re: “A kind of residence.” Um, no, it is actually the Jonah Community Center. Here is a photo I just took. I would guess the two lower side portions of the building were added after its theatre days to create more room. I remember the exterior as being red in the early 1950s.
Charles Allen was a Block Islander. Besides the Scenic Temple and Union (later Fays), he also owned the Scenic Theatre in Pawtucket at 156 Main Street and the Allen Block in Providence at 911 Westminster Street, where he lived. He built the doomed Hippodrome and died in 1915.
The history of the Hippodrome or “Hip” is one of utter disaster. It is recounted by Roger Brett in his Temples of Illusion, and is synthesized here:
“Now, with the Union and Scenic doing well, Charlie Allen once again had a dream. He had been to New York City and had taken in a few shows at the famous Hippodrome, that mammoth pleasure palace on Sixth Avenue that held 5000 people. The stage there was so big that the greatest spectacles ever seen in an American theater were mounted on it… (…)
“As 1913 waned, the local theatrical fraternity had learned that Allen had acquired the entire block bounded by Fountain, Union, Sabin, and Mathewson Streets and was planning to build his own version of the New York Hippodrome…. (…)
“During the fall [1914] , while the Gaiety and Emery were opening, Charlie Allen was having second thoughts about his unfinished Hippodrome. Competetive houses were fairly leaping out of the watery excavations of downtown Providence, and there would soon be another one, a very large one, in the next block at Washington and Union Streets. This one was the Strand, being built by a corporation of businessmen in emulation of New York’s movie palaces.
“(…) Now it was clear to Allen that his Hippodrome was going to require more time and more money. And where were the spectacles going to come from anyway? He had no bookings. There he sat with a foundation, a floor, and walls only one storey high. So…he had the roof trusses set in place at what should have been balcony level, bricked up the proscenium opening…and prepared to open for business as a film theater.
“It opened with a matinee on January 9, 1915, sans fanfare, and with its name shortened to Hip. At least, that’s what the electric sign read that hung over the front entrance on Union Street…. This truly immense theater covered 34,000 square feet with side walls on Fountain and Sabin Streets. The stage, if it had ever been completed, would have had its loading doors on Mathewson Street.
“The Hip is one of the most forgotten of the city’s theaters and there are no known photographs of it. A newspaper report of its opening stated that the exterior had ‘a rambling and fortress-like appearance’ of brick facing on concrete walls. The interior…was described as ‘vast, and in dull red and green with 3,000 leather upholstered seats sweeping between six aisles.’(…) The Hip boasted of having the largest projection booth in the world…. [it] may have been converted from part or all of the balcony framework. Allen’s claims of ‘the largest’ were an attempted cover-up for the aborted condition of the house….
“The newspaper report continued…,‘the largest theater lobby in the world…runs the entire width of the front with many doors opening on all sides.’ (…) The only stairs…were two flights that led to nowhere…on each side of the stage. (…)
“[Allen] advertised the Hip as ‘the largest one floor theater in the world, 3,000 seats for 10¢.’ It was a final attempt at face-saving but it didn’t work. The few people who did attend thought it was just too depressing to watch a movie surrounded by a sea of empty seats….
“The Strand…made its appearance on June 12, 1915…the man in the street and his missus favored the Strand and so sealed the doom of the Hippodrome. There would be no more dreams of grandeur for 73-year-old Charlie Allen and he passed away on November 27th of that year. (…) The Hip closed after two years, the seats were taken out, and it became a parking garage, still named the Hip.”
The site of the Hippodrome is where the Providence Journal Building is today.
Great! After the Music Hall in Providence burned in 1905, it was closed as an entertainment facility, repaired, and reopened as the Providence Public Market. It stood until 1955, and as a youth I must have seen it (I used to go to the R.K.O. Albee down the street) and not taken notice.
