramic Company the original architect of the 1905 structure was Henry Fisher. I’ve been unable to discover the architect for the 1915-1916 conversion, but it would not have been Fisher, who retired in 1909.
Surprisingly, even without an address to work with Google Maps has put the pin icon for this theater almost exactly at its actual location. The seven-story building prominent in the vintage postcard Don Lewis provided is still standing at the northeast corner of Pierce and 4th Street, and the Theatre was in the second building south of 4th on the same side of Pierce. This block is now mostly parking lot, so we can mark the Plaza Theatre as demolished.
The Plaza Theatre would have been roughly across the street from the entrance of the modern Great Southern Bank building which uses the address 329 N.Pierce, so the theater’s address would probably have been approximately 330 N. Pierce (Google street view estimates the location as 351, but of course it exaggerates.)
Thanks, Ferretman. I see from Google’s satellite view that the entire block the theater was on is now a parking lot, but it looks like there aren’t many places nearby to go to once you’ve parked your car.
norfolk356: What is on the corner now (and extending along Boush Street all the way to College Place) is an enormous building called Harbor Heights. It has retail space on the Boush Street side of the ground floor, with fourteen floors condominiums and lofts above. The parking garage extends east along Tazewell about two thirds of the way to Granby Street, so the Colonial’s site must be under its footprint.
Chestnut Hill is an unincorporated village that is mostly inside the incorporated city of Newton, which is the part of it that the Showcase SuperLux is in. Newton contains all or parts of thirteen villages, but none of those villages are legal entities, just traditional names.
One part of the town of Brookline is also considered part of the village of Chestnut Hill, and Chestnut Hill also spills over into part of the city of Boston itself (parts of the Boston neighborhoods of West Roxbury and Brighton are considered part of the village Chestnut Hill.) Massachusetts is just kind of odd when it comes to place names (so is Pennsylvania, but that’s another story.) Things like that don’t happen in Iowa, by gosh!
Anyway, the Showcase SuperLux should probably be listed as being both in Newton (the incorporated city) and in Chestnut Hill (the unofficial but traditional neighborhood.) If any theaters ever open in the entirely unrelated Chestnut Hill neighborhoods of the Massachusetts towns of Blackstone or Belchertown, well, we’ll just have to figure out what to do about them then.
The vaudeville program at the Central Square Theatre in Lynn starting October 23 had done good business, according to an item in the October 28, 1911, issue of The New York Clipper.
An item from an issue of The Moving Picture World earlier that year (which I’ve been unable to date exactly) had said that the Central Square Theatre had opened on December 29. A late 1910 opening matches up nicely with the item in The American Architect of March 3, 1910, which said that plans for the proposed Central Square Theatre in Lynn had been prepared by Boston architect E. W. Maynard.
The Rowland Theatre was to open on October 23, according to a belated item in the October 28, 1911, issue of The New York Clipper. The item said that the new house, which would open with vaudeville, had been “…modeled after Maxine Elliot’s playhouse in New York.”
I’ve been unable to find much about Stotser & Associates on the Internet. They have no web site of their own that I can find, and the business web sites that have pages for the firm give very little information about them. They are an architectural or architectural engineering firm headquartered in Columbus, Georgia, and have the aka R S E International, presumably an acronym for partners Ron Stotser and Sia Etemadi. The firm was established in 1993 and all the business sites agree it is rather small, though more recent postings show higher revenues and more personnel than earlier postings so it must be growing rapidly.
I have found a few construction related web sites that list Stotser & Associates as architects of various multiplex theaters, especially for the Rave Cinema chain (page at Continental Building Systems), but construction companies often deal only with supervising architects, who are not necessarily the actual designers of the projects they oversee.
Still, I don’t see why a small firm in Georgia would be supervising construction of a large project in Massachusetts, or other distant locations that have had projects attributed to them. Supervising architects are usually small firms with their only office near a given project, or larger firms with a branch office near that project. It’s a bit puzzling, and I’m not sure what function Stotser & Associates fulfilled in the Showcase SuperLux project, while the two firms named in my previous comment were undoubtedly both major players in it.
This article about The Street in the New England Real Estate Journal says that the Cambridge architectural firm Prellwitz Chilinski Associates (PCA) designed the reconstruction of the old Chestnut Hill Shopping Center into The Street. PCA also designed the Legacy Center, site of one of National Amusement’s earlier multiplexes.
The interiors of the Showcase SuperLux itself are the work of the British firm Julian Taylor Design Associates, with offices in the market town of Romsey, Hampshire, England. Their web site features a slide show with nine photos of the project.
