In 1941, the owners of the Apex were in a clearance dispute with Loew’s, as reported in the July 18 issue of The Film Daily:
“K-B Arbitration Hearing Under Way in Washington
“Washington Bureau of THE FILM DAILY
“Washington — Arbitration case of K-B Amusement Co., Washington, against Loew’s, Inc. got under way here yesterday, with routine testimony setting the stage for major arguments to come. The K-B Company is contending against clearance the Calvert and Uptown theaters over its Apex Theater, in the same neighborhood.
“James V. Hayes and Robert Sher, former D of J attorneys who worked on the New York consent decree represent K-B Amusement Co. C. Stanley Thompson is attorney for Loew’s while Warner Brothers, an intervenor in case, is represented by Howard Levinson and Harold Berkowitz.
“Apex owners contend that seven days' clearance granted nearby Calvert is unreasonable. Much of yesterday’s testimony concerned real estate values in the neighborhood. Rudolph Berger, district manager for Loew’s, also was called in to testify.”
The K-B Amusement Company was a partnership of Fred S. Kogod and Max Burka. They controlled several theaters in the greater Washington D.C. region.
I think the opening date of 1930 for the Pictorial Theatre probably comes from the advertisement shown on this page at Kilduff’s. The Pictorial was showing Mae Murray’s Peacock Alley. The thing is that Mae Murray starred in both the 1930 musical version of the film and in the 1921 silent version, and from the upcoming films in the ad (Dustin Farnum in Iron to Gold, Tom Mix in Chasing the Moon, both released in 1922) it must have been the 1921 version that the Pictorial was showing. The ad most likely dates from 1922, and the Pictorial might have been in operation for a considerable time before that.
I don’t think this house was ever actually called the Wilson Avenue Theatre. Brick and Clay Record was published in Chicago, and Chicago had a house called the Wilson Avenue Theatre, opened in 1909. Whoever wrote the item probably just added Avenue to the name of the Youngstown house because he was thinking of the Chicago house when he wrote it.
A paragraph about the Wilson Avenue Theatre appears in the November 3, 1914, issue of Brick and Clay Record:
“Two Youngstown material concerns, the Youngstown Supply Company and the Youngstown Ice Company, furnished face and hollow-brick for the new Wilson Avenue theater, in that city, and participated in the advertising which marked the opening of the house. The theater is the largest and most up-to-date motion picture house in the city, and the Youngstown papers carried a double page advertisement announcing the opening and featuring the part the various contractors and material men had played in its construction. The two brick concerns had their share of the space, and benefited by the publicity which it afforded.”
Why an outfit called the Youngstown Ice Company was supplying brick I don’t know, but the name was not a typo. It was mentioned in other construction journals of the period. And yes, they also dealt in ice.
The mention of a double-page opening ad for the theater is tantalizing. It must have appeared prior to November 3, but there’s no indication how long before.
The Alvin and the Lyric were both operated by the partnership of Hartzell & Pitzer according to their listings in the 1908 report of the Ohio Department of Inspections.
In April, 1908, Hartzell & Pitzer also began operating a house in Youngstown called the Empire Theatre as a burlesque stand.
The Andrews Theatre opened in early 1912, as noted in this item from the July 31 issue of The New York Dramatic Mirror:
“Andrews Theatre in Salamanca, N. Y., owned and managed by Max Andrews, built in 1911 and opened Jan. 22, 1912, with ‘The Country Boy,’ has been doing a capacity business since that time. It is furnished throughout with the latest improvements. Gas and electricity are used for lighting. The building is heated by steam and the system of ventilation is of service both Winter and Summer. In addition to fireproof construction, there are fire-escapes and automatic devices to open the doors. The seating capacity of the theatre is about one thousand, and the stage is ample in every respect.”