The Midway was listed in 1948 and 1952 Warwick City directories as being owned by one Joseph L. Cariolo. A 1963 directory listed it as vacant. I no longer believe the theatre was demolished, because I drove up there today and saw that a building, resembling a former wooden-structure theatre, is still there at 830 Oakland Beach Avenue, at the start of the lane with the food stands, bars, and restaurants. It seems to be some kind of residence. References to the Scenic Theatre (with the specification “photoplays”) abound in city directories from the 1920s, disappear pretty much in the 1930s. No street number is ever given, just Oakland Beach Avenue; so I cannot determine whether the Scenic was an earlier name for the Midway Theatre. My hunch is it was.
In Temples of Illusion Roger Brett wrote of the beginnings of the Scenic Temple [later Rialto]:
“In the summer of 1906, [Charles] Allen counted the number of people going into the Nickel and checked the cost of film rentals. The margin of profit looked good and the work of converting roller rink to theater commenced immediately. On December 31, 1906, the Scenic Temple threw open its doors. Like the Nickel, it had movies and illustrated songs. Unlike the Nickel, it also had four acts of vaudeville. Hours were from 1:30 to 10:30, six days a week, with new shows every Monday and Thursday. Admission was 10¢.
“The old church [Westminster Congregational, 1829] made a theater of respectable size….It probably sat 700 on the orchestra floor and another 200 in the balcony…. Allen’s modifications were minimal. He covered up the windows but the floor remained flat…,and, while he did put in a stage, it had no curtain. A vertical sign with lightbulbs spelling out the word "Scenic” was suspended over the sidewalk in front of the minuscule entrance lobby.
“The Scenic Temple did well with movies, small time vaudeville, and illustrated songs, but its great success came between 1911 and 1913 when it played host to Homan’s Musical Stock Company.”
re: “The building was razed in 1970 for the second pass of the Downtown Revitalization Project.”
I don’t understand the lunatic thinking in a phrase like “Downtown Revitalization Project,” when it refers to the wanton destruction of a great historic building. Do you know if the upstairs theatre part remained during the Peerless years or did that become converted to other uses as well?
During the week of February 17, 1935, the film programs of the Music Hall included the following: Sun.-Tues., Let’s Talk it Over with Chester Morris and Mae Clark & Managed Money, a short with Shirley Temple, & King of the Jungle with Buster Crabbe; Wed.-Thurs., Romance in the Rain with Robert Pryor, Heather Angel & Five Bad Men with Noah Beery, Jr., Art Mix, Bill Patton; Fri.-Sat.: Dames with Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell & The Man Trailer with Buck Jones.
Quite an assortment, with an emphasis on B-films, apart from Dames, which was an A-type Busby Berkeley musical.
The Providence Journal of July 5, 1976, reported that the theatre, named Hillside at the time, had been destroyed by fire. The article said:
“Kenneth Guarino, president of K.I.M. Realty,…Providence, said his firm bought the building two months ago and was in the process of renovating it to make it a family theater again.
“For years, the theater, near the intersection of Waterman Avenue and Smith Street, was known as the Community Theatre. For a brief period after the theater closed, about 10 years ago, it was used as an indoor golf enterprise.
“Guarino said extensive renovations were made to restore the interior of the building. He said the renovation included a new screen and sound system, air conditioning, seating facilities and a new vestibule area near the entrance.
“The building, constructed in 1926, formerly housed a dental office on a portion of the second floor and also contained a small variety store on the first floor next to the entrance.”
In 1965 the Pike was embroiled in censorship problems with the Town of Johnston, acting upon audience complaints about some of the movies that had been shown. The films that provoked an inquiry by Mayor Mario R. aRussillo were the showings of two particular films, Three Nuts in Search of a Bolt with Mamie van Doren and Promises! Promises! with Jayne Mansfield. Theatre manager Alfred Cipriano maintained there was “nothing dirty” about the movies there. Police chief Vincent Acciardo was asked whether he could censor movies shown at the Pike Drive-In. “We’re going to clamp down on them if they sneak a film in on us that is unfavorable,” the chief said, as reported in the Providence Journal of April 14, 1965.
On April 17th a Journal editorial opined, “Living in a democracy presupposes a considerable leniency in free expression in movies, books and plays. It also presupposes that people will try to become informed enough to protect heir own sensibilities instead of running off to find a censor every time they are shocked.”
