Constructed as a twin cinema, Cinemette South was odd in its day for a new twin in that there was a considerable imbalance in the size of the auditoriums. One contained 556 seats, the other 294.
Though the theater was nice and was within walking distance of what was then a Samurai Restaurant, Cinemette South was tucked up on a steep hill, with the unadorned back of the building facing down on Greentree Road.
The theater faced its own parking lot, which was not visible to the road below.
Though located at 2090 Greentree Road and carrying the Greentree zipcode 15220, the twin was in Scott Township, a southwestern suburb of Pittsburgh.
It was designed as a first-run South Hills theater, sometimes picking up pictures that had just concluded exclusive Downtown engagements.
But despite the densely residential suburban area in which it was located, it never managed to establish itself as a high-grossing destination. It was peculiarly isolated.
A personal recollection: Never one to let weather interfere with moviegoing plans, I drove to Cinemette South on what became a very snowy evening. When I left the virtually empty theater a couple of hours later, I was taken aback by the slipperiness of the steep road leading back down to Greentree Road. I recall creeping down in my car inch by inch for a very long time.
Since the twin cinemas closed, the building has been used mainly as office and possibly retail space.
The property was purchased July 1, 2005, by Allegheny Agony LP.
The official name of this 18-screen megaplex seems to be Cinemark 18 at the Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills. Can you imagine anyone chewing over that while trying to explain where they’re seeing something?
The theaters are in what seems to be the largest building in the sprawling, multi-building mall. Entry is from the interior of the mall.
It opened July 14, 2005, with 17 regular stadium-seating screens and a 349-seat IMAX auditorium.
The total capacity is 3,695. There are 237 in No. 1 and 18, 140 in 7 and 12, 137 in 2 and 17, 291 in 8 and 11, 188 in No. 10 and 156 in 3, 4, 5, 6, 13, 14, 15 and 16.
The multiplex is outside the Pittsburgh city limits in McCandless Township. Of the original eight auditoriums, two had 480 seats and the other six had 540 seats.
Showcase Cinemas East’s four original auditoriums consisted of two 400-seaters and two 375-seaters.
Though considered part of the Monroeville moviehouse community, Showcase Wast was located in adjacent, if lesser-known, Wilkins Township, just west of Monroeville.
For a brief time in the beginning, movies were advertised as being in a specific autorium (Showcase East #3, for example), which, as I recall, were numbered from left (west) to right (east).
Soon it became apparent that while “Silent Movie,” for example, might play its whole Showcase East engagement in #3, patrons soon found that #3 might be the lefthand auditorium one day and a smaller one the next night.
As management tinkered with which movies got to play in the bigger auditoriums, the staff moved the numerical names of the auditoriums from day to day or at least from week to week to make sure “Silent Movie” was always in an auditorium labeled #3.
This was because of an old practice that distributors had been enforcing Downtown: When a movie jumped from one Downtown theater to another, the second theater was supposed to pay “first week” (higher) rentals, which in practice did not normally happen.
The flexibility of multiplexes, which kept film prints shifting around while still under the same roof, forced distributors to give up on the notion of keeping track of which movie was in which auditorium.
Soon there was no pretense of one movie playing its whole engagement in #3. The auditoriums in megaplexes thereafter were permanently numbered for purely practical reasons. No film was advertised as being in this one versus that one unless it was in an IMAX auditorium.
Showcase East enjoyed the biggest grosses per screen for several years but lost its box-office footing steadily in the 1990s and then plummeted as competition stiffened.
Although the 20-screen megaplex Loews North Versailles came and went within a year and a half, Showcase East was thrashed business-wise by two new state-of-the-art megaplexes with stadium seating, Destinta North Versailles (aka Plaza 22) and especially by Loews Waterfront, now called AMC Waterfront, which has become the highest-grossing complex within more than 100 miles.
It was a case of the mighty falling. Roughly 30 years earlier, Showcase East had sucked up so much movie patronage that it contributed more than any other film emporium to the dismantling of the Downtown first-run moviehouse district as well as to the closing of the Monroe and Cinema 22 single-screen theaters in Monroeville.
Cinemette took over the Monroeville Jerry Lewis Cinemas and added two screens, making it a quad, all side by side with the screens facing east.
Cinema World bought it as part of the purchase of the Cinemette circuit. Finally, if briefly, Carmike took over and closed it.
It is a Best Buy retailer.