The 1913-1914 Cahn guide listed the Andrews Theatre as a ground floor house with 911 seats. The 1909-1910 guide lists only a 550-seat Teck Theatre at Salamanca, operated by Max Andrews. The Teck opened in December, 1908, according to an item in the December 25 issue of The Billboard. It appears to have been destroyed by a fire in January, 1910. Perhaps the Andrews Theatre was its replacement.
The Gayety was a fairly large theater. The 1907 annual report of the Ohio Department of Inspection listed it with 1,500 seats, the same capacity the report listed for the Park Theatre.
A Youngstown burlesque house called the Gayety was mentioned in the September 19, 1942, issue of The Billboard, but without an address there’s no way of telling if it was the same Gayety that was operating in 1906-07.
The Gayety of 1942 was on the Empire Burlesque Circuit. Earlier, the Grand had been on that circuit, and returned to it in 1943, so the circuit might have been using the Gayety to get some leverage over the owners of the Grand. The Gayety was mentioned in Billboard in both 1946 and 1950 as part of Johnny (or Jack) Kane’s Ohio Circuit, which also booked burlesque. By 1953, the Park was on the Kane circuit.
I believe three theaters are conflated in the current description. The theater built in the 1880s must have been the Red Bank Opera House, which opened in 1883 and burned to the ground in 1905. It was located on the south side of Front Street just west of Maple Avenue.
Frick’s Theatre was better known as Frick’s Lyceum, and it opened in September, 1906, in a converted tomato cannery on the waterfront. The site is now part of Marine Park. An article about it appeared in the August 29, 1906, issue of the Red Bank Register (upper left corner of this PDF.) The Lyceum was listed in the 1912 Cahn guide with the notation “This theater is still in existence but has been closed for some time.” It does not appear in the 1913-1914 guide.
The theater at Front Street and Wharf Avenue was, as teecee said, built in 1912. The Red Bank Register of October 23, 1912, had an article about it (top right corner of the first page of this PDF.) Stockholders in the Red Bank Amusement Company were Fred H. VanDorn, Thomas Williams, and John J. Travers. The theater featured a long lobby, 13 feet wide and 71 feet long, which led from Front Street to the theater proper, which backed up to Union Street and was 56x128 feet. The Lyric was erected by local builder George W. Sewing, who also acted as architect.
The article said that the owners hoped to have the house open by Thanksgiving, but they missed the date. The January 22, 1913, issue of the Register said that the installation of the furnishings and equipment of the theater was well underway and the opening was to be on or about February 1.
The Lyric was remodeled in early 1920 and reopened as the Palace Theatre on April 5, according to the April 7 issue of the Register. The Palace was first operated by N. E. McNulty. In September, 1928, the house had another name change, becoming the Hunting Theatre, which was operated by Mr. and Mrs. Tony Hunting. The theater closed in 1930, but reopened later that year under the previous name Palace Theatre. On January 9, 1931, the Palace Theatre was completely destroyed by a fire.
The January 16, 1912, issue of The Troy Times had this item:
“Boyer and Rosenthal, who will shortly open the Majestic Theatre at 103 Third Street—the Shyne property—took out a license to-day. They expect to be ready the latter part of this week or early next week.”
The January 18, 1945, issue of The Times Record said that the Majestic Theatre was to be converted into facilities for the local post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The auditorium floor was to be leveled and a second floor installed in the space to accommodate lounges, a recreation room, rest rooms, and offices. The ground floor would house a meeting hall and kitchen facilities. Although the Majestic closed in the mid-1920s, the rebuilding plans indicate that auditorium was still intact in 1945.
Joe Masher’s description of the State Theatre says that it was designed by the same architect as the American Theatre, and the description of this house says that it was a twin of the State. If that’s so, then the architect of this theater was Abraham K. Mosley, who was noted as the architect of the Rose (State) Theatre in The American Contractor of April 29, 1922.
The Rose/State Theatre was definitely on Fourth Street, not Fourth Avenue. Here is an item about it from the April 29, 1922, issue of The American Contractor:
“TROY, N. Y.
