An article in the September 20, 1964, issue of the Petersburg Progress-Index said that the Century Theatre Company was chartered in 1917, so the theater must have been opened by 1918. In its early years the Century featured Keith vaudeville.
The October 6, 1917, issue of The American Contractor had this item:
“Petersburg, Va.—Theater & Store Bldg.: $50,000. 1 sty. Asso. Archts. & Bldrs. C. K. Bryant, Craig & Isbell, Lehigh bldg. Owner Century Amusement Co., Walter Sacks, agt.. Center Square. Bldrs. & owner taking sep. bids.”
Richmond architect C. K. Bryant had a long career, but the Petersburg firm Craig & Isbell, apparently his associates on this project, I have not found mentioned in the trade journals after 1918.
The Gem Theatre was advertised below the “Colored News” column of the Petersburg Progress-Index of February 10, 1954. One of the upcoming events was a live show called A Night on Lennox Avenue. The Gem continued to be advertised on a different page of the paper than other theaters through 1965, but in 1966 the paper’s movie listings were desegregated and the Gem’s ads appeared adjacent to those of other theaters. The Gem did not prosper, though, as by 1969 it was advertising “Adult Entertainment.”
The Beacon’s Facebook “About” page (here) has a different history than our description. It says the theater was built by the Knights of Pythias in 1928.
There was a Broadway Theatre operating in Hopewell at least as early as 1916, when it was mentioned in the September 30 issue of The Moving Picture World, but it was apparently a different house than the Broadway that opened in 1928.
The NRHP registration form for the building says that the Broadway Theatre in the Pythian building opened on November 28, 1928. The house became the Beacon Theatre under new ownership after the original operators defaulted on their loans in 1932. The form also attributes the design of the building to both Fred Bishop and local architect Osbert L. Edwards.
The April 11, 1941, issue of The Film Daily said that Louis Israel’s Ellet Theatre in Akron was to open soon. The new house was being outfitted by National Theatre Supply, Cleveland.
The February 26, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World listed A. J. Meyerpeter of the Mystic Theatre, Denver, as a charter member of the new Rocky Mountain Screen Club, an organization of theater owners and operators.
Sometime prior to May, 1915, when he took over operation of the Plaza Theatre on Curtis Street, pioneer Denver exhibitor Lewis Erb had been connected with the Mystic Theatre.
The opening of the Bon-Air Theatre was noted in the April 11, 1941, issue of The Film Daily:
“Watseka, Ill.— The A. B. McCullom circuit is opening the new Bon Air Theater here, seating 400. This will give the circuit two local houses, the other being the Watseka.”
Thanks for the source, Hank. If a scholarly book published by the Iowa State University Press says that Broadway Theatre was an aka for the Brooklyn Opera House (which it does, on page 89 in a Google Books snippet view,) that’s good enough for me.
There is a Broadway Street in Brooklyn, but Google’s satellite and street views show that it is entirely residential, so it seems unlikely that it would have been the location of a theater. Brooklyn is a very small town, so a second theater also seems unlikely, but if Brooklyn did have a second theater I’d expect it to have been on either Jackson Street or Front Street, where most of the town’s other business are.
The article in Worcester Magazine I linked to in the previous comment says that Poli’s Elm Street Theatre was a project originally to be called the Lincoln Theatre, though it never operated under that name. The builders of the new house, the Worcester Amusement Company, ran into difficulties partway through construction and the theater remained unfinished until Sylvester Poli bought it and completed it in 1912.
The letting of contracts for the Lincoln Theatre was noted in the August 13, 1910, issue of The American Contractor:
“Worcester, Mass.—Lincoln Theater: $175,000. Architects Leon H. Lempert & Son, Rochester. Owner Worcester Amusement Co., E. W. Lynch, pres., Worcester. General contract let to F. W. Mark, Worcester. See Rochester Building Notes.”
Multiple period sources indicate that Poli kept Leon Lempert Jr. on as architect (Lempert Sr. had died in 1909) after he took over the unfinished project.
