I believe that the Webbo might be the theater that opened in 1938 as the Palace, which was noted in this item from the July 5 issue of The Film Daily:
“Harriman, Tenn. — The Palace, erected by the Peerless Enterprises Inc., Tim W. Smith, president, has opened here. The Palace seats 1,000, with 625 downstairs. Boyd Underwood, formerly of the Tennessee Theater, Knoxville, Tenn., is the manager.”
Peerless Enterprises was one of three independent theater chains that filed a lawsuit against Crescent Amusement Co. in 1939. A July 21, 1941, Motion Picture Daily article about the case had this to say:
:“Tim W. Smith, president of Peerless Enterprises, Inc., Knoxville, maintained under examination the previous day that Crescent competition and his difficulty in obtaining product had forced his newly-opened houses in Harriman, Morristown and Newport, all in East Tennessee, to close in 1938.”
I’ve found no later references to the Palace, so it’s most likely fate was to have been taken over by Crescent and renamed.
The July 5, 1938, issue of The Film Daily ran this item about the proposed theater at Washington Avenue and Española Way:
“Weingarten Miami Beach House Ready for Winter
“Miami Beach— New $100,000 theater to be erected here by Herman Weingarten, prexy of the W. G. Operating Co., will be ready for the 1938-39 winter season, it is announced. Thirty-six year lease on a site at Espanola Way and Washington Ave. has been closed.
“Paul Greenbaum of New York City, associated with Weingarten for the last 20 years in the construction of theaters in New York, Brooklyn and Long Island, will have charge of construction work. Robert Collins is architect.
“The building will have a large entrance on Washington Ave. and a roomy balcony and open smoking loge. The latest type of construction and air conditioning will be utilized.”
Toward the bottom of this web page about the Princess Theatre is the story of how the Prince Theatre got its name. Until 1938 it was called the Roxy Theatre. When the Princess burned that year, its marquee survived. The “ss” was cut off the end and the remainder of the marquee, reading Prince, was moved to the Roxy.
The impression I got from the text is that the Roxy/Prince was down Roane Street from the Princess.
A short film made when the Princess reopened in 1939 can be seen at YouTube (I believe this film was previously linked, but the comment with the link has been removed.) The film consists mostly of scenes in Harriman, including schools, churches, factories, and shots of various worthies such as civic officials and members of the Rotary Club. A few scenes, mostly in the last couple of minutes, show the Princess Theatre.
One significant scene shows Crescent Amusement Company head Tony Sudekum greeting architect Joe Holman, so the Princess, like most Crescent houses of the period, was designed by the Nashville architectural firm Marr & Holman.
John Gaisford, architect of the Jefferson Theatre, also designed the Marion (later Paramount) Theatre in Clarksdale, Mississippi. I’ve also found references to a theater project in Little Rock that Gaisford designed for New York theater owner Albert Weis in 1909, but I’ve been unable to discover if the house was built or, if it was, what it was called.
A footnote in Steve Goodson’s Highbrows, Hillbillies & Hellfire: Public Entertainment in Atlanta, 1880-1930 (Google Books preview) says that the Vaudette Theatre closed in 1924 and the building became part of J. M. High’s department store. The same note says that the Vaudette of 1911 had 800 seats, and cites an Atlanta Constitution article of February 26, 1911, which claimed that the Vaudette was the largest theater showing movies in the south other than Jake Wells’s Bijou, also in Atlanta, which, unlike the Vaudette was a combination house running vaudeville as well as movies.
The 1909-1910 Cahn guide listed the Auditorium as a ground floor house with 1,024 seats. I haven’t been able to discover if it ever showed movies. A May 18, 2013, article in the Greeneville Sun calls it the “…old Greenville Opera House building….” but I don’t know if that was ever its formal name.
Greeneville also once had a theater called Snapp’s Opera House, dating from 1887, but it was on Main Street (either 120 or 122 Main.) The Auditorium was apparently a newer theater. There was once also a house called the Princess Theatre in the building next door to Snapp’s Opera House.
If the addresses haven’t changed since the Sanborn map was made, then the likely Palace Theatre building at 136 Depot is still standing. It’s a four-story brick building with the second floor windows bricked up (probably to make room for a balcony) located on the north side of Depot a few doors east of Irish Street. In satellite view the roof looks to be in good shape, and there is a store of some kind on the ground floor but there is no readable signage.
Moving Places: A Life at the Movies, by Jonathan Rosenbaum, grandson of Louis Rosenbaum, who opened this theater in 1928, has a few paragraphs about the Ritz which can be found on this web page. The section names the architects of the Ritz as the Nashville firm of Marr & Holman.