“Theatre (Rose, movie): $30,000. 2 sty. 60x120. 4th St., bet. Ferry & Congress sts. Archt. A. K. Mosely. Franklin sq. Owner J. C. Rosenthal. 20 Locust av. Cone. ext. walls. Gen. contr. let to C. P. Boland. 30 4th st.”
Abraham K. Mosley was a native of England who came to the United States in 1904. He was commissioned to work on the Emma Willard School in 1910 and settled in Troy where he practiced for many years, though he designed buildings as far away as Kansas City, Kansas (St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church on 18th Street.) He died in 1951.
The Louvee Theatre was designed and built by the F & Y Building Service of Columbus, Ohio. It was on a list of eleven of the compnay’s recent projects that was published in the October 27, 1938, issue of the Boone County Recorder.
The Avalon Theatre was designed and built by the F & Y Building Service of Columbus, Ohio. It was one of eleven theaters on a list of the company’s projects in an ad that was published in the October 27, 1938, issue of the Boone County Recorder.
An ad for the F & Y Building Service in the Boone County Recorder of October 27, 1938, listed the Arlington Theatre as one of five houses in Columbus that the firm had designed and built by that time. The others were the Westmont, the Fifth Avenue, the Cleve, and the Indianola.
An ad for the F & Y Building Service in the October 27, 1938, issue of the Boone County Recorder (PDF here) listed the Fifth Avenue Theatre as one of five Columbus houses it had designed.
If this house originally opened in 1920 then the project by F & Y must have been a remodeling or a replacement. I don’t think the company began designing and building theaters until the mid-1930s, though F & Y Construction had been in business since the 1910s.
In the ad uploaded by dbellis54 the text says “Have you seen the New Fifth Ave.? Modern!” which suggests a recent remodeling. The movie advertised, Born to Dance was released in the U.S. on November 27, 1936, according to IMDb, so the ad for this sub-run house probably dates from well into 1937. It’s likely that this was the theater that F & Y worked on in the 1930s.
An ad for the F & Y Building Service in the October 27, 1938, issue of the Boone County Recorder (PDF here) said that Erlanger’s new Gayety Theatre was one of eleven movie houses the company had designed and built since December, 1937.
The Miami-Western Theatre opened on September 23, 1938, per a full-page ad for the theater in Miami University’s 1939 yearbook. The Streamline Modern auditorium featured murals depicting student life at Miami University on one side wall and at Western College for Women on the other. The house closed in 1988.
An ad for the F & Y Building Service in the October 27, 1938, issue of the Boone County Recorder (PDF here) of Burlington, Kentucky, on the occasion of the opening of the Gayety Theatre in nearby Erlanger, had a list of several theaters designed and built by F & Y since December, 1937, including the Miami-Western.
A brochure for a walking tour of Oxford’s uptown business district (large PDF file) says that the Princess Theatre was built in 1911 and opened as the Oxford Theatre. It became the Talawanda Theatre in 1950, and was enlarged and renamed the Princess in the 1980s.
This January 25, 2015, article in the Journal-News says that plans are afoot to build a new building for the theaters on a lot adjacent to the Princess and incorporate the facade of the existing Arts and Crafts style building as the entrance to the new theaters, but the plans have not yet been approved. I haven’t found any more recent articles about the proposal.
Though it was still standing when the current Google Street View was made, this page says that the building was demolished in April, 2014. Farther down the page it says that the Isis operated until the end of the silent era, and in 1930 was rebuilt as offices by Western Union.
CharmaineZoe provides this vintage photo of the Isis Theatre, probably from around 1926, the year the movie Midnight Sun was released.
The Orpheum opened on April 2, 1908. This item about the event is from the April 4 issue of Variety:
SUN & MURRAY’S NEW VENTURE.
“Zanesville, O., April 2.