The caption of this photo says the Opera House was also known as the Broadway Theatre. The Flickr user photolibrarian is a retired university librarian who lives in Nevada, Iowa, so he’s likely to be a reliable source, though I’ve found no other references to an aka of Broadway Theatre for this house. I did find a Broadway Theatre in Brooklyn, Iowa, mentioned in a couple of trade journal items from the 1920s, and in a newspaper article from 1945, but without any details which would definitely connect it to the Opera House.
The Empire Theatre is mentioned a few times in trade publications in the 1910s. In 1916, the house was sold by Dave Solari to an Alois Fischer. There is a reference to Fischer’s Empire Theatre in 1917. By August, 1919, the Empire was being operated by Blumenfeld & Knox, who were having plans prepared for a new theater. I haven’t found what became of that project. In March that same year, the American Photo Player Co. had sold the Empire a Beethoven model organ.
A couple of articles in The Napa Valley Register have some information about the house. This article about the 1906 earthquake says that the Hayes Theatre was built in 1904. It also says that after the earthquake “[b]ricks of the destroyed Hayes theater building, at First and Coombs streets, littered its interior and the surrounding streets. While the building appeared to be a complete loss, the owner reconstructed the Hayes with a new infrastructure of iron and wood trusses.”
Another article indicates that the Hayes Building was not demolished in 1924, but was purchased by Samuel Gordon and later extensively remodeled. The NRHP Registration Form for the Gordon Building also says that some of the Hayes Building survived:
“The 1929 section of the Gordon Building was constructed incorporating the infrastructure of the 1904 Hayes building, a squat two story structure with a ground floor housing the theatre, five retail spaces and a stairwell entrance to the second story offices. The new construction saw the height of the building increased. The old theatre lobby space became the lobby entrance to the second story office suites. Two small and one double size retail space encompassing the old theatre were constructed on the ground floor. The interior retail spaces had high ceilings with decorative molding and were supported by tall columns with decorative capitals. The double size retail space had a small curving stairway leading to a full mezzanine. Stair banisters and mezzanine rail were of polychromatic glazed terra cotta.”
It sounds as though the auditorium’s walls were kept, but the roof was removed and a floor of offices built above the retail stores that were put into the former auditorium space. A new facade replaced the back wall of the theater’s stage house fronting on Coombs Street.
The original Orpheum in Denver was designed by Willis Marean and Albert J. Norton. There are four photos of it on this web page.
The firm of Marean & Norton practiced in Denver from 1895 to 1936 and left a significant legacy of buildings in Colorado, some of which are now listed on the NRHP and others of which are designated local landmarks.
A couple of web sites say that the reason the Studio didn’t get demolished in 2009 was because the city, which owns the building, couldn’t afford the expense. A lot of cities can’t afford to restore old theaters, but Middletown can’t even afford to knock one down.
The Tehachapi earthquake took place on July 21, 1952. It’s likely that in the confusion of the next few days the theater’s ads just didn’t get pulled from the newspaper. As I recall, the earthquake hit about four o'clock in the morning (it was powerful enough to wake me up where I lived in suburban Los Angeles, about a hundred miles from the epicenter), so the last show at the Rex must have been on the evening of July 20.
Charles H. Biggar was one of Bakersfield’s most noted architects. Around 1915 he was briefly in a partnership with Charles H. Kysor (who later changed his surname to Kyson), son of pioneer Los Angeles architect Ezra F. Kysor.
It seems that Archiplanet conflated two theaters. There were two houses in Portsmouth called the Lyric Theatre. The first one was a building with an arched entrance, and was located in the 400 block of Chilicothe Street. This must have been the theater dating from 1912.
The newer Lyric Theatre, at 820 Gallia Street, actually opened on September 3, 1925, as Law’s Hollywood Theatre, and was designed by the local architectural firm DeVoss & Donaldson. The Hollywood Theatre is advertised in The Portsmouth Daily Times through 1926, and is mentioned in January, 1927, but the September 8, 1927, issue of the paper has a reference to the Lyric Theatre Building on Gallia Square. As the Hollywood/Lyric was on Gallia Square and the original Lyric was not, the name of the theater must have changed in 1927.