I can’t find any other references on the Internet to architects named Thomas Mar or Joseph Harmon, but there are plenty of references to Nashville architects Thomas Marr and Joseph Holman. Marr & Holman were designing theaters for the Crescent Amusement Company at least as early as 1915, and designed theaters for the company for many years. Crescent’s Capitol in Greenville must have been designed by Marr & Holman.
Friends of the Queen Theatre provides this web page with a brief history of the house. It says that the Queen was built by Franklin Theatrical Enterprises, operators of the King Theatre in downtown Honolulu, and was opened on June 29, 1936. It was designed by local architect Lyman Bigelow.
Broumas also operated the Newport Theatre for a time. The company declared bankruptcy in December, 1967. At the time they operated 17 theaters in six states.Although headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, I believe that Broumas had operated more theaters in the Youngstown area than anywhere else.
Broumas Theatres opened the Lincoln Knolls Plaza Theatre on December 15, 1963, the same day they opened the Boardman Plaza Theatre. The Broumas chain, headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, had 17 theaters in six states when it declared bankruptcy in December, 1967.
This ad, headed “WANTED, HIGH-CLASS MUSICAL COMEDIES” appeared in the January 24, 1920, issue of The Billboard:
“20 to 35 people that can give two-hour Show; also Dramatic and Vaudeville
Companies. Percentage or salary. One to two weeks' stand. If you have the company I have the house. Let’s get together. Traveling independent companies of all kinds, let me hear from you, especially big Musical Comedies.
“GEO. C. BACKUS, Scott’s Theater, … HAMPTON, VA”
I don’t know if Scott’s Theatre succeeded in attracting high-class musical comedies in 1920, but in 1927 the Hampton High School yearbook reported that “Scott’s Theatre was almost completely filled” for the April 22 performance of the school’s Senior Class play.
This web page has a colorized postcard of the Scott Theatre (click third thumbnail in the bottom row.)
A “Looking Back” type of feature published in the Vindicator on December 15, 2003, (online here) said that in December, 1963, Broumas Theatres opened two new movie houses at Lincoln Knolls Plaza and Boardman Plaza, and had a third house under construction at Liberty Plaza.
coldercase: Discovering the program at a given neighborhood theater on a given date is apt to be very difficult, if not impossible. As you’ve discovered, neighborhood theaters typically didn’t advertise in the metropolitan daily papers during the silent era.
Like small town theaters, neighborhood houses usually changed programs twice a week, and some theaters would have a monthly program printed up and distributed from the theater and from neighborhood stores. Some theaters did smaller weekly programs instead. In both cases, theaters would offset the cost by selling advertising space to local businesses.
These programs were undoubtedly thrown out by most people at the end of the month, though I’m sure a few pack rats saved a few of them, but if any have survived to this late date I’m not aware of them. Even if any copies have survived, there’s no telling where they might be. There are undoubtedly some programs in the hands of collectors of movie-related ephemera, but the odds that programs from any of these three theaters are among them are very small, and the chances of any of them being from August, 1924, vanishingly small.
By the 1920s a few districts of Los Angeles had daily or weekly neighborhood newspapers, but I’m not aware of any that were published for the area around these three theaters. Someone at the public library might know for sure if there was one or not, though even if there was there’s no guarantee that its archive still exists, or that any of these theaters advertised in it.
It’s also very unlikely that the business records of any of these theaters have survived, or the records of the distribution companies that provided films to them, though those records would certainly have told which theaters had which films on any given date.
As the Realart/New University was very close to the USC campus, I had hoped that there might be an ad for it in the school’s student newspaper, but in the three issues of The Southern California Trojan from August, 1924, that the USC Digital Library has online the only movie theater advertised was the California, at Main and 8th downtown.
I can’t think of any other sources that might have the information you want, but one thing that’s certain is that these neighborhood theaters would not have been showing first-run movies from the important studios. Big movies from big studios wouldn’t have been available to them until weeks or even months after they had finished their runs in larger theaters. Whatever they were showing in August, 1924, would have been something that had been shown in the downtown theaters earlier that year, unless they were movies from the “poverty row” studios (usually adventure films or westerns) that typically never got shown at the major theaters.
Newsreels being shown at the White Sands Theatre were mentioned in the January 20, 1938, issue of the Alamogordo News. Though I haven’t found any earlier mentions of the White Sands, I’m sure the house opened sometime in 1937.