“Sun & Murray this week opened the Orpheum with vaudeville. The following made up the first show: Alburtus and Altus, comedy club juggling; Georgia Lewis, monologue and singing; Ann Hamilton, sketch, ‘Beggars’; John H. West, musical Brownie; Four Dancing Harrises, dancing.”
Gus Sun was a former juggler, vaudevillian, and minstrel who entered the theater business in 1904,opening a small vaudeville and picture house in Springfield, Ohio. By 1909 he had a circuit of a dozen theaters and booked dozens of other houses through the booking agency he founded in 1906.
The Strand Theatre that opened in 1929 was actually the second Strand Theatre at this address. The first was a smaller theater that opened on March 12, 1922. Here is a drawing of the first Strand.
24 N. Broad Street was the Paramount’s historic address, but Middletown has renumbered its lots and the Paramount’s site is on what is now South Broad Street. In this aerial photo from 1955, the intersection of Central Avenue and Broad Street is at center bottom, and the Paramount can be seen on the west side of Broad halfway up the block north of Central.
The Paramount is at right in this 1962 photo. The building housing Doan’s Ace Hardware is still standing, but has been stripped of its modern front, revealing what remains of the much older facade beneath.
Linkrot repair: The May 3, 1952, Boxoffice article about the Langley Theatre has moved again:
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
In 1941, the owners of the Apex were in a clearance dispute with Loew’s, as reported in the July 18 issue of The Film Daily:
The K-B Amusement Company was a partnership of Fred S. Kogod and Max Burka. They controlled several theaters in the greater Washington D.C. region.Linkrot repair: The December 14, 1935, Boxoffice article about the Ambassador Theatre can now be found at this link.
I think the opening date of 1930 for the Pictorial Theatre probably comes from the advertisement shown on this page at Kilduff’s. The Pictorial was showing Mae Murray’s Peacock Alley. The thing is that Mae Murray starred in both the 1930 musical version of the film and in the 1921 silent version, and from the upcoming films in the ad (Dustin Farnum in Iron to Gold, Tom Mix in Chasing the Moon, both released in 1922) it must have been the 1921 version that the Pictorial was showing. The ad most likely dates from 1922, and the Pictorial might have been in operation for a considerable time before that.
I don’t think this house was ever actually called the Wilson Avenue Theatre. Brick and Clay Record was published in Chicago, and Chicago had a house called the Wilson Avenue Theatre, opened in 1909. Whoever wrote the item probably just added Avenue to the name of the Youngstown house because he was thinking of the Chicago house when he wrote it.
A paragraph about the Wilson Avenue Theatre appears in the November 3, 1914, issue of Brick and Clay Record:
Why an outfit called the Youngstown Ice Company was supplying brick I don’t know, but the name was not a typo. It was mentioned in other construction journals of the period. And yes, they also dealt in ice.The mention of a double-page opening ad for the theater is tantalizing. It must have appeared prior to November 3, but there’s no indication how long before.
The Alvin and the Lyric were both operated by the partnership of Hartzell & Pitzer according to their listings in the 1908 report of the Ohio Department of Inspections.
In April, 1908, Hartzell & Pitzer also began operating a house in Youngstown called the Empire Theatre as a burlesque stand.
The Andrews Theatre opened in early 1912, as noted in this item from the July 31 issue of The New York Dramatic Mirror:
The 1913-1914 Cahn guide listed the Andrews Theatre as a ground floor house with 911 seats. The 1909-1910 guide lists only a 550-seat Teck Theatre at Salamanca, operated by Max Andrews. The Teck opened in December, 1908, according to an item in the December 25 issue of The Billboard. It appears to have been destroyed by a fire in January, 1910. Perhaps the Andrews Theatre was its replacement.The Gayety was a fairly large theater. The 1907 annual report of the Ohio Department of Inspection listed it with 1,500 seats, the same capacity the report listed for the Park Theatre.
A Youngstown burlesque house called the Gayety was mentioned in the September 19, 1942, issue of The Billboard, but without an address there’s no way of telling if it was the same Gayety that was operating in 1906-07.