In 1928, the Schine circuit took over operation of the Lyric Theatre, along with the LaRoy and Columbia Theatres. I haven’t discovered when Warner Bros. took over the house.
This web page has photos of several Portsmouth theaters, including the LaRoy about halfway down the page. A list at the top of the page gives the LaRoy’s address as 848 Gallia Street.
The August 1, 1928, issue of the Portsmouth Daily Times said that the Schine Theaters Circuit, which had recently acquired the LaRoy, Lyric, and Columbia Theatres, would install new and improved lamps in the projectors at all three houses.
This article from the South Philly Review says that the Alhambra Theatre was converted into a roller skating rink in 1952. The building was sold to the city in 1963 and demolished to make way for a parking lot. During its last few years the Alhambra served as a boxing arena, and a more recent arena called the New Alhambra was named for it.
There are a couple of exterior photos of the Alhambra in the Irving R. Glazer Theater Collection at the Philadelphia Athenaeum. Thumbnails of them can be seen on this page at Philadelphia Architects and Buildings, but only subscribers to the site will be able to open the full-sized versions.
The 1918 book History of Butte County, California, by George C. Mansfield, has a biographical sketch of Albert A. Plagge, who designed the Gardella Theatre and numerous other buildings in Oroville. Plagge was an architecture student living in San Francisco at the time of the earthquake and fire of 1906, and remained there until 1908 when he removed to Oroville. Finding that there was more money in construction than architecture he established a construction firm but continued to design most of the buildings the firm built, including the Gardella Theatre.
The NRHP registration form for the State Theatre says that the Gardella Theatre suffered a major fire on July 11, 1927. The Gardella and the Rex Theatre, which had recently been renovated, were both being operated by the partnership of Harry Seipel and A. B. C. Chamberlain, who also operated theaters in Palo Alto and Crockett. The Gardella estate announced that a new theater would be built to replace the burned house and would be operated by Seipel & Chamberlain, but soon the T&D Jr. circuit took over the project and the new house, the State Theatre, was built and operated by them. I haven’t found what became of the Gardella Theatre following the 1927 fire. Though the building stood until 1964, it’s possible that it never housed a movie a theater again after the fire.
A 1918 book, History of Butte County, California, by George C. Mansfield, says that the Rex Theatre was built around 1906 by Lewis Slissman and William C. Goodenow.
The NRHP registration form for the State Theatre says that the Rex was refurbished in 1927, and reopened on July 2. At this time the Rex was operated by Harry Seipel and A.B.C. Chamberlain, who also operated the Gardella Theatre in Oroville as well as theaters in Palo Alto and Crockett.
This is from a brief biography of Mr. I. D. Stanford which was published in the 1918 book History of Butte County, California, by George C. Mansfield:
“In July, 1916, Mr. and Mrs. Stanford purchased the Lyric Theater in Chico, and since then he has given his undivided attention to the conduct of the business and has built up a fine patronage and has made of it one of the best show-houses in the Valley. He has made a study of what the public wants and gives it to them. The theater is conducted as a moving-picture theater and has a seating capacity of four hundred. It is perfectly ventilated; in summer large electric fans are operated and in winter it is heated by furnace, with the result that the Lyric is the popular show-house in Chico. Popular prices prevail. In June, 1918, Mr. and Mrs. Stanford purchased the Liberty Theater at Marysville, which has a seating capacity of five hundred, and this will be conducted in conjunction with their Chico play-house.”
In the 1922-1923 edition of the FDY the Lyric is one of four Chico theaters listed as being operated by Henry Daly. In the 1927 Yearbook it is one of three houses in Chico operated by the National Theaters Syndicate.
The Lyric Theatre was mentioned in both the January 8 and March 11 issues of The Moving Picture World in 1916. The earlier item said that owner R. Bauer planned to remodel the Lyric and rename it the Park Theatre, but the March 11 item said that the Lyric Theatre in Chico, recently opened by R. Bauer, had been remodeled, so I guess Mr. Bauer changed his mind about the renaming.