The May 2, 1956, issue of the Alamogordo Daily News reported that the new Sierra Theatre would open the following day. The opening feature would be the comedy The Lieutenant Wore Skirts. The Sierra featured a 17x38-foot screen. The house was operated by Frontier Theatres.
The Iris Theatre’s building has a midcentury look, so I would say it is most likely the project that was listed simply as “Eagle Pass, Tex.— Cliff and W. C. Butler, a 600-seater” in the “New Theatres” column of Showmen’s Trade Review for January 1, 1949.
Here’s an announcement about the Masonic Lodge building in Rushville, from the “Contracts Awarded” section of the May 23, 1914, issue of The American Contractor:
“Moving Picture Theater, Store & Lodge Bldg.: 2 sty. & bas. $35,000. Rushville, Ind. Archt. Herbert Faltz, 1108 Indiana Pythian bldg., Indianapolis. Owner Masonic Temple Asso., Earl Payne, chm., building committee, Rushville. Genl. contractor Bert Anderson, Rushville. On second sty. brick work. Brick, Bedford stone trim. Tar & gravel roofing & sheet metal work to Model Sheet Metal Co. 811 E. 23d st., Indianapolis. Genl. contractor will do plastering & painting by day work.”
The architect “Herbert Faltz” was probably Herbert William Foltz, who practiced in Indianapolis from 1898 to 1933.
The supermarket was in the theater building (in the present Street View it’s got a “For Lease” sign on it.) Street View is stranded in the parking lot, but give it a couple of clicks and you can see the theater’s former emergency exit doors on the back of the building. The marquee is still on the front of the building, too, but covered with a plain surface.
This web page from the Texas Historical Association has a brief biography of Sam Schwartz, who opened the Aztec Theatre in 1915 and whose family operated the house until its closing in 1982. The architect and contractor for the Aztec was Leonard F. Seed.
ArleenDel is correct. This Facebook page has a photo showing the Yolanda Theatre, and it was mid-block. A comment down the page says that it was on Main Street between Jefferson and Adams Streets. It also says that the building is still standing, but comparing Google street view with the vintage photo it looks like the upper part of the building, including the original roof, has been removed.
The arched front on the building in the old photo was characteristic of movie theaters of the early 1910s, so I would guess that the Yolanda was a very early house, though it might have operated under some other name early in its history. So far the only theater name I’ve found for Eagle Pass in the early trade publications was a house called the Star, mentioned in 1918.
The Plaza Theatre was eventually twinned. A Groceteria.com message board about a supermarket in Ridgeview Plaza includes a comment from someone who saw Top Gun at the twin cinema in the mall in 1986. Another comment says that the twin operated as a discount house during its last days, but it doesn’t say when that was.
The five-week run of Queen Elizabeth in 1912 and the movies shown in 1913 might not have been the only movies at the Powers, though they are the only ones I’ve found mentioned in period publications. There are quite a number of theaters listed at Cinema Treasures that only showed movies intermittently. Though they were never full-time movie theaters, having them listed here doesn’t bother me.
I’ve actually considered submitting the Geary Theatre in San Francisco (the adjacent Curran, also primarily a legitimate house, is already listed) and the Biltmore in Los Angeles, both of which ran a few movies over their long careers (the Biltmore was actually built with a projection booth as part of the original plans, though it was seldom used.)
I believe that the Webbo might be the theater that opened in 1938 as the Palace, which was noted in this item from the July 5 issue of The Film Daily:
Peerless Enterprises was one of three independent theater chains that filed a lawsuit against Crescent Amusement Co. in 1939. A July 21, 1941, Motion Picture Daily article about the case had this to say:I’ve found no later references to the Palace, so it’s most likely fate was to have been taken over by Crescent and renamed.The July 5, 1938, issue of The Film Daily ran this item about the proposed theater at Washington Avenue and Española Way:
Toward the bottom of this web page about the Princess Theatre is the story of how the Prince Theatre got its name. Until 1938 it was called the Roxy Theatre. When the Princess burned that year, its marquee survived. The “ss” was cut off the end and the remainder of the marquee, reading Prince, was moved to the Roxy.
The impression I got from the text is that the Roxy/Prince was down Roane Street from the Princess.
A short film made when the Princess reopened in 1939 can be seen at YouTube (I believe this film was previously linked, but the comment with the link has been removed.) The film consists mostly of scenes in Harriman, including schools, churches, factories, and shots of various worthies such as civic officials and members of the Rotary Club. A few scenes, mostly in the last couple of minutes, show the Princess Theatre.
