An earlier Brighton Theatre was at 1810 Brighton (Road or Place), circa 1917. It must have been gone by 1928 this Brighton Theatre (also known as the New Brighton, probably in the beginning), opened Nov. 10, 1928, at 1739 Brighton Place. The capacity was listed as 700 and 750, both probably rounded off numbers, in different sources.
Before becoming a union meeting hall for Branch 84 of the National Association of Letter Carriers in 1982, it had been used for warehouse storage by the Frame Electric Company.
The theater was known at least briefly as the Braverman.
For decades after the Boulevard closed, the building was used by the Cedar of Lebanon Society, which may still be there. I have the theater’s address as 808 Brookline Boulevard. It probably occupied 808 and 810.
What a mess! I’m not sure I’d want Broadway to lose all of its honky-tonk quality, but that block cries out for some sort of gentrification, doesn’t it? Visually, that’s about as bad as it gets in terms of a neon/commercial nightmare. Behind it … within it … lurks a once-nice moviehouse.
I have many happy memories of catching oup on American and foreign classics on double bills, so often linked by star, director or theme, from 1967 through the 1980s. What an odd little theater with its upward slope and its audience of diehard movie buffs. There was something of an adventure about going there.
When a site is removed, what happens to the information and postings that were on it? Have they been threaded into this one or just erased? I’d hate to see the information just liquidated.
Thanks for all of the extra information, Warren. I didn’t know enough then to be impressed by the combined Dorsey bands, and I’m guessing Joey Bishop was no more to me than someone who turned up on Ed Sullivan occasionally. I even enjoy knowing what we had trailers of that day.
Bethel Cinemas opened Dec. 17, 1971, with “Evel Knievel” on one screen and a blockbuster combination of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “Patton” on the second screen.
The second week it has “T.R. Baskin” on one screen and “They Call Me Trinity” on the other.
Ed Jones, a great gentleman, brought back Mel Brooks' “The Twelve Chairs” in an exclusive engagement after Brooks had had great success with “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein.” “The Twelve Chairs” played for many weeks.
The theater also got several weeks out of a solo re-release of “A Boy and His Dog.”
The suburban Pittsburgh theater was on Paxton Drive just off Route 88/Library Road, about a block from the entrance of South Park.
The Belmar was the largest and apparently the nicest of the theaters in the Homewood-Belmar section of Pittsburgh.
It opened in 1915 as Belmar Photoplays and soon shortened its identity to the Belmar.
Seating was reported as being in the 580-600 range.
The theater played late-run double bills, the last of which was a United Artists combo of the then-recent “Midnight Cowboy” (1969) and “Hour of the Gun” (1967).
The Belmar closed in 1970 but remained in place for many years thereafter with the titles of the final fouble feature on the marquee. Eventually it was razed.
An oddity of the Barry is that for several years after the theater was razed, its marquee lingered there, hanging over the sidewalk on Penn Avenue heralding what the property had become: the Barry (surface) parking lot.
It was as if a mansion has been razed but that no one removed the roof from the former front porch – a neat remnant.
The land is occupied now by a theater of a different sort – the O'Reilly thrust-stage theater, Pittsburgh Public Theatre’s present home.
Leon, A small point, but you may be confusing two films by the title “See No Evil.” The that played at RCMH in 1971 was the GP-rated (now PG) thriller in which Mia Farrow played a blind girl terrorized by a killer. It wasn’t especially good, but it was an inoffensive variation on the Audrey Hepburn blind-lady thriller, “Wait Until Dark,” which had a successful 1967 run at RCMH.
A later, unrelated movie called “See No Evil” was a graphically violent R-rated exploitation film; it did not play the Music Hall.
You’re awfully defensive about the Quad, RCDTJ. Suspiciously defensive. Life’s too short. Not everyone’s going to love the place as you do. Let’s move on.
Originally called the (New) Kenyon Opera House, it opened Dec. 23, 1912. It already had become the Pitt Theatre by the time it played “Birth of a Nation,” though not necessarily as part of the silent blockbuster’s initial release.