The nearby 10-screen Showcase Cinemas East in Wilkins Township could gross significantly more per screen than Cinemette East and much more frequently scarfed up the pictures that had greater grossing potential.
Cinema 22, in Monroeville Plaza, and the Monroe, at 3813 William Penn Highway – both on Route 22, have merged in my memory. Does anyone remember which had a spiral staircase in the lobby?
After growing to six screens – four stadium auditoriums in the original 1948 structure and two on the opposite side of Pittsburgh Street, the two that were off by themselves closed a year or more ago.
Although it outlasted the nearby six-screen Harmar indoor, the Cheswick faces competition now from the still-newish Cinemark 18 Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills or whatever the unwieldy correct name is.
The theater’s address was 701 Fifth Avenue. Capacity: 647.
In my book, the Chatham was the premiere Pittsburgh moviehouse in which to see a movie – before, then or since.
If you examine Ron Miller’s list of movies to play here, you can see that almost every one is first rate. The big theater circuit in town (Associated, which morphed into Cinemette) seemed to throw the Chatham a really choice bone every three or four months.
If the film did some business, as most did (“Alfie,” “Wait Until Dark,” “Bullitt,” “The Odd Couple,” “Airport,” “The Sting,” et al), the Chatham was set for months with deluxe fare that drew an upscale audience.
When something came up short (“Don’t Drink the Water,” “The Mephisto Waltz,” “Bang the Drum Slowly”), the theater had to scramble until its next gift of an important new film.
Helped by comfortable seats and superb sight lines, something about the communal ambiance of the Chatham allowed all sorts of moods to wash over audiences, from the comedy of “Barefoot in the Park” and “The Odd Couple” to the excitement of the two greatest car chase thrillers, “Bullitt” and “The French Connection,” to the shared shock of the climactic jolt in “Wait Until Dark,” when gasps and shouts invariably erupted, to the sheer euphoria of “That’s Entertainment,” the Chatham was the most purely enjoyable theater to attend.
I always thought of it as the Radio City Music Hall of Pittsburgh in terms of bookings and the classiness of the experience.
For most of the years it was open and owned by Morris Finkel, the Chatham’s manager was George Pappas, a mustached, dapper administrator who ran the theater like a tight ship.
He stood in his open-walled office, arms folded, surveying the audience in the lobby awaiting the next performance, admonishing sternly, and with a voice he projected effortlessly, anyone he caught sneaking a smoke or behaving a wee bit rambunctiously. (It was a different time and, frankly, a better time – sans cell phones and butterfly attention spans.)
At the Chatham there was a distinct sense that someone of military bearing was in charge and was determined to maintain standards. The audience itself was the primary beneficiary.
Given the outstanding bill of fare Pappas had the good fortune to exhibit over the years, I was astonished – no, incredulous – when Pappas admitted late in his career that he never sat down and watched a movie there. Not once, he insisted. He was, I always suspected, too restless, too determindly interactive.
The first hint that times were a-changing was in 1970 when the Chatham played “Airport” for 14 weeks to excellent attendance before Universal decided it wanted to move the blockbuster into the choicest suburban houses.
When “Airport’s” first week at the larger(South Hills) Village Theatre (now redesigned as Carmike 10), which was the 15th week in Pittsburgh, outdrew the biggest of the 14 weeks at the Chatham, it became apparent that suburban sites now had greater value to distributors than even the nicest Downtown theaters.
This would be the best of all possible sites for major art/specialty/independent releases if someone had the cash and the imagination to reopen and run it well.
The Chartiers Theatre on which I found information was also a 600-seater in Crafton but was listed as being at 44 Crafton Avenue. I have some misgivings about the Crafton Avenue address because that would place it in the same block as St. Phillip Catholic Church, which seems to consume all of that block now.
At one address or the other in 1983 I found a company called D&E Accounting.
“Galleria opened about 1989, under the name of Pittsburgh Theatre Corporation,” according to John Harper, who, with wife Cady, owned 50 percent. The other half was owned by mall developer Dick Zappala.
“We sold out interest to Zappala in 1991, I think, and he sold the theater to Jeff Lewine’s Cinema World a couple of years later. Cinema World sold to Carmike in the mid to late 1990s,” Harper added.
The sixplex switched to digital a couple of years ago.
One of the more nicely maintained multiplexes in the district, it splits first-run product with its nearby stablemate, Carmike 10 (a reconstruction of the Village Theatre).