The Gayety of 1942 was on the Empire Burlesque Circuit. Earlier, the Grand had been on that circuit, and returned to it in 1943, so the circuit might have been using the Gayety to get some leverage over the owners of the Grand. The Gayety was mentioned in Billboard in both 1946 and 1950 as part of Johnny (or Jack) Kane’s Ohio Circuit, which also booked burlesque. By 1953, the Park was on the Kane circuit.
I believe three theaters are conflated in the current description. The theater built in the 1880s must have been the Red Bank Opera House, which opened in 1883 and burned to the ground in 1905. It was located on the south side of Front Street just west of Maple Avenue.
Frick’s Theatre was better known as Frick’s Lyceum, and it opened in September, 1906, in a converted tomato cannery on the waterfront. The site is now part of Marine Park. An article about it appeared in the August 29, 1906, issue of the Red Bank Register (upper left corner of this PDF.) The Lyceum was listed in the 1912 Cahn guide with the notation “This theater is still in existence but has been closed for some time.” It does not appear in the 1913-1914 guide.
The theater at Front Street and Wharf Avenue was, as teecee said, built in 1912. The Red Bank Register of October 23, 1912, had an article about it (top right corner of the first page of this PDF.) Stockholders in the Red Bank Amusement Company were Fred H. VanDorn, Thomas Williams, and John J. Travers. The theater featured a long lobby, 13 feet wide and 71 feet long, which led from Front Street to the theater proper, which backed up to Union Street and was 56x128 feet. The Lyric was erected by local builder George W. Sewing, who also acted as architect.
The article said that the owners hoped to have the house open by Thanksgiving, but they missed the date. The January 22, 1913, issue of the Register said that the installation of the furnishings and equipment of the theater was well underway and the opening was to be on or about February 1.
The Lyric was remodeled in early 1920 and reopened as the Palace Theatre on April 5, according to the April 7 issue of the Register. The Palace was first operated by N. E. McNulty. In September, 1928, the house had another name change, becoming the Hunting Theatre, which was operated by Mr. and Mrs. Tony Hunting. The theater closed in 1930, but reopened later that year under the previous name Palace Theatre. On January 9, 1931, the Palace Theatre was completely destroyed by a fire.
The January 16, 1912, issue of The Troy Times had this item:
The January 18, 1945, issue of The Times Record said that the Majestic Theatre was to be converted into facilities for the local post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The auditorium floor was to be leveled and a second floor installed in the space to accommodate lounges, a recreation room, rest rooms, and offices. The ground floor would house a meeting hall and kitchen facilities. Although the Majestic closed in the mid-1920s, the rebuilding plans indicate that auditorium was still intact in 1945.Joe Masher’s description of the State Theatre says that it was designed by the same architect as the American Theatre, and the description of this house says that it was a twin of the State. If that’s so, then the architect of this theater was Abraham K. Mosley, who was noted as the architect of the Rose (State) Theatre in The American Contractor of April 29, 1922.
The Rose/State Theatre was definitely on Fourth Street, not Fourth Avenue. Here is an item about it from the April 29, 1922, issue of The American Contractor:
Abraham K. Mosley was a native of England who came to the United States in 1904. He was commissioned to work on the Emma Willard School in 1910 and settled in Troy where he practiced for many years, though he designed buildings as far away as Kansas City, Kansas (St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church on 18th Street.) He died in 1951.The Louvee Theatre was designed and built by the F & Y Building Service of Columbus, Ohio. It was on a list of eleven of the compnay’s recent projects that was published in the October 27, 1938, issue of the Boone County Recorder.
The Avalon Theatre was designed and built by the F & Y Building Service of Columbus, Ohio. It was one of eleven theaters on a list of the company’s projects in an ad that was published in the October 27, 1938, issue of the Boone County Recorder.