Later it became the Penn Avenue Theatre and then the Miles.
I believe it might have become the Barry in 1935. Estimates of capacity during this period range from 900-1,000 seats. It closed on or about June 1, 1951.
The Barry played almost exclusively first-run double bills of minor, hour-long movies from distributors such as Republic. Sample bills: “Loaded Pistols” with “Leather Gloves”; “Baby Face Morgan” and “Bad Men of Tombstone”; “Hold That Baby” and “Brothers in the Saddle.” Holdovers were extremely rare.
Notable exceptions: The Marx Brothers' “Love Happy” got a 12-day run as a single feature. And most notably, about a year after “The Red Shoes” had concluded a roadshow (reserved seat) engagement elsewhere, it moved to the Barry for a six-week run that did business far beyond the norm here.
Vis a vis the women film critics for the New York Daily News: I once read that the name Kate Cameron was a nom de plume, just as Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren were.
Whatever her real name, Kate Cameron’s surname reportedly was an in-joke: Camera On.
The cinemas were all but hidden on the second floor of a building at 307 Fourth Avenue that was well off the beaten path of Downtown moviegoers.
I think it’s fair to say that the great majority of Pittsburgh area film patrons never did figure out where Bank Cinemas was located. The grosses always reflected the lack of traffic there.
The auditoriums were not quite shoe boxes, but though they were clean and nicely maintained, they were small (281 seats and 261) and lacked the grandness of the theaters that once drew people Downtown.
The opening attractions were a moveover of “Carrie,” which already had played at the larger nearby Warner, plus the French hit “Cousin, Cousine.”
The owners tried to put Bank Cinemas on the map by playing “Star Wars” on both screens in the summer of 1977. The move certainly helped attendance by forcing a lot of new patrons seek out the new theater, but the epic sci-fi film hardly played to maximum advantage on the smallish screens.
Manager Paul Fleming was exceptionally cordial, but the cinemas always had a sense of being temporary tenants, and finally Point Park College took over the site. One auditorium was maintained for that purpose, but apparently for lectures and meetings rather than as a cinema. The other auditorium was converted to another use.
In addition to its original identity as the Rankin, the theater was known as the Villager before it became the Galaxy.
If memory serves, the Villager suffered a fire in the 1960s.
By the time the Villager was repaired and ready to reopen, RKO Stanley Warner had constructed a plush 1,303 single-screen theater about four miles away called the Village. (That one is now Carmike 10, a wholly refurbished building with 10 stadium-seat auditoriums.) The new Village was in Bethel Park about 100 yards from South Hills Village, which is divided between Bethel Park and Upper St. Clair.
Correctly sensing that Bridgeville’s Villager Theatre needed a new name to avoid confusion, they picked Galaxy as its new identity.
I only saw a couple of movies there – one, I think, when it was the Villager and one at the Galaxy. One of the films was a late run of “Fantastic Voyage” when I first returned from the Army and was doing a lot of catching up.
What I remember is buying a ticket outside, as in the old days, then walking through the lobby door only to be sold my popcorn in the lobby by the same lady. She was on double duty at the concession stand and had only to wheel around and hop off her box-office stool to sell concessions at the stand directly behind rthe box office.
As I recall, the theater had peculiar acoustics. Something about the lack of carpeting and curtains created a bit of an echo. Does anyone else remember this?
The theater is in Bethel Park just yards from the border of Upper St. Clair in the South Hills suburbs near Pittsburgh.
(The nearby South Hills Village is part Bethel and part Upper St. Clair.)
The capacity of this theater was 1,303 when it opened in 1966 as the glorious, stylish one-screen Village.
When chopped up into five auditoriums and reopened in December 1982, the seats in some auditoriums were not re-aligned to conform to the installation/angles of the five new, smaller screens, and so patrons of Village 5 sat at slightly skewed angles in at least four of the five auditoriums.
The totally refurbished Carmike 10 (Spare us these dumb generic names!), which opened in July 1998, was a vast improvement on the five-screen version of the Village.