One significant scene shows Crescent Amusement Company head Tony Sudekum greeting architect Joe Holman, so the Princess, like most Crescent houses of the period, was designed by the Nashville architectural firm Marr & Holman.
John Gaisford, architect of the Jefferson Theatre, also designed the Marion (later Paramount) Theatre in Clarksdale, Mississippi. I’ve also found references to a theater project in Little Rock that Gaisford designed for New York theater owner Albert Weis in 1909, but I’ve been unable to discover if the house was built or, if it was, what it was called.
A footnote in Steve Goodson’s Highbrows, Hillbillies & Hellfire: Public Entertainment in Atlanta, 1880-1930 (Google Books preview) says that the Vaudette Theatre closed in 1924 and the building became part of J. M. High’s department store. The same note says that the Vaudette of 1911 had 800 seats, and cites an Atlanta Constitution article of February 26, 1911, which claimed that the Vaudette was the largest theater showing movies in the south other than Jake Wells’s Bijou, also in Atlanta, which, unlike the Vaudette was a combination house running vaudeville as well as movies.
The 1909-1910 Cahn guide listed the Auditorium as a ground floor house with 1,024 seats. I haven’t been able to discover if it ever showed movies. A May 18, 2013, article in the Greeneville Sun calls it the “…old Greenville Opera House building….” but I don’t know if that was ever its formal name.
Greeneville also once had a theater called Snapp’s Opera House, dating from 1887, but it was on Main Street (either 120 or 122 Main.) The Auditorium was apparently a newer theater. There was once also a house called the Princess Theatre in the building next door to Snapp’s Opera House.
If the addresses haven’t changed since the Sanborn map was made, then the likely Palace Theatre building at 136 Depot is still standing. It’s a four-story brick building with the second floor windows bricked up (probably to make room for a balcony) located on the north side of Depot a few doors east of Irish Street. In satellite view the roof looks to be in good shape, and there is a store of some kind on the ground floor but there is no readable signage.
Moving Places: A Life at the Movies, by Jonathan Rosenbaum, grandson of Louis Rosenbaum, who opened this theater in 1928, has a few paragraphs about the Ritz which can be found on this web page. The section names the architects of the Ritz as the Nashville firm of Marr & Holman.
I can’t find any other references on the Internet to architects named Thomas Mar or Joseph Harmon, but there are plenty of references to Nashville architects Thomas Marr and Joseph Holman. Marr & Holman were designing theaters for the Crescent Amusement Company at least as early as 1915, and designed theaters for the company for many years. Crescent’s Capitol in Greenville must have been designed by Marr & Holman.
Friends of the Queen Theatre provides this web page with a brief history of the house. It says that the Queen was built by Franklin Theatrical Enterprises, operators of the King Theatre in downtown Honolulu, and was opened on June 29, 1936. It was designed by local architect Lyman Bigelow.
Broumas also operated the Newport Theatre for a time. The company declared bankruptcy in December, 1967. At the time they operated 17 theaters in six states.Although headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, I believe that Broumas had operated more theaters in the Youngstown area than anywhere else.
Broumas Theatres opened the Lincoln Knolls Plaza Theatre on December 15, 1963, the same day they opened the Boardman Plaza Theatre. The Broumas chain, headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, had 17 theaters in six states when it declared bankruptcy in December, 1967.
This ad, headed “WANTED, HIGH-CLASS MUSICAL COMEDIES” appeared in the January 24, 1920, issue of The Billboard:
I don’t know if Scott’s Theatre succeeded in attracting high-class musical comedies in 1920, but in 1927 the Hampton High School yearbook reported that “Scott’s Theatre was almost completely filled” for the April 22 performance of the school’s Senior Class play.This web page has a colorized postcard of the Scott Theatre (click third thumbnail in the bottom row.)
A “Looking Back” type of feature published in the Vindicator on December 15, 2003, (online here) said that in December, 1963, Broumas Theatres opened two new movie houses at Lincoln Knolls Plaza and Boardman Plaza, and had a third house under construction at Liberty Plaza.
coldercase: Discovering the program at a given neighborhood theater on a given date is apt to be very difficult, if not impossible. As you’ve discovered, neighborhood theaters typically didn’t advertise in the metropolitan daily papers during the silent era.
Like small town theaters, neighborhood houses usually changed programs twice a week, and some theaters would have a monthly program printed up and distributed from the theater and from neighborhood stores. Some theaters did smaller weekly programs instead. In both cases, theaters would offset the cost by selling advertising space to local businesses.