Much the same would occur in the 1970s when the Johnston Cinema, further down Hartford Avenue and closer to the town hall, began to show hard-core pornography.
The Dimerina was located behind the building in Olneyville Square that was/would become the R.I. HOSPITAL TRVST BANK…an etching still visible on the front although the bank building is now the Olneyville branch of the Providence Public Library. 7 Stokes Street, where the Dimerina was, is today a parking lot with an adjacent vacant lot. No building remains. Turn right a bit from Stokes Street onto Olneyville Square, cross the Square, and where Hardware in the Square today operates at 1911 Westminster Street was the original location of the Pastime. Go further up Westminster Street to the tall housing complex, and that is where the Conn’s Olympia used to be. Come back across the square to Grasso’s Gulf Service Station, and that is where the Royal used to be.
Roger, I always drive to the location to check. A hardware store called Hardware in the Square is there now at 1911. From the rear you can see that it is a brick building which may have existed at the time of the theatre, or may have been built after. I couldn’t tell. A couple of doors to the right, closer to Broadway, there used to be a Grand Central Market when I gew up, now reduced from its large size (only the front remains) and called the Iglesia Cristiana. When I used to visit the market decades ago, I always thought that at some time it had been a theatre, because of the height of the main large part of the market, an entrance area that suggested a former lobby (now the Iglesia) and what looked like a scenery tower to the rear.
Roger Brett, in his Temples of Illusion, referred to the Edisonia and the Pastime as separate theatres. He wrote, “While impromptu theaters had been popping up like mushrooms after a rain in downtown Providence, the same thing had been going on in that almost autonomous region known as Olneyville Square. Olneyville had the Dimerina in 1907, the Edisonia Theater in 1908 and 1909, the Pastime Theater from 1909 to 1915…”
He says nothing detailed about them, but since the city directories give both the Pastime and Edisonia the same address, 1911 Westminster Street, I am assuming they were the same theatre. “Edisonia” is clearly a place that shows movies, but “Pastime” is an easier name for people to remember and suggests other entertainments as well as movies. Perhaps the name was changed in 1909. This is pure conjecture, but it seems plausible. Further “excavation” may prove otherwise.
Re: Music Hall in Providence. Yes, I would like info. I know it burned down in 1905 and never showed movies, except as a novelty. For example, The Great Train Robbery was shown there.
The Music Hall was at 229 Main, according to a city directory I checked, and Roland is putting it up later today. I found a list of “coming movies” for the Music Hall in February, 1935. There was also a Globe Theatre at 175 Main, listed in 1914. They were sprouting like mushrooms.
In late June of 1976, when the theatre was called Ocean State Theatre, there was a first-run policy initiated with Murder by Death. It wasn’t until it became the Providence Performing Arts Center, however, that this magnificent theatre captured new success.
This theatre was located in a spot (and perhaps the same building) that is now part of the new posh Providence Hotel, whose entrance is on Mathewson Street. At the corner of Mathewson and Westminster is a pleasant little “boutique park” with benches. Behind it, in the hotel, is the fabulous Italian restaurant L'Epicureo. In the same general spot, in the 1980s, was the video porno-theatre, the VIP Luxury Cinema.
This video/porno theatre was located in a building that is now part of the new posh Providence Hotel, whose entrance is on Mathewson Street. At the corner of Mathewson and Westminster is a pleasant little “boutique park” with benches. Behind it, in the hotel, is the fabulous gourmet Italian restaurant, L'Epicureo. In the same general spot, in 1907, was the short-lived movie house, the Lyric Theatre.
re: “A kind of residence.” Um, no, it is actually the Jonah Community Center. Here is a photo I just took. I would guess the two lower side portions of the building were added after its theatre days to create more room. I remember the exterior as being red in the early 1950s.
Charles Allen was a Block Islander. Besides the Scenic Temple and Union (later Fays), he also owned the Scenic Theatre in Pawtucket at 156 Main Street and the Allen Block in Providence at 911 Westminster Street, where he lived. He built the doomed Hippodrome and died in 1915.