The original one-screen auditorium was for a few years the nicest second-run theater in Western Pennsylvania, I think.
A sign of the changing times occurred in 1970 when the first-run Chatham Cinema Downtown/Uptown did terrific business for 14 weeks with “Airport.” The picture was still doing major holdover business when Universal yanked it to give it to a few suburban theaters including the Village. When the Village outdrew the biggest of the 14 weeks at the Chatham, the writing was on the wall: Movies, even pictures that have been playing for 14 weeks Downtown, could do better in the posh new suburban houses. We all know how booking patterns shifted dramatically in the years that followed, sealing the fates of the Downtown first-run theaters and then closing them one by one.
Ironically, the rush to open more screens in the suburbs led to the chopping up of some of the nice houses, including the Village, that had made “Airport” so attractive there.
The theater is in Bethel Park. The nearby South Hills Village is part Bethel and part Upper St. Clair.
The capacity of this theater was 1,303 when it was the glorious, stylish one-screen Village.
When chopped up into five auditoriums, the seats in some auditoriums were not re-aligned to conform to the installation/angles of the five new, smaller screens, and so patrons of Village 5 sat at slightly skewed angles in at least four of the five auditoriums.
The original one-screen auditorium was for a few years the nicest second-run theater in Western Pennsylvania, I think.
A sign of the changing times occurred ominously in 1970 when the first-run Chatham Cinema Downtown/Uptown did terrific business for 14 weeks with “Airport.” The picture was still doing major holdover business when Universal yanked it to give it to a few suburban theaters including the Village. When the Village outdrew the biggest of the 14 weeks at the Chatham, the writing was on the wall: Movies, even pictures that have been playing for 14 weeks Downtown, could do better in the posh new suburban houses. We all know how booking patterns shifted dramatically in the years that followed, sealing the fates of the Downtown first-run theaters and then closing them one by one.
Ironically, the rush to open more screens in the suburbs led to the chopping up of some of the nice houses, including the Village, that had made “Airport” so attractive there.
A slight amendment to my first May 28, 2008, post:
Though the Victoria was the original name for this theater, it held that name before 1912. From 1912 to roughly 1920, it was called the Liberty for the street on which it sat. That gives the theater six distinct identities over three-quarters of a century.
I gave up on the Quad many years ago after two failed efforts to gain admission in one NYC visit. I had to squeeze as many films into each day as possible, and because the Quad was not near my hotel nor any of the other theaters on my long agenda, I had to go there when I could squeeze it in, subway round trip included.
The show times were/are tight enough that one would be able to see a film from middle to middle and sit through the interval without an inordinate waste of time.
I was trying to catch a documentary the Quad was playing that week and in both trips to the theater was detained in transit just enough to miss the start of the feature. I was denied entry because of house policy.
The second trip was on my last afternoon in NYC. Again, “You can’t go in; we have a policy,” etc.
I asked to see the manager and pleaded my case to her without discourtesy. She repeated, inflexibly, what the cashier already had told me.
I had been there many times before, always purchasing concessions as well as tickets.
The irony is that the theater was dead on both of these weekday afternoons. No question of that. Those in charge dug in their heels on a house policy that made little sense in the special circumstances of slow weekday afternoons, without another patron in sight and weak grosses reported later that week.
I never again patronized the theater on future visits.
For the record, I’m also surprised to find Lincoln Plaza lumped in with the Quad and the Angelika. The Lincoln Plaza lacks some amenities, too, but I’ve always found it to be a clear cut above the others and never encounted any difficulties in my dozens of visits there.
An earlier Brighton Theatre was at 1810 Brighton (Road or Place), circa 1917. It must have been gone by 1928 this Brighton Theatre (also known as the New Brighton, probably in the beginning), opened Nov. 10, 1928, at 1739 Brighton Place. The capacity was listed as 700 and 750, both probably rounded off numbers, in different sources.