The Lyric was mentioned again in the October 28 issue that same year, which said that the house had been repaired and reopened after suffering damage from a fire.
A brochure for a walking tour of downtown Pleasanton (no longer available on the Internet) said that the mission revival building at 720-722 Main was built as an auto showroom and garage around 1920, and in 1945 was converted into the Rancho Theatre, “a Spanish movie house.”
The PDF of the downtown walking tour brochure has vanished from the Internet. Even though the link is still on this web page, it now produces only a 404 error. Maybe they will repair it someday. However, the page has a slide show of historic photos, and one of them is of the Roxy. Unfortunately, the slide show is totally automated so you have to just wait for the photo to come up in the stream, and then it stays for only a few seconds.
That’s what I was thinking. The new Ritz Theatre on the south side was bigger than the old Ritz/Britton Theatre on the north side, so the new Ritz must have had the 586 seats.
An article in the September 20, 1964, issue of the Petersburg Progress-Index said that the Century Theatre Company was chartered in 1917, so the theater must have been opened by 1918. In its early years the Century featured Keith vaudeville.
The October 6, 1917, issue of The American Contractor had this item:
Richmond architect C. K. Bryant had a long career, but the Petersburg firm Craig & Isbell, apparently his associates on this project, I have not found mentioned in the trade journals after 1918.The Gem Theatre was advertised below the “Colored News” column of the Petersburg Progress-Index of February 10, 1954. One of the upcoming events was a live show called A Night on Lennox Avenue. The Gem continued to be advertised on a different page of the paper than other theaters through 1965, but in 1966 the paper’s movie listings were desegregated and the Gem’s ads appeared adjacent to those of other theaters. The Gem did not prosper, though, as by 1969 it was advertising “Adult Entertainment.”
The Beacon’s Facebook “About” page (here) has a different history than our description. It says the theater was built by the Knights of Pythias in 1928.
There was a Broadway Theatre operating in Hopewell at least as early as 1916, when it was mentioned in the September 30 issue of The Moving Picture World, but it was apparently a different house than the Broadway that opened in 1928.
The NRHP registration form for the building says that the Broadway Theatre in the Pythian building opened on November 28, 1928. The house became the Beacon Theatre under new ownership after the original operators defaulted on their loans in 1932. The form also attributes the design of the building to both Fred Bishop and local architect Osbert L. Edwards.
The April 11, 1941, issue of The Film Daily said that Louis Israel’s Ellet Theatre in Akron was to open soon. The new house was being outfitted by National Theatre Supply, Cleveland.
The February 26, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World listed A. J. Meyerpeter of the Mystic Theatre, Denver, as a charter member of the new Rocky Mountain Screen Club, an organization of theater owners and operators.
Sometime prior to May, 1915, when he took over operation of the Plaza Theatre on Curtis Street, pioneer Denver exhibitor Lewis Erb had been connected with the Mystic Theatre.
The opening of the Bon-Air Theatre was noted in the April 11, 1941, issue of The Film Daily:
Thanks for the source, Hank. If a scholarly book published by the Iowa State University Press says that Broadway Theatre was an aka for the Brooklyn Opera House (which it does, on page 89 in a Google Books snippet view,) that’s good enough for me.
There is a Broadway Street in Brooklyn, but Google’s satellite and street views show that it is entirely residential, so it seems unlikely that it would have been the location of a theater. Brooklyn is a very small town, so a second theater also seems unlikely, but if Brooklyn did have a second theater I’d expect it to have been on either Jackson Street or Front Street, where most of the town’s other business are.
The article in Worcester Magazine I linked to in the previous comment says that Poli’s Elm Street Theatre was a project originally to be called the Lincoln Theatre, though it never operated under that name. The builders of the new house, the Worcester Amusement Company, ran into difficulties partway through construction and the theater remained unfinished until Sylvester Poli bought it and completed it in 1912.