An ad for the F & Y Building Service in the Boone County Recorder of October 27, 1938, listed the Arlington Theatre as one of five houses in Columbus that the firm had designed and built by that time. The others were the Westmont, the Fifth Avenue, the Cleve, and the Indianola.
An ad for the F & Y Building Service in the October 27, 1938, issue of the Boone County Recorder (PDF here) listed the Fifth Avenue Theatre as one of five Columbus houses it had designed.
If this house originally opened in 1920 then the project by F & Y must have been a remodeling or a replacement. I don’t think the company began designing and building theaters until the mid-1930s, though F & Y Construction had been in business since the 1910s.
In the ad uploaded by dbellis54 the text says “Have you seen the New Fifth Ave.? Modern!” which suggests a recent remodeling. The movie advertised, Born to Dance was released in the U.S. on November 27, 1936, according to IMDb, so the ad for this sub-run house probably dates from well into 1937. It’s likely that this was the theater that F & Y worked on in the 1930s.
An ad for the F & Y Building Service in the October 27, 1938, issue of the Boone County Recorder (PDF here) said that Erlanger’s new Gayety Theatre was one of eleven movie houses the company had designed and built since December, 1937.
The Miami-Western Theatre opened on September 23, 1938, per a full-page ad for the theater in Miami University’s 1939 yearbook. The Streamline Modern auditorium featured murals depicting student life at Miami University on one side wall and at Western College for Women on the other. The house closed in 1988.
An ad for the F & Y Building Service in the October 27, 1938, issue of the Boone County Recorder (PDF here) of Burlington, Kentucky, on the occasion of the opening of the Gayety Theatre in nearby Erlanger, had a list of several theaters designed and built by F & Y since December, 1937, including the Miami-Western.
A brochure for a walking tour of Oxford’s uptown business district (large PDF file) says that the Princess Theatre was built in 1911 and opened as the Oxford Theatre. It became the Talawanda Theatre in 1950, and was enlarged and renamed the Princess in the 1980s.
This January 25, 2015, article in the Journal-News says that plans are afoot to build a new building for the theaters on a lot adjacent to the Princess and incorporate the facade of the existing Arts and Crafts style building as the entrance to the new theaters, but the plans have not yet been approved. I haven’t found any more recent articles about the proposal.
The MidPointe Library has a few photos of the Sorg Opera House/Colonial Theatre. Unfortunately, none show the interior.
This photo shows the building around 1950, shortly after it had been remodeled and renamed the Colonial Theatre.
Somewhat clearer is this 1975 photo which shows more of the facade’s Romanesque Revival details.
This photo is from around 1900.
Though it was still standing when the current Google Street View was made, this page says that the building was demolished in April, 2014. Farther down the page it says that the Isis operated until the end of the silent era, and in 1930 was rebuilt as offices by Western Union.
CharmaineZoe provides this vintage photo of the Isis Theatre, probably from around 1926, the year the movie Midnight Sun was released.
The Orpheum opened on April 2, 1908. This item about the event is from the April 4 issue of Variety:
Gus Sun was a former juggler, vaudevillian, and minstrel who entered the theater business in 1904,opening a small vaudeville and picture house in Springfield, Ohio. By 1909 he had a circuit of a dozen theaters and booked dozens of other houses through the booking agency he founded in 1906.The Strand Theatre that opened in 1929 was actually the second Strand Theatre at this address. The first was a smaller theater that opened on March 12, 1922. Here is a drawing of the first Strand.
24 N. Broad Street was the Paramount’s historic address, but Middletown has renumbered its lots and the Paramount’s site is on what is now South Broad Street. In this aerial photo from 1955, the intersection of Central Avenue and Broad Street is at center bottom, and the Paramount can be seen on the west side of Broad halfway up the block north of Central.
The Paramount is at right in this 1962 photo. The building housing Doan’s Ace Hardware is still standing, but has been stripped of its modern front, revealing what remains of the much older facade beneath.