Before becoming a union meeting hall for Branch 84 of the National Association of Letter Carriers in 1982, it had been used for warehouse storage by the Frame Electric Company.
The theater was known at least briefly as the Braverman.
For decades after the Boulevard closed, the building was used by the Cedar of Lebanon Society, which may still be there. I have the theater’s address as 808 Brookline Boulevard. It probably occupied 808 and 810.
What a mess! I’m not sure I’d want Broadway to lose all of its honky-tonk quality, but that block cries out for some sort of gentrification, doesn’t it? Visually, that’s about as bad as it gets in terms of a neon/commercial nightmare. Behind it … within it … lurks a once-nice moviehouse.
I have many happy memories of catching oup on American and foreign classics on double bills, so often linked by star, director or theme, from 1967 through the 1980s. What an odd little theater with its upward slope and its audience of diehard movie buffs. There was something of an adventure about going there.
Anyone know where Lincoln Square 13 ranks now in terms of total annual revenue and/or the highest revenue per screen average?
When a site is removed, what happens to the information and postings that were on it? Have they been threaded into this one or just erased? I’d hate to see the information just liquidated.
Thanks for all of the extra information, Warren. I didn’t know enough then to be impressed by the combined Dorsey bands, and I’m guessing Joey Bishop was no more to me than someone who turned up on Ed Sullivan occasionally. I even enjoy knowing what we had trailers of that day.
What a massive collection you must have – and no doubt superbly catalogued so everything’s at your fingertips. Thanks for sharing with all of us.
No doubt the organ was used to accompany silent films. Any idea if it survived into the Victor’s sound era.
Lost Memory, Are you located in Pittsburgh? You have some great shots of local theaters.
Toward the end, the Bellevue was a bargain house run by Richard Stern as part of his CineMagic theater circuit.
Bethel Cinemas opened Dec. 17, 1971, with “Evel Knievel” on one screen and a blockbuster combination of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “Patton” on the second screen.
The second week it has “T.R. Baskin” on one screen and “They Call Me Trinity” on the other.
Ed Jones, a great gentleman, brought back Mel Brooks' “The Twelve Chairs” in an exclusive engagement after Brooks had had great success with “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein.” “The Twelve Chairs” played for many weeks.
The theater also got several weeks out of a solo re-release of “A Boy and His Dog.”
The suburban Pittsburgh theater was on Paxton Drive just off Route 88/Library Road, about a block from the entrance of South Park.
The Belmar was the largest and apparently the nicest of the theaters in the Homewood-Belmar section of Pittsburgh.
It opened in 1915 as Belmar Photoplays and soon shortened its identity to the Belmar.
Seating was reported as being in the 580-600 range.
The theater played late-run double bills, the last of which was a United Artists combo of the then-recent “Midnight Cowboy” (1969) and “Hour of the Gun” (1967).
The Belmar closed in 1970 but remained in place for many years thereafter with the titles of the final fouble feature on the marquee. Eventually it was razed.
An oddity of the Barry is that for several years after the theater was razed, its marquee lingered there, hanging over the sidewalk on Penn Avenue heralding what the property had become: the Barry (surface) parking lot.
It was as if a mansion has been razed but that no one removed the roof from the former front porch – a neat remnant.
The land is occupied now by a theater of a different sort – the O'Reilly thrust-stage theater, Pittsburgh Public Theatre’s present home.
Leon, A small point, but you may be confusing two films by the title “See No Evil.” The that played at RCMH in 1971 was the GP-rated (now PG) thriller in which Mia Farrow played a blind girl terrorized by a killer. It wasn’t especially good, but it was an inoffensive variation on the Audrey Hepburn blind-lady thriller, “Wait Until Dark,” which had a successful 1967 run at RCMH.
A later, unrelated movie called “See No Evil” was a graphically violent R-rated exploitation film; it did not play the Music Hall.
You’re awfully defensive about the Quad, RCDTJ. Suspiciously defensive. Life’s too short. Not everyone’s going to love the place as you do. Let’s move on.