The history of the Hippodrome or “Hip” is one of utter disaster. It is recounted by Roger Brett in his Temples of Illusion, and is synthesized here:
“Now, with the Union and Scenic doing well, Charlie Allen once again had a dream. He had been to New York City and had taken in a few shows at the famous Hippodrome, that mammoth pleasure palace on Sixth Avenue that held 5000 people. The stage there was so big that the greatest spectacles ever seen in an American theater were mounted on it… (…)
“As 1913 waned, the local theatrical fraternity had learned that Allen had acquired the entire block bounded by Fountain, Union, Sabin, and Mathewson Streets and was planning to build his own version of the New York Hippodrome…. (…)
“During the fall [1914] , while the Gaiety and Emery were opening, Charlie Allen was having second thoughts about his unfinished Hippodrome. Competetive houses were fairly leaping out of the watery excavations of downtown Providence, and there would soon be another one, a very large one, in the next block at Washington and Union Streets. This one was the Strand, being built by a corporation of businessmen in emulation of New York’s movie palaces.
“(…) Now it was clear to Allen that his Hippodrome was going to require more time and more money. And where were the spectacles going to come from anyway? He had no bookings. There he sat with a foundation, a floor, and walls only one storey high. So…he had the roof trusses set in place at what should have been balcony level, bricked up the proscenium opening…and prepared to open for business as a film theater.
“It opened with a matinee on January 9, 1915, sans fanfare, and with its name shortened to Hip. At least, that’s what the electric sign read that hung over the front entrance on Union Street…. This truly immense theater covered 34,000 square feet with side walls on Fountain and Sabin Streets. The stage, if it had ever been completed, would have had its loading doors on Mathewson Street.
“The Hip is one of the most forgotten of the city’s theaters and there are no known photographs of it. A newspaper report of its opening stated that the exterior had ‘a rambling and fortress-like appearance’ of brick facing on concrete walls. The interior…was described as ‘vast, and in dull red and green with 3,000 leather upholstered seats sweeping between six aisles.’(…) The Hip boasted of having the largest projection booth in the world…. [it] may have been converted from part or all of the balcony framework. Allen’s claims of ‘the largest’ were an attempted cover-up for the aborted condition of the house….
“The newspaper report continued…,‘the largest theater lobby in the world…runs the entire width of the front with many doors opening on all sides.’ (…) The only stairs…were two flights that led to nowhere…on each side of the stage. (…)
“[Allen] advertised the Hip as ‘the largest one floor theater in the world, 3,000 seats for 10¢.’ It was a final attempt at face-saving but it didn’t work. The few people who did attend thought it was just too depressing to watch a movie surrounded by a sea of empty seats….
“The Strand…made its appearance on June 12, 1915…the man in the street and his missus favored the Strand and so sealed the doom of the Hippodrome. There would be no more dreams of grandeur for 73-year-old Charlie Allen and he passed away on November 27th of that year. (…) The Hip closed after two years, the seats were taken out, and it became a parking garage, still named the Hip.”
The site of the Hippodrome is where the Providence Journal Building is today.
Great! After the Music Hall in Providence burned in 1905, it was closed as an entertainment facility, repaired, and reopened as the Providence Public Market. It stood until 1955, and as a youth I must have seen it (I used to go to the R.K.O. Albee down the street) and not taken notice.
At various times in the 1930s and 1940s this place was listed in the city directory as the Greenwich Picture House or else the Greenwich Playhouse.
A 1914 City Directory refers to a Miller Mathewson Hall (moving pictures) in North Kingstown. I wonder if this was the same place.
The Midway was listed in 1948 and 1952 Warwick City directories as being owned by one Joseph L. Cariolo. A 1963 directory listed it as vacant. I no longer believe the theatre was demolished, because I drove up there today and saw that a building, resembling a former wooden-structure theatre, is still there at 830 Oakland Beach Avenue, at the start of the lane with the food stands, bars, and restaurants. It seems to be some kind of residence. References to the Scenic Theatre (with the specification “photoplays”) abound in city directories from the 1920s, disappear pretty much in the 1930s. No street number is ever given, just Oakland Beach Avenue; so I cannot determine whether the Scenic was an earlier name for the Midway Theatre. My hunch is it was.
