A number of Maud Humphrey’s illustrations can be seen on this web page. She illustrated a number of children’s books as well as drawing advertisements. Mellin’s Baby Food was among her clients.
A letter from A. C. Russell of the New Iris Theatre, Velva, North Dakota, was published in the October 13, 1923, issue of Exhibitors Herald. Velva’s movie house was called simply the Iris Theatre when a letter from its earlier operator, L. K. Sivertson, was published in Motography of January 13, 1917. That letter was dated December 26, 1916.
The April 1, 1954, issue of Motion Picture Daily said that the Lake Theatre in Powers Lake, North Dakota, had recently been equipped for CinemaScope movies.
The diagram in the article says the new seats are 60 inches wide. Sixty inches is five feet! They look to be a couple of feet taller than they are wide, too- I’d say about seven feet from floor to top of seat back. Gerry Lopez must be a giant. In the photo he looks to be almost as wide as the back of the seat he’s in, and his head extends above the top of it. So if the CEO of AMC is ten feet tall and weighs about seven or eight hundred pounds, it’s no wonder they think they need to re-seat their theaters. Maybe they should just hire a smaller CEO and save their money.
LOL Wall Street Journal. When did their graphics department get so innumerate? It should be obvious to anyone with a sense of proportion that the rows are five feet deep, not the seats five feet wide.
The Vernon Theatre was originally a project of the Dusenbury brothers. This item is from the February 7, 1914, issue of Motography:
“J. W. Dusenbury has taken out a building permit for the
erection of a moving picture theater on Mount Vernon avenue, near Twentieth street, Columbus, to cost $30,000.”
A follow-up item appeared in the May 2 issue of the same publication:
“The new picture theater built by the Messrs. Dusenbury in
Mt. Vernon avenue, Columbus, is now nearing completion and will be opened to the public shortly. It will be called the Vernon. Its capacity is 1,000.”
An early report on the project appeared in the September 13, 1913, issue of The American Contractor:
“Moving Picture Theater: 2 sty. & bas. $15,000. Mt. Vernon av., nr. 20th st. Archts. Dawson & Holbrook, Outlook bldg. Owner J. W. Dusenbury, care Southern Theater. Architects are receiving figures on foundation. Brick, terra cotta, tile lobby, composition roof, galv. iron cornice, pine finish & floors, struct. & archt. iron.”
Dawson & Holbrook also designed the downtown Columbus house that was long known as the Knickerbocker Theatre, and might have planned the conversion of the old Grand Opera House on State Street into a movie theater around 1914.
This house was built in 1914 and opened as the Empress Theatre. This PDF with data from the Library of Congress Historic American Buildings survey was prepared shortly before the front of the building was demolished in 1980. The document notes Horace L. Chapman as the owner of the building prior to 1919, but says that it was built in 1915-1916.
It also says that the architect is unknown, but the Internet provides evidence that the theater was designed by the firm of Dawson & Holbrook. Here is an item from the April 11, 1914, issue of The American Contractor:
Columbus, O.—Theater. Store & Flat Bldg. (seating 1,300): 3 sty. & bas., providing for 8 sty. later. 80x187. $80,000. High & Cherry Sts. Archts. Dawson & Holbrook, Outlook bldg. Owner Horace L. Chapman, Wyandotte bldg. General contract to J. W. Heckert, Ruggery bldg. Excavating. Architect desires bids at once on plastering.“
Currently, Amazon has on sale a 1915 print ad from the O. W. Ketcham Terra Cotta Works, and the ad features a photo of this house, captioned "Empress Theatre Building, Columbus, O. Dawson & Holbrook, Architects.” Here is a link (though it is probably temporary.) Amazon doesn’t say what magazine the ad was published in, but it might turn up at the Internet Archive or Google Books eventually.
Architects Dawson & Holbrook designed at least one other built theater in Columbus, the Vernon, and in 1914 they were selected to design a new theater to be built on the site of the Grand Opera House on State Street, though it appears that he opera house was merely renovated around that time, and I haven’t been able to discover if the plans for that project were done by Dawson & Holbrook.
John Siebrand, operator of the New Grand Theatre, submitted capsule reviews to Exhibitors Herald in the early 1920s. This one was published in the December 31, 1921, issue:
“The Passion Flower, with Norma Talmadge. — Good picture, but does not please the Norma fans. — John W. Siebrand. New Grand theatre, Northwood, N. Dak. — Neighborhood patronage.”
He was more pleased with the public response to another movie which he reviewed in the January 21, 1922 issue:
“Lahoma, an Edgar Lewis production. — A real blue ribbon feature of the west in the making. Went over like a landslide. Pathe has a number of winners like this one. — John W. Siebrand. New Grand theatre. Northwood. N. Dak. — Neighborhood patronage.”
The Woodland Theatre building is located at 549 Park Street. LoopNet has a recent street view. At some point the theater entrance was moved from the center of the front, which has a pediment, to an adjacent storefront, but the old marquee was left in place.
The only vintage decorations left on the facade are a few medallions and a pair of thin, engaged Solomonic columns in a false portico on the second floor, but it looks like it might have been a very pretty little building at one time, perhaps of Spanish or Italian Renaissance style.
Here is a bit more in formation about the Shaw-Hayden Theatre, from the “Contracts Awarded” column of the August 9, 1919, issue of The American Contractor:
“M. P. Theater & 4 Stores & Lodge Room: $100,000. 3 sty. 110x114. Hayden av. nr. Shaw av., East Cleveland, O. Archt. W. S. Ferguson, 1900 Euclid bldg., Cleveland. Owner Shaw Hayden Amusement Co., J. F. Bruce, pres., 315 Ardenall av., East Cleveland. Gen. Contr. J. E. Chrustlan Co., 1307 St. Clair av., Cleveland. Mas. & carp, by gen. contr. Htg. let to Martin Elec. Co., Illuminating bldg., Cleveland. 1st sty. mas.”