Originally called the (New) Kenyon Opera House, it opened Dec. 23, 1912. It already had become the Pitt Theatre by the time it played “Birth of a Nation,” though not necessarily as part of the silent blockbuster’s initial release.
Later it became the Penn Avenue Theatre and then the Miles.
I believe it might have become the Barry in 1935. Estimates of capacity during this period range from 900-1,000 seats. It closed on or about June 1, 1951.
The Barry played almost exclusively first-run double bills of minor, hour-long movies from distributors such as Republic. Sample bills: “Loaded Pistols” with “Leather Gloves”; “Baby Face Morgan” and “Bad Men of Tombstone”; “Hold That Baby” and “Brothers in the Saddle.” Holdovers were extremely rare.
Notable exceptions: The Marx Brothers' “Love Happy” got a 12-day run as a single feature. And most notably, about a year after “The Red Shoes” had concluded a roadshow (reserved seat) engagement elsewhere, it moved to the Barry for a six-week run that did business far beyond the norm here.
Vis a vis the women film critics for the New York Daily News: I once read that the name Kate Cameron was a nom de plume, just as Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren were.
Whatever her real name, Kate Cameron’s surname reportedly was an in-joke: Camera On.
The cinemas were all but hidden on the second floor of a building at 307 Fourth Avenue that was well off the beaten path of Downtown moviegoers.
I think it’s fair to say that the great majority of Pittsburgh area film patrons never did figure out where Bank Cinemas was located. The grosses always reflected the lack of traffic there.
The auditoriums were not quite shoe boxes, but though they were clean and nicely maintained, they were small (281 seats and 261) and lacked the grandness of the theaters that once drew people Downtown.
The opening attractions were a moveover of “Carrie,” which already had played at the larger nearby Warner, plus the French hit “Cousin, Cousine.”
The owners tried to put Bank Cinemas on the map by playing “Star Wars” on both screens in the summer of 1977. The move certainly helped attendance by forcing a lot of new patrons seek out the new theater, but the epic sci-fi film hardly played to maximum advantage on the smallish screens.
Manager Paul Fleming was exceptionally cordial, but the cinemas always had a sense of being temporary tenants, and finally Point Park College took over the site. One auditorium was maintained for that purpose, but apparently for lectures and meetings rather than as a cinema. The other auditorium was converted to another use.
Has anyone a date when the cinemas closed?
Great picture, Ken.
In addition to its original identity as the Rankin, the theater was known as the Villager before it became the Galaxy.
If memory serves, the Villager suffered a fire in the 1960s.
By the time the Villager was repaired and ready to reopen, RKO Stanley Warner had constructed a plush 1,303 single-screen theater about four miles away called the Village. (That one is now Carmike 10, a wholly refurbished building with 10 stadium-seat auditoriums.) The new Village was in Bethel Park about 100 yards from South Hills Village, which is divided between Bethel Park and Upper St. Clair.
Correctly sensing that Bridgeville’s Villager Theatre needed a new name to avoid confusion, they picked Galaxy as its new identity.
I only saw a couple of movies there – one, I think, when it was the Villager and one at the Galaxy. One of the films was a late run of “Fantastic Voyage” when I first returned from the Army and was doing a lot of catching up.
What I remember is buying a ticket outside, as in the old days, then walking through the lobby door only to be sold my popcorn in the lobby by the same lady. She was on double duty at the concession stand and had only to wheel around and hop off her box-office stool to sell concessions at the stand directly behind rthe box office.
As I recall, the theater had peculiar acoustics. Something about the lack of carpeting and curtains created a bit of an echo. Does anyone else remember this?
The theater is in Bethel Park just yards from the border of Upper St. Clair in the South Hills suburbs near Pittsburgh.
(The nearby South Hills Village is part Bethel and part Upper St. Clair.)
The capacity of this theater was 1,303 when it opened in 1966 as the glorious, stylish one-screen Village.
When chopped up into five auditoriums and reopened in December 1982, the seats in some auditoriums were not re-aligned to conform to the installation/angles of the five new, smaller screens, and so patrons of Village 5 sat at slightly skewed angles in at least four of the five auditoriums.