Galleria 6 tends to keep the films of greatest interest to audiences under 12 (cartoon features, for example) and to audiences over 35, including films with older middleage stars and the occasional art-house moveover.
I, too, first noted the theater being at 1862 Centre Avenue, then found that the address listed elsewhere (I think Pittsburgh Press directories) as 1822. It’s hard to verify now.
After the theater was leveled, the general site was used as a surface parking lot, a super market that closed, and later, as Andrew Johnson noted in the Tribune-Review two years ago, a Subway restaurant and Cheap Tobacco & More.
It was the next-to-last functioning moviehouse in the Hill. Only the long-dormant New Granada Theatre stayed open longer and still stands.
I have indications the theater is at 1909 Center (as listed above by Rick Aubrey) and 2009-13 Centre. Can anyone corroborate either? News stories and columns routinely ignore the address.
The structure opened in 1927 as the Pythian Temple of the Knights of Pythias. In the 1930s the building was sold to the owner of a nearby Hill District moviehouse called the Granada. He renamed the temple the New Granada. It had 850 or 920 seats, depending on one’s source.
The film house was owned by Associated Theatres in the 1960s (perhaps earlier, too) and early 1970s, but instead of including it the daily newspaper directory with other Associated theaters, the New Granada’s daily ad was listed alphabetically in the directory of Pittsburgh’s independent neighborhood theaters.
The New Grenada outlasted the Hill’s other longest-standing moviehouse, the Roosevelt at 1822 Centre.
In the New Grenada’s final years, it was open three days a week – not Fridays through Sundays, as you might expect, but Saturdays through Mondays. The owners had found attendance was weak on Fridays but felt they needed a three-day “weekend” for booking movies.
Given that it has been closed, deteriorating inside and out and, sadly, an eyesore for more than three decades (even longer if you consider how it was run into the ground during its last several years of operation), the New Granada has almost surely set the local record as the theater to remain erect the longest without being razed or used for any other commercial purpose.
Better it should linger in limbo than be sacrificed like hundreds of other Pittsburgh moviehouses.
This theater, located just east of the intersection at Craig Street, later was razed and used as a surface parking lot for Giant Eagle super market, which since has closed.
Though capacity is listed as 603 by at least one source, I also found an indication it had just 500.
The theater opened as the Weiland. The name was changed to Centre, mirroring the avenue on which it was located, when the late Jacques Kahn took over management in 1941-42.
I cannot remember the interior at all, but I was lucky enough to get there once in late 1951 or early 1952 for “The Frogman” and “Teresa.”
The theater was known as the Harris from 1911-36 and the Casino from 1936-66. (The Harris name was to be used again Downtown at 113 Sixth Street (earlier called the Alvin and later the Gateway) and then again at 809 Liberty Avenue (the former Art Cinema and the present Harris Theatre).
For decades in Pittsburgh, the Casino was THE burlesque house featuring such strippers as Lili St. Cyr, Irma The Body, Tempest Storm and Blaze Starr, as well as comedians such as Billy “Cheese & Crackers” Hagen.
The site’s official name seemed to become Casino Burlesk.
The theater became progressively more dilapidated. In its later years it used late-run movies to fill out the program, with the live shows probably becoming shorter.
For at least three decades after the Casino was razed, the property was occupied by a surface parking lot.
The property was part of a large block of land purchased by Point Park College in 2006 for development as part of the school’s campus.
There was a separate structure also called the New Carnegie, which apparently was across the street from the New Carnegie listed here. The other one to which I refer had become a grocery store by 1983 after the theater, in its final days, tried porno briefly.
Can anyone confirm that at different times, there were two New Carnegies whose properties apparently faced each other – or would have had they been in business concurrently?
The Louisa Theatre first occupied the site. After the Louisa burned down, the New Carnegie was built. By 1983 it was a state unemployment office. In 2000 the property was sold again.
One source listed the capacity at 1,571. No other details except that 838 Braddock Avenue, the nearest address listed on the county real estate web site, is owned by the Braddock Commons Corp.
Wow. That photo was taken way before my time. At it happens, it was taken on my future birthday.
Thank you for clarifying that the staircase was in the Monroe rather than in Cinema 22, Will.
Constructed as a twin cinema, Cinemette South was odd in its day for a new twin in that there was a considerable imbalance in the size of the auditoriums. One contained 556 seats, the other 294.