The letting of contracts for the Lincoln Theatre was noted in the August 13, 1910, issue of The American Contractor:
Multiple period sources indicate that Poli kept Leon Lempert Jr. on as architect (Lempert Sr. had died in 1909) after he took over the unfinished project.The caption of this photo says the Opera House was also known as the Broadway Theatre. The Flickr user photolibrarian is a retired university librarian who lives in Nevada, Iowa, so he’s likely to be a reliable source, though I’ve found no other references to an aka of Broadway Theatre for this house. I did find a Broadway Theatre in Brooklyn, Iowa, mentioned in a couple of trade journal items from the 1920s, and in a newspaper article from 1945, but without any details which would definitely connect it to the Opera House.
The Empire Theatre is mentioned a few times in trade publications in the 1910s. In 1916, the house was sold by Dave Solari to an Alois Fischer. There is a reference to Fischer’s Empire Theatre in 1917. By August, 1919, the Empire was being operated by Blumenfeld & Knox, who were having plans prepared for a new theater. I haven’t found what became of that project. In March that same year, the American Photo Player Co. had sold the Empire a Beethoven model organ.
A couple of articles in The Napa Valley Register have some information about the house. This article about the 1906 earthquake says that the Hayes Theatre was built in 1904. It also says that after the earthquake “[b]ricks of the destroyed Hayes theater building, at First and Coombs streets, littered its interior and the surrounding streets. While the building appeared to be a complete loss, the owner reconstructed the Hayes with a new infrastructure of iron and wood trusses.”
Another article indicates that the Hayes Building was not demolished in 1924, but was purchased by Samuel Gordon and later extensively remodeled. The NRHP Registration Form for the Gordon Building also says that some of the Hayes Building survived:
It sounds as though the auditorium’s walls were kept, but the roof was removed and a floor of offices built above the retail stores that were put into the former auditorium space. A new facade replaced the back wall of the theater’s stage house fronting on Coombs Street.The original Orpheum in Denver was designed by Willis Marean and Albert J. Norton. There are four photos of it on this web page.
The firm of Marean & Norton practiced in Denver from 1895 to 1936 and left a significant legacy of buildings in Colorado, some of which are now listed on the NRHP and others of which are designated local landmarks.
Here is a 1994 photo of the Studio Theatre. The same year, this photo was made, showing the stage house.
A couple of web sites say that the reason the Studio didn’t get demolished in 2009 was because the city, which owns the building, couldn’t afford the expense. A lot of cities can’t afford to restore old theaters, but Middletown can’t even afford to knock one down.
Here is a photo of the Stanley Theatre from around 1950. This is another view, undated.
The Tehachapi earthquake took place on July 21, 1952. It’s likely that in the confusion of the next few days the theater’s ads just didn’t get pulled from the newspaper. As I recall, the earthquake hit about four o'clock in the morning (it was powerful enough to wake me up where I lived in suburban Los Angeles, about a hundred miles from the epicenter), so the last show at the Rex must have been on the evening of July 20.
Charles H. Biggar was one of Bakersfield’s most noted architects. Around 1915 he was briefly in a partnership with Charles H. Kysor (who later changed his surname to Kyson), son of pioneer Los Angeles architect Ezra F. Kysor.
It seems that Archiplanet conflated two theaters. There were two houses in Portsmouth called the Lyric Theatre. The first one was a building with an arched entrance, and was located in the 400 block of Chilicothe Street. This must have been the theater dating from 1912.
The newer Lyric Theatre, at 820 Gallia Street, actually opened on September 3, 1925, as Law’s Hollywood Theatre, and was designed by the local architectural firm DeVoss & Donaldson. The Hollywood Theatre is advertised in The Portsmouth Daily Times through 1926, and is mentioned in January, 1927, but the September 8, 1927, issue of the paper has a reference to the Lyric Theatre Building on Gallia Square. As the Hollywood/Lyric was on Gallia Square and the original Lyric was not, the name of the theater must have changed in 1927.
In 1928, the Schine circuit took over operation of the Lyric Theatre, along with the LaRoy and Columbia Theatres. I haven’t discovered when Warner Bros. took over the house.