Thanks for that link, Howard. It’s remarkable that the Playhouse building has not only survived for so many decades after the theater closed, but will now have a second life as an entertainment venue.
The vaulted auditorium ceiling as seen in the slide show must have been original to the theater, though there is a possibility that the circular reveals for indirect lighting could have been added in a later remodeling while the theater was still in operation.
Bill Counter’s page for the Playhouse has a photo from 2009, when the auditorium was being used as a church by Victory Outreach. There is also a 2014 photo taken during the conversion of the space to the Teragram Ballroom. The stage seen in both photos must have been added by the church, but the ballroom’s developer has added a traditional proscenium to it as part of the renovation. The side wall decoration is also modern.
Counter has discovered that the auditorium served as a print shop for some time after the Playhouse closed. My family was in the printing business so I know that presses are very heavy, so when the floor was leveled it must have been done with a very thick pour of concrete. The Ballroom must have kept that floor. It would have been prohibitively expensive to dig it out. But even though the ceiling is likely all that remains of the Playhouse’s original interior, it’s nice to know that the building has entered its second century still standing, and is once again providing entertainment.
Code Two was released in 1953.
A June 15 opening means that the Chelsea Theatre presented its last show on the 28th anniversary of its opening.
Even numbered addresses are on the north side of 4th Street, so the Chelsea was on the site of the glassy, four story building at the northwest corner of 4th and Wyandotte Street.
A more detailed history of the Lyric Theatre can be found in this PDF of another Hartford Historical Society newsletter, from 1995. It includes a map showing that the Lyric was indeed on the west side of North Main Street a short distance north of Bridge Street.
The grainy photo of the Lyric in the 1994 newsletter Ron referred to (PDF here also shows the building next door to the south. Though there is not much detail in it, I’m pretty sure the neighboring building is the three-story brick commercial structure still standing at 42 North Main Street, on the northwest corner of North Main and Bridge Street.
That means that the theater would have been on one of the lots now occupied by a larger, post-modern structure called the Dreamland Building, which is at 58 North Main Street. The theater’s actual address probably would have been lower than 58, say approximately 50 N. Main.
Allen J. Singer’s Stepping Out in Cincinnati: Queen City Entertainment 1900-1960 (Google Books preview) says that the Empress ran “B” movies in between burlesque shows. That was pretty much standard for most burlesque houses by the 1940s, probably done more to give the performers and the band some break time than to bring in paying customers.
By the 1950s most burlesque theaters, including the two that I remember were still operating on Main Street in Los Angeles, were running what then passed for erotic movies as part of every show. The handful of strictly live burlesque theaters operated as two-a-day (or three-a-day) houses, going dark between the afternoon and evening performances. Singer says that the Empress ran six shows a day, so it must have been continuous.
Every web site I’ve seen but Cinema Treasures places the Cinema North in Mattydale, not Syracuse.
On February 10, 2014, the Evansville Courier & Press posted this obituary of Larry Aiken, who had renovated the Rosedale Theatre into the Theatre A. At the same time, Aiken launched The Pub in the building next door, intending it as a place where theater patrons could get a drink before or after the show, but The Pub proved so popular that it eventually displaced the theater.
The Washington was run by the local circuit, Premier Theatres, for many years, but in 1965 was taken over by Ted Graulich, operator of the Family Drive-In at Evansville. He took over the Ross Theatre at the same time.
After remodeling the Washington, as reported in Boxoffice, February 21, 1966 (page one, with auditorium photo, page two with marquee photo), Graulich renamed the house the Cinema 35. Seating had been reduced to 605.
The April 3, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World had an item about a Dreamland Theatre located on Washington Street in Boston, but I don’t know if it was this house or not. The item said that the building housing the theater was to be demolished:
Perhaps the owners of the building changed their minds about demolishing it. I haven’t found any later items about the project.An article about Crowley’s theaters in the June 16, 2013, issue of The Crowley Post-Signal (PDF here) says that the Trail Drive-In opened on Sunday, July 3, 1949, with the James Cagney movie Blood on the Sun. The house advertised two shows nightly, at dusk and at 10:00 PM.
The Trail Drive-In remained open until late September, 1968. Though it advertised at that time that it was closing temporarily for repairs, it appears to have never reopened.
An article about Crowley’s theaters in the June 16, 2013, issue of The Crowley Post-Signal (PDF here) says that the Bruce Theatre was an independently operated house that was open from 1940 to 1956. There is also a photo of the front of the theater.