Though the theater was nice and was within walking distance of what was then a Samurai Restaurant, Cinemette South was tucked up on a steep hill, with the unadorned back of the building facing down on Greentree Road.
The theater faced its own parking lot, which was not visible to the road below.
Though located at 2090 Greentree Road and carrying the Greentree zipcode 15220, the twin was in Scott Township, a southwestern suburb of Pittsburgh.
It was designed as a first-run South Hills theater, sometimes picking up pictures that had just concluded exclusive Downtown engagements.
But despite the densely residential suburban area in which it was located, it never managed to establish itself as a high-grossing destination. It was peculiarly isolated.
A personal recollection: Never one to let weather interfere with moviegoing plans, I drove to Cinemette South on what became a very snowy evening. When I left the virtually empty theater a couple of hours later, I was taken aback by the slipperiness of the steep road leading back down to Greentree Road. I recall creeping down in my car inch by inch for a very long time.
Since the twin cinemas closed, the building has been used mainly as office and possibly retail space.
The property was purchased July 1, 2005, by Allegheny Agony LP.
The official name of this 18-screen megaplex seems to be Cinemark 18 at the Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills. Can you imagine anyone chewing over that while trying to explain where they’re seeing something?
The theaters are in what seems to be the largest building in the sprawling, multi-building mall. Entry is from the interior of the mall.
It opened July 14, 2005, with 17 regular stadium-seating screens and a 349-seat IMAX auditorium.
The total capacity is 3,695. There are 237 in No. 1 and 18, 140 in 7 and 12, 137 in 2 and 17, 291 in 8 and 11, 188 in No. 10 and 156 in 3, 4, 5, 6, 13, 14, 15 and 16.
Each of the Cinema World auditoriums had 304 seats.
The theater opened as the Jerry Lewis Cinema. As Cinema Wexford it functioned as a late-run bargain house.
My reference to Dollar General above is incorrect. The theater has become a Family Dollar store.
The multiplex is outside the Pittsburgh city limits in McCandless Township. Of the original eight auditoriums, two had 480 seats and the other six had 540 seats.
Showcase Cinemas East’s four original auditoriums consisted of two 400-seaters and two 375-seaters.
Though considered part of the Monroeville moviehouse community, Showcase Wast was located in adjacent, if lesser-known, Wilkins Township, just west of Monroeville.
For a brief time in the beginning, movies were advertised as being in a specific autorium (Showcase East #3, for example), which, as I recall, were numbered from left (west) to right (east).
Soon it became apparent that while “Silent Movie,” for example, might play its whole Showcase East engagement in #3, patrons soon found that #3 might be the lefthand auditorium one day and a smaller one the next night.
As management tinkered with which movies got to play in the bigger auditoriums, the staff moved the numerical names of the auditoriums from day to day or at least from week to week to make sure “Silent Movie” was always in an auditorium labeled #3.
This was because of an old practice that distributors had been enforcing Downtown: When a movie jumped from one Downtown theater to another, the second theater was supposed to pay “first week” (higher) rentals, which in practice did not normally happen.
The flexibility of multiplexes, which kept film prints shifting around while still under the same roof, forced distributors to give up on the notion of keeping track of which movie was in which auditorium.
Soon there was no pretense of one movie playing its whole engagement in #3. The auditoriums in megaplexes thereafter were permanently numbered for purely practical reasons. No film was advertised as being in this one versus that one unless it was in an IMAX auditorium.
Showcase East enjoyed the biggest grosses per screen for several years but lost its box-office footing steadily in the 1990s and then plummeted as competition stiffened.
Although the 20-screen megaplex Loews North Versailles came and went within a year and a half, Showcase East was thrashed business-wise by two new state-of-the-art megaplexes with stadium seating, Destinta North Versailles (aka Plaza 22) and especially by Loews Waterfront, now called AMC Waterfront, which has become the highest-grossing complex within more than 100 miles.
It was a case of the mighty falling. Roughly 30 years earlier, Showcase East had sucked up so much movie patronage that it contributed more than any other film emporium to the dismantling of the Downtown first-run moviehouse district as well as to the closing of the Monroe and Cinema 22 single-screen theaters in Monroeville.
This site opened as a Jerry Lewis twin cinema.
Cinemette took over the Monroeville Jerry Lewis Cinemas and added two screens, making it a quad, all side by side with the screens facing east.