This web page has photos of several Portsmouth theaters, including the LaRoy about halfway down the page. A list at the top of the page gives the LaRoy’s address as 848 Gallia Street.
The August 1, 1928, issue of the Portsmouth Daily Times said that the Schine Theaters Circuit, which had recently acquired the LaRoy, Lyric, and Columbia Theatres, would install new and improved lamps in the projectors at all three houses.
This article from the South Philly Review says that the Alhambra Theatre was converted into a roller skating rink in 1952. The building was sold to the city in 1963 and demolished to make way for a parking lot. During its last few years the Alhambra served as a boxing arena, and a more recent arena called the New Alhambra was named for it.
There are a couple of exterior photos of the Alhambra in the Irving R. Glazer Theater Collection at the Philadelphia Athenaeum. Thumbnails of them can be seen on this page at Philadelphia Architects and Buildings, but only subscribers to the site will be able to open the full-sized versions.
The 1918 book History of Butte County, California, by George C. Mansfield, has a biographical sketch of Albert A. Plagge, who designed the Gardella Theatre and numerous other buildings in Oroville. Plagge was an architecture student living in San Francisco at the time of the earthquake and fire of 1906, and remained there until 1908 when he removed to Oroville. Finding that there was more money in construction than architecture he established a construction firm but continued to design most of the buildings the firm built, including the Gardella Theatre.
The NRHP registration form for the State Theatre says that the Gardella Theatre suffered a major fire on July 11, 1927. The Gardella and the Rex Theatre, which had recently been renovated, were both being operated by the partnership of Harry Seipel and A. B. C. Chamberlain, who also operated theaters in Palo Alto and Crockett. The Gardella estate announced that a new theater would be built to replace the burned house and would be operated by Seipel & Chamberlain, but soon the T&D Jr. circuit took over the project and the new house, the State Theatre, was built and operated by them. I haven’t found what became of the Gardella Theatre following the 1927 fire. Though the building stood until 1964, it’s possible that it never housed a movie a theater again after the fire.
A 1918 book, History of Butte County, California, by George C. Mansfield, says that the Rex Theatre was built around 1906 by Lewis Slissman and William C. Goodenow.
The NRHP registration form for the State Theatre says that the Rex was refurbished in 1927, and reopened on July 2. At this time the Rex was operated by Harry Seipel and A.B.C. Chamberlain, who also operated the Gardella Theatre in Oroville as well as theaters in Palo Alto and Crockett.
This is from a brief biography of Mr. I. D. Stanford which was published in the 1918 book History of Butte County, California, by George C. Mansfield:
In the 1922-1923 edition of the FDY the Lyric is one of four Chico theaters listed as being operated by Henry Daly. In the 1927 Yearbook it is one of three houses in Chico operated by the National Theaters Syndicate.The Lyric Theatre was mentioned in both the January 8 and March 11 issues of The Moving Picture World in 1916. The earlier item said that owner R. Bauer planned to remodel the Lyric and rename it the Park Theatre, but the March 11 item said that the Lyric Theatre in Chico, recently opened by R. Bauer, had been remodeled, so I guess Mr. Bauer changed his mind about the renaming.
The Lyric was mentioned again in the October 28 issue that same year, which said that the house had been repaired and reopened after suffering damage from a fire.
A brochure for a walking tour of downtown Pleasanton (no longer available on the Internet) said that the mission revival building at 720-722 Main was built as an auto showroom and garage around 1920, and in 1945 was converted into the Rancho Theatre, “a Spanish movie house.”
The PDF of the downtown walking tour brochure has vanished from the Internet. Even though the link is still on this web page, it now produces only a 404 error. Maybe they will repair it someday. However, the page has a slide show of historic photos, and one of them is of the Roxy. Unfortunately, the slide show is totally automated so you have to just wait for the photo to come up in the stream, and then it stays for only a few seconds.
That’s what I was thinking. The new Ritz Theatre on the south side was bigger than the old Ritz/Britton Theatre on the north side, so the new Ritz must have had the 586 seats.