The totally refurbished Carmike 10 (Spare us these dumb generic names!), which opened in July 1998, was a vast improvement on the five-screen version of the Village.
The original one-screen auditorium was for a few years the nicest second-run theater in Western Pennsylvania, I think.
A sign of the changing times occurred in 1970 when the first-run Chatham Cinema Downtown/Uptown did terrific business for 14 weeks with “Airport.” The picture was still doing major holdover business when Universal yanked it to give it to a few suburban theaters including the Village. When the Village outdrew the biggest of the 14 weeks at the Chatham, the writing was on the wall: Movies, even pictures that have been playing for 14 weeks Downtown, could do better in the posh new suburban houses. We all know how booking patterns shifted dramatically in the years that followed, sealing the fates of the Downtown first-run theaters and then closing them one by one.
Ironically, the rush to open more screens in the suburbs led to the chopping up of some of the nice houses, including the Village, that had made “Airport” so attractive there.
The theater is in Bethel Park. The nearby South Hills Village is part Bethel and part Upper St. Clair.
The capacity of this theater was 1,303 when it was the glorious, stylish one-screen Village.
When chopped up into five auditoriums, the seats in some auditoriums were not re-aligned to conform to the installation/angles of the five new, smaller screens, and so patrons of Village 5 sat at slightly skewed angles in at least four of the five auditoriums.
The original one-screen auditorium was for a few years the nicest second-run theater in Western Pennsylvania, I think.
A sign of the changing times occurred ominously in 1970 when the first-run Chatham Cinema Downtown/Uptown did terrific business for 14 weeks with “Airport.” The picture was still doing major holdover business when Universal yanked it to give it to a few suburban theaters including the Village. When the Village outdrew the biggest of the 14 weeks at the Chatham, the writing was on the wall: Movies, even pictures that have been playing for 14 weeks Downtown, could do better in the posh new suburban houses. We all know how booking patterns shifted dramatically in the years that followed, sealing the fates of the Downtown first-run theaters and then closing them one by one.
Ironically, the rush to open more screens in the suburbs led to the chopping up of some of the nice houses, including the Village, that had made “Airport” so attractive there.
A slight amendment to my first May 28, 2008, post:
Though the Victoria was the original name for this theater, it held that name before 1912. From 1912 to roughly 1920, it was called the Liberty for the street on which it sat. That gives the theater six distinct identities over three-quarters of a century.
Even the best-intentioned policies can be wrong-headed when applied bureaucratically and unnecessarily. It’s called common sense.
I do defend the management’s right to apply its rules no matter the circumstances and mine to patronize other moviehouses instead.
I gave up on the Quad many years ago after two failed efforts to gain admission in one NYC visit. I had to squeeze as many films into each day as possible, and because the Quad was not near my hotel nor any of the other theaters on my long agenda, I had to go there when I could squeeze it in, subway round trip included.
The show times were/are tight enough that one would be able to see a film from middle to middle and sit through the interval without an inordinate waste of time.
I was trying to catch a documentary the Quad was playing that week and in both trips to the theater was detained in transit just enough to miss the start of the feature. I was denied entry because of house policy.
The second trip was on my last afternoon in NYC. Again, “You can’t go in; we have a policy,” etc.
I asked to see the manager and pleaded my case to her without discourtesy. She repeated, inflexibly, what the cashier already had told me.
I had been there many times before, always purchasing concessions as well as tickets.
The irony is that the theater was dead on both of these weekday afternoons. No question of that. Those in charge dug in their heels on a house policy that made little sense in the special circumstances of slow weekday afternoons, without another patron in sight and weak grosses reported later that week.
I never again patronized the theater on future visits.
For the record, I’m also surprised to find Lincoln Plaza lumped in with the Quad and the Angelika. The Lincoln Plaza lacks some amenities, too, but I’ve always found it to be a clear cut above the others and never encounted any difficulties in my dozens of visits there.