These programs were undoubtedly thrown out by most people at the end of the month, though I’m sure a few pack rats saved a few of them, but if any have survived to this late date I’m not aware of them. Even if any copies have survived, there’s no telling where they might be. There are undoubtedly some programs in the hands of collectors of movie-related ephemera, but the odds that programs from any of these three theaters are among them are very small, and the chances of any of them being from August, 1924, vanishingly small.
By the 1920s a few districts of Los Angeles had daily or weekly neighborhood newspapers, but I’m not aware of any that were published for the area around these three theaters. Someone at the public library might know for sure if there was one or not, though even if there was there’s no guarantee that its archive still exists, or that any of these theaters advertised in it.
It’s also very unlikely that the business records of any of these theaters have survived, or the records of the distribution companies that provided films to them, though those records would certainly have told which theaters had which films on any given date.
As the Realart/New University was very close to the USC campus, I had hoped that there might be an ad for it in the school’s student newspaper, but in the three issues of The Southern California Trojan from August, 1924, that the USC Digital Library has online the only movie theater advertised was the California, at Main and 8th downtown.
I can’t think of any other sources that might have the information you want, but one thing that’s certain is that these neighborhood theaters would not have been showing first-run movies from the important studios. Big movies from big studios wouldn’t have been available to them until weeks or even months after they had finished their runs in larger theaters. Whatever they were showing in August, 1924, would have been something that had been shown in the downtown theaters earlier that year, unless they were movies from the “poverty row” studios (usually adventure films or westerns) that typically never got shown at the major theaters.
Newsreels being shown at the White Sands Theatre were mentioned in the January 20, 1938, issue of the Alamogordo News. Though I haven’t found any earlier mentions of the White Sands, I’m sure the house opened sometime in 1937.
The May 2, 1956, issue of the Alamogordo Daily News reported that the new Sierra Theatre would open the following day. The opening feature would be the comedy The Lieutenant Wore Skirts. The Sierra featured a 17x38-foot screen. The house was operated by Frontier Theatres.
The Iris Theatre’s building has a midcentury look, so I would say it is most likely the project that was listed simply as “Eagle Pass, Tex.— Cliff and W. C. Butler, a 600-seater” in the “New Theatres” column of Showmen’s Trade Review for January 1, 1949.
Here’s an announcement about the Masonic Lodge building in Rushville, from the “Contracts Awarded” section of the May 23, 1914, issue of The American Contractor:
The architect “Herbert Faltz” was probably Herbert William Foltz, who practiced in Indianapolis from 1898 to 1933.The supermarket was in the theater building (in the present Street View it’s got a “For Lease” sign on it.) Street View is stranded in the parking lot, but give it a couple of clicks and you can see the theater’s former emergency exit doors on the back of the building. The marquee is still on the front of the building, too, but covered with a plain surface.
This web page from the Texas Historical Association has a brief biography of Sam Schwartz, who opened the Aztec Theatre in 1915 and whose family operated the house until its closing in 1982. The architect and contractor for the Aztec was Leonard F. Seed.
ArleenDel is correct. This Facebook page has a photo showing the Yolanda Theatre, and it was mid-block. A comment down the page says that it was on Main Street between Jefferson and Adams Streets. It also says that the building is still standing, but comparing Google street view with the vintage photo it looks like the upper part of the building, including the original roof, has been removed.
The arched front on the building in the old photo was characteristic of movie theaters of the early 1910s, so I would guess that the Yolanda was a very early house, though it might have operated under some other name early in its history. So far the only theater name I’ve found for Eagle Pass in the early trade publications was a house called the Star, mentioned in 1918.
The Plaza Theatre was eventually twinned. A Groceteria.com message board about a supermarket in Ridgeview Plaza includes a comment from someone who saw Top Gun at the twin cinema in the mall in 1986. Another comment says that the twin operated as a discount house during its last days, but it doesn’t say when that was.
The five-week run of Queen Elizabeth in 1912 and the movies shown in 1913 might not have been the only movies at the Powers, though they are the only ones I’ve found mentioned in period publications. There are quite a number of theaters listed at Cinema Treasures that only showed movies intermittently. Though they were never full-time movie theaters, having them listed here doesn’t bother me.
I’ve actually considered submitting the Geary Theatre in San Francisco (the adjacent Curran, also primarily a legitimate house, is already listed) and the Biltmore in Los Angeles, both of which ran a few movies over their long careers (the Biltmore was actually built with a projection booth as part of the original plans, though it was seldom used.)