In Temples of Illusion Roger Brett wrote of the beginnings of the Scenic Temple [later Rialto]:
“In the summer of 1906, [Charles] Allen counted the number of people going into the Nickel and checked the cost of film rentals. The margin of profit looked good and the work of converting roller rink to theater commenced immediately. On December 31, 1906, the Scenic Temple threw open its doors. Like the Nickel, it had movies and illustrated songs. Unlike the Nickel, it also had four acts of vaudeville. Hours were from 1:30 to 10:30, six days a week, with new shows every Monday and Thursday. Admission was 10¢.
“The old church [Westminster Congregational, 1829] made a theater of respectable size….It probably sat 700 on the orchestra floor and another 200 in the balcony…. Allen’s modifications were minimal. He covered up the windows but the floor remained flat…,and, while he did put in a stage, it had no curtain. A vertical sign with lightbulbs spelling out the word "Scenic” was suspended over the sidewalk in front of the minuscule entrance lobby.
“The Scenic Temple did well with movies, small time vaudeville, and illustrated songs, but its great success came between 1911 and 1913 when it played host to Homan’s Musical Stock Company.”
re: “The building was razed in 1970 for the second pass of the Downtown Revitalization Project.”
I don’t understand the lunatic thinking in a phrase like “Downtown Revitalization Project,” when it refers to the wanton destruction of a great historic building. Do you know if the upstairs theatre part remained during the Peerless years or did that become converted to other uses as well?
Of course it was…you say it in your description.
Great pictures! I’m assuming that the auditorium itself was not on the ground floor but up a flight, as with the Providence Music Hall.
Roland just posted an entry on the Music Hall with some incredible photos! Click and check it out.
During the week of February 17, 1935, the film programs of the Music Hall included the following: Sun.-Tues., Let’s Talk it Over with Chester Morris and Mae Clark & Managed Money, a short with Shirley Temple, & King of the Jungle with Buster Crabbe; Wed.-Thurs., Romance in the Rain with Robert Pryor, Heather Angel & Five Bad Men with Noah Beery, Jr., Art Mix, Bill Patton; Fri.-Sat.: Dames with Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell & The Man Trailer with Buck Jones.
Quite an assortment, with an emphasis on B-films, apart from Dames, which was an A-type Busby Berkeley musical.
Thanks. The Providence Opera House is listed, and Low’s Opera House is listed under the name Victory.
The Providence Journal of July 5, 1976, reported that the theatre, named Hillside at the time, had been destroyed by fire. The article said:
“Kenneth Guarino, president of K.I.M. Realty,…Providence, said his firm bought the building two months ago and was in the process of renovating it to make it a family theater again.
“For years, the theater, near the intersection of Waterman Avenue and Smith Street, was known as the Community Theatre. For a brief period after the theater closed, about 10 years ago, it was used as an indoor golf enterprise.
“Guarino said extensive renovations were made to restore the interior of the building. He said the renovation included a new screen and sound system, air conditioning, seating facilities and a new vestibule area near the entrance.
“The building, constructed in 1926, formerly housed a dental office on a portion of the second floor and also contained a small variety store on the first floor next to the entrance.”
In 1965 the Pike was embroiled in censorship problems with the Town of Johnston, acting upon audience complaints about some of the movies that had been shown. The films that provoked an inquiry by Mayor Mario R. aRussillo were the showings of two particular films, Three Nuts in Search of a Bolt with Mamie van Doren and Promises! Promises! with Jayne Mansfield. Theatre manager Alfred Cipriano maintained there was “nothing dirty” about the movies there. Police chief Vincent Acciardo was asked whether he could censor movies shown at the Pike Drive-In. “We’re going to clamp down on them if they sneak a film in on us that is unfavorable,” the chief said, as reported in the Providence Journal of April 14, 1965.