Cinema World bought it as part of the purchase of the Cinemette circuit. Finally, if briefly, Carmike took over and closed it.
It is a Best Buy retailer.
The nearby 10-screen Showcase Cinemas East in Wilkins Township could gross significantly more per screen than Cinemette East and much more frequently scarfed up the pictures that had greater grossing potential.
Thanks for that thorough report, Denny.
Cinema 22 had 775 seats.
Cinema 22, in Monroeville Plaza, and the Monroe, at 3813 William Penn Highway – both on Route 22, have merged in my memory. Does anyone remember which had a spiral staircase in the lobby?
After growing to six screens – four stadium auditoriums in the original 1948 structure and two on the opposite side of Pittsburgh Street, the two that were off by themselves closed a year or more ago.
Although it outlasted the nearby six-screen Harmar indoor, the Cheswick faces competition now from the still-newish Cinemark 18 Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills or whatever the unwieldy correct name is.
The theater’s address was 701 Fifth Avenue. Capacity: 647.
In my book, the Chatham was the premiere Pittsburgh moviehouse in which to see a movie – before, then or since.
If you examine Ron Miller’s list of movies to play here, you can see that almost every one is first rate. The big theater circuit in town (Associated, which morphed into Cinemette) seemed to throw the Chatham a really choice bone every three or four months.
If the film did some business, as most did (“Alfie,” “Wait Until Dark,” “Bullitt,” “The Odd Couple,” “Airport,” “The Sting,” et al), the Chatham was set for months with deluxe fare that drew an upscale audience.
When something came up short (“Don’t Drink the Water,” “The Mephisto Waltz,” “Bang the Drum Slowly”), the theater had to scramble until its next gift of an important new film.
Helped by comfortable seats and superb sight lines, something about the communal ambiance of the Chatham allowed all sorts of moods to wash over audiences, from the comedy of “Barefoot in the Park” and “The Odd Couple” to the excitement of the two greatest car chase thrillers, “Bullitt” and “The French Connection,” to the shared shock of the climactic jolt in “Wait Until Dark,” when gasps and shouts invariably erupted, to the sheer euphoria of “That’s Entertainment,” the Chatham was the most purely enjoyable theater to attend.
I always thought of it as the Radio City Music Hall of Pittsburgh in terms of bookings and the classiness of the experience.
For most of the years it was open and owned by Morris Finkel, the Chatham’s manager was George Pappas, a mustached, dapper administrator who ran the theater like a tight ship.
He stood in his open-walled office, arms folded, surveying the audience in the lobby awaiting the next performance, admonishing sternly, and with a voice he projected effortlessly, anyone he caught sneaking a smoke or behaving a wee bit rambunctiously. (It was a different time and, frankly, a better time – sans cell phones and butterfly attention spans.)
At the Chatham there was a distinct sense that someone of military bearing was in charge and was determined to maintain standards. The audience itself was the primary beneficiary.
Given the outstanding bill of fare Pappas had the good fortune to exhibit over the years, I was astonished – no, incredulous – when Pappas admitted late in his career that he never sat down and watched a movie there. Not once, he insisted. He was, I always suspected, too restless, too determindly interactive.
The first hint that times were a-changing was in 1970 when the Chatham played “Airport” for 14 weeks to excellent attendance before Universal decided it wanted to move the blockbuster into the choicest suburban houses.
When “Airport’s” first week at the larger(South Hills) Village Theatre (now redesigned as Carmike 10), which was the 15th week in Pittsburgh, outdrew the biggest of the 14 weeks at the Chatham, it became apparent that suburban sites now had greater value to distributors than even the nicest Downtown theaters.
This would be the best of all possible sites for major art/specialty/independent releases if someone had the cash and the imagination to reopen and run it well.
The Chartiers Theatre on which I found information was also a 600-seater in Crafton but was listed as being at 44 Crafton Avenue. I have some misgivings about the Crafton Avenue address because that would place it in the same block as St. Phillip Catholic Church, which seems to consume all of that block now.
At one address or the other in 1983 I found a company called D&E Accounting.
“Galleria opened about 1989, under the name of Pittsburgh Theatre Corporation,” according to John Harper, who, with wife Cady, owned 50 percent. The other half was owned by mall developer Dick Zappala.
“We sold out interest to Zappala in 1991, I think, and he sold the theater to Jeff Lewine’s Cinema World a couple of years later. Cinema World sold to Carmike in the mid to late 1990s,” Harper added.