On April 17th a Journal editorial opined, “Living in a democracy presupposes a considerable leniency in free expression in movies, books and plays. It also presupposes that people will try to become informed enough to protect heir own sensibilities instead of running off to find a censor every time they are shocked.”
Much the same would occur in the 1970s when the Johnston Cinema, further down Hartford Avenue and closer to the town hall, began to show hard-core pornography.
The Dimerina was located behind the building in Olneyville Square that was/would become the R.I. HOSPITAL TRVST BANK…an etching still visible on the front although the bank building is now the Olneyville branch of the Providence Public Library. 7 Stokes Street, where the Dimerina was, is today a parking lot with an adjacent vacant lot. No building remains. Turn right a bit from Stokes Street onto Olneyville Square, cross the Square, and where Hardware in the Square today operates at 1911 Westminster Street was the original location of the Pastime. Go further up Westminster Street to the tall housing complex, and that is where the Conn’s Olympia used to be. Come back across the square to Grasso’s Gulf Service Station, and that is where the Royal used to be.
Roger, I always drive to the location to check. A hardware store called Hardware in the Square is there now at 1911. From the rear you can see that it is a brick building which may have existed at the time of the theatre, or may have been built after. I couldn’t tell. A couple of doors to the right, closer to Broadway, there used to be a Grand Central Market when I gew up, now reduced from its large size (only the front remains) and called the Iglesia Cristiana. When I used to visit the market decades ago, I always thought that at some time it had been a theatre, because of the height of the main large part of the market, an entrance area that suggested a former lobby (now the Iglesia) and what looked like a scenery tower to the rear.
Roger Brett, in his Temples of Illusion, referred to the Edisonia and the Pastime as separate theatres. He wrote, “While impromptu theaters had been popping up like mushrooms after a rain in downtown Providence, the same thing had been going on in that almost autonomous region known as Olneyville Square. Olneyville had the Dimerina in 1907, the Edisonia Theater in 1908 and 1909, the Pastime Theater from 1909 to 1915…”
He says nothing detailed about them, but since the city directories give both the Pastime and Edisonia the same address, 1911 Westminster Street, I am assuming they were the same theatre. “Edisonia” is clearly a place that shows movies, but “Pastime” is an easier name for people to remember and suggests other entertainments as well as movies. Perhaps the name was changed in 1909. This is pure conjecture, but it seems plausible. Further “excavation” may prove otherwise.
Re: Music Hall in Providence. Yes, I would like info. I know it burned down in 1905 and never showed movies, except as a novelty. For example, The Great Train Robbery was shown there.
The Music Hall was at 229 Main, according to a city directory I checked, and Roland is putting it up later today. I found a list of “coming movies” for the Music Hall in February, 1935. There was also a Globe Theatre at 175 Main, listed in 1914. They were sprouting like mushrooms.
In late June of 1976, when the theatre was called Ocean State Theatre, there was a first-run policy initiated with Murder by Death. It wasn’t until it became the Providence Performing Arts Center, however, that this magnificent theatre captured new success.
Appropriately enough, the E. M. Loew’s was showing the film Drive-In at the beginning of July, 1976. The second feature was The Lords of Flatbush.
The address for the Paris Cinema(s) was 291 Weybosset Street.
This theatre was located in a spot (and perhaps the same building) that is now part of the new posh Providence Hotel, whose entrance is on Mathewson Street. At the corner of Mathewson and Westminster is a pleasant little “boutique park” with benches. Behind it, in the hotel, is the fabulous Italian restaurant L'Epicureo. In the same general spot, in the 1980s, was the video porno-theatre, the VIP Luxury Cinema.
This video/porno theatre was located in a building that is now part of the new posh Providence Hotel, whose entrance is on Mathewson Street. At the corner of Mathewson and Westminster is a pleasant little “boutique park” with benches. Behind it, in the hotel, is the fabulous gourmet Italian restaurant, L'Epicureo. In the same general spot, in 1907, was the short-lived movie house, the Lyric Theatre.