The sixplex switched to digital a couple of years ago.
One of the more nicely maintained multiplexes in the district, it splits first-run product with its nearby stablemate, Carmike 10 (a reconstruction of the Village Theatre).
Galleria 6 tends to keep the films of greatest interest to audiences under 12 (cartoon features, for example) and to audiences over 35, including films with older middleage stars and the occasional art-house moveover.
Can’t enlarge the photos on Page 7, LM. No Acrobat Reader on my computer, probably. Sorry.
I, too, first noted the theater being at 1862 Centre Avenue, then found that the address listed elsewhere (I think Pittsburgh Press directories) as 1822. It’s hard to verify now.
After the theater was leveled, the general site was used as a surface parking lot, a super market that closed, and later, as Andrew Johnson noted in the Tribune-Review two years ago, a Subway restaurant and Cheap Tobacco & More.
It was the next-to-last functioning moviehouse in the Hill. Only the long-dormant New Granada Theatre stayed open longer and still stands.
I have indications the theater is at 1909 Center (as listed above by Rick Aubrey) and 2009-13 Centre. Can anyone corroborate either? News stories and columns routinely ignore the address.
The structure opened in 1927 as the Pythian Temple of the Knights of Pythias. In the 1930s the building was sold to the owner of a nearby Hill District moviehouse called the Granada. He renamed the temple the New Granada. It had 850 or 920 seats, depending on one’s source.
The film house was owned by Associated Theatres in the 1960s (perhaps earlier, too) and early 1970s, but instead of including it the daily newspaper directory with other Associated theaters, the New Granada’s daily ad was listed alphabetically in the directory of Pittsburgh’s independent neighborhood theaters.
The New Grenada outlasted the Hill’s other longest-standing moviehouse, the Roosevelt at 1822 Centre.
In the New Grenada’s final years, it was open three days a week – not Fridays through Sundays, as you might expect, but Saturdays through Mondays. The owners had found attendance was weak on Fridays but felt they needed a three-day “weekend” for booking movies.
Given that it has been closed, deteriorating inside and out and, sadly, an eyesore for more than three decades (even longer if you consider how it was run into the ground during its last several years of operation), the New Granada has almost surely set the local record as the theater to remain erect the longest without being razed or used for any other commercial purpose.
Better it should linger in limbo than be sacrificed like hundreds of other Pittsburgh moviehouses.
This theater, located just east of the intersection at Craig Street, later was razed and used as a surface parking lot for Giant Eagle super market, which since has closed.
Though capacity is listed as 603 by at least one source, I also found an indication it had just 500.
The theater opened as the Weiland. The name was changed to Centre, mirroring the avenue on which it was located, when the late Jacques Kahn took over management in 1941-42.
I cannot remember the interior at all, but I was lucky enough to get there once in late 1951 or early 1952 for “The Frogman” and “Teresa.”
The theater was known as the Harris from 1911-36 and the Casino from 1936-66. (The Harris name was to be used again Downtown at 113 Sixth Street (earlier called the Alvin and later the Gateway) and then again at 809 Liberty Avenue (the former Art Cinema and the present Harris Theatre).
For decades in Pittsburgh, the Casino was THE burlesque house featuring such strippers as Lili St. Cyr, Irma The Body, Tempest Storm and Blaze Starr, as well as comedians such as Billy “Cheese & Crackers” Hagen.
The site’s official name seemed to become Casino Burlesk.
The theater became progressively more dilapidated. In its later years it used late-run movies to fill out the program, with the live shows probably becoming shorter.
For at least three decades after the Casino was razed, the property was occupied by a surface parking lot.
The property was part of a large block of land purchased by Point Park College in 2006 for development as part of the school’s campus.
One of the drive-ins nearest to Downtown Pittsburgh.
There was a separate structure also called the New Carnegie, which apparently was across the street from the New Carnegie listed here. The other one to which I refer had become a grocery store by 1983 after the theater, in its final days, tried porno briefly.
Can anyone confirm that at different times, there were two New Carnegies whose properties apparently faced each other – or would have had they been in business concurrently?
The Louisa Theatre first occupied the site. After the Louisa burned down, the New Carnegie was built. By 1983 it was a state unemployment office. In 2000 the property was sold again.
One source listed the capacity at 1,571. No other details except that 838 Braddock Avenue, the nearest address listed on the county real estate web site, is owned by the Braddock Commons Corp.