Architect William Stanley Ferguson designed at least three other theaters in the Cleveland area.
There was also a Colonial Theatre, which was later (or earlier- I haven’t been able to discover the correct order) called the White Way Theatre, located at 106 E. Broad Street. It’s mentioned in the PDF I linked to in my first comment.
As for the theaters on Wilson Avenue, it’s possible that there were two (at 112 and at 114-116) or maybe there was only one theater with three different names and its address got shifted over the years. The PDF makes it clear that the parking lot south of Robert’s Jewelers is where the Dunn Theatre was located.
The recent opening of Louis R. Lurie and Howard J. Sheehan’s Rialto Theatre in Eureka was noted in the July 12, 1918, issue of Variety. Lurie and Sheehan also owned the Rialto Theatre in San Francisco.
The American Theatre was completed on April 6, 1912, after 85 days of construction. The house was the subject of a brief article in the October 5, 1912, issue of The Moving Picture World. The structure was framed in concrete and steel, with brick curtain walls. The stage, with a fifty-foot fly loft, was large enough to accommodate legitimate productions as well as vaudeville. Half the seating capacity was in the balcony, which featured the same luxurious appointments as the main floor. The house boasted an $8,000 pipe organ to provide musical accompaniment to the silent movies.
According to this web page, the Liberty Theatre was installed in the Mantle Block, an office and retail building at 14-20 W. Main Street built in 1892. The Mantle Block was designed by architect H. M. Patterson, who later moved to Los Angeles and designed the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood.
The Mantle Block is still standing, occupied by part of the Piccadilly Museum of Transportation Memorabilia and Advertising Art. It’s an interesting Romanesque Revival building with a few Gothic touches. As the theater opened in 1916, more than a decade after Patterson moved to Los Angeles, it’s unlikely that he had anything to do with the alterations for the theater. The entire building is still standing, even though the theater was dismantled long ago.
Exactly when the house was dismantled I don’t know, but it was presenting movies and vaudeville at least as late as 1933, and in 1935 it was hosting weekly wrestling matches, according to various items in the Butte Standard.
First Citizens Bank is on the odd-numbered side of the street. The Dunn Theatre had to have been on the lot just south of where Robert’s Jewelers is in the current Street View. Robert’s is at 112 S. Wilson.
This PDF describes historic buildings in Dunn’s downtown, and it says that the Dunn Theatre was adjacent to the north of the Wellons Mercantile Building, which is at 120-124 S. Wilson Avenue. The theater was where the parking lot is now. The theater’s address was probably 116-118 S. Wilson.
Capsule movie reviews by O. Troyer of the Lyric Theatre, Rugby, N.D., were published in issues of Exhibitors Herald from 1920 through 1924.
The following item appeared in the May 8, 1926, issue of Motion Picture News:
“Rugby, N. D., will have a new theatre in August. J. A. Troyer, of the Lyric Theatre there, and his brother, O. O. Troyer, who has a theatre at Dickinson, are building the house.”
I don’t know if the new theater got built or not. It’s possible that it was just a new home for the Lyric.
Someone was advertising in the classified section of The Moving Picture World in late 1913, seeking to buy a movie theater in a small town west of Chicago. The address the advertiser gave for responses was Grand Theater, Oakes, N.D.. The building in the photo does look old enough to have been around in 1913, so it might have been this same house.
The Trail Theatre would not have opened until sometime the 1950s, as construction on New Town itself wasn’t begun until early that decade. New Town was built to replace three small towns that were inundated by Lake Sakakawea, the reservoir behind Garrison Dam. It’s possible that there was an earlier Trail Theatre in Van Hook, Legion Park, or Sanish, the towns drowned by the lake, and that its signage was moved to New Town.
This page at CinemaTour Forums has a photo of the back of the Trail Theatre, which shows that it was a bit unconventional for a quonset hut. Most quonsets have a semi-circular roof, but the Trail’s roof has a slight peak to it, like a Gothic arch. Perhaps this form made it easier for the roof to withstand North Dakota’s heavy snowfalls?
NRHP nomination forms do sometimes have mistakes, but the Film Daily Yearbooks have more. This particular NRHP form, prepared by a planning firm in Fargo, cites Traill County assessment and real estate records as well as items published in the local newspapers as early as 1927 as sources, so it looks to be reliable.
The editors of the Yearbooks were not very good at updating their records, unfortunately. The theater in the neighborhood I grew up in was listed in the Yearbook as late as 1963, even though it had been converted into a church at least five years earlier. I’ve also found some cases where a theater didn’t get listed in the Yearbook until some years after it had opened.
The “Circuits” section of the Yearbooks is even more unreliable than the theater listings. I have come across theaters listed under circuits which had vanished from the main theater listings decades earlier.
Film Daily itself was probably more reliable overall than the Yearbooks, but even then you have to be wary of such things as seat counts, which were frequently wrong, and the magazine was loaded with misspellings and typos.
A document from the Grundy County Historical Society mentions that the Dixie Theatre was across the street from a Presbyterian church that once stood at the southeast corner of Laurel and Depot Streets.
There is a photo of the theater at the bottom of page 85 of Marion County in Vintage Postcards, by Billyfrank Morrison (Google Books preview.) Judging from the photo, the Dixie must have been on Laurel Street at the northeast corner of Depot Street. The caption says that the theater was built in 1926 and closed in 1960, and the building burned down in the late 1970s.
The Dixie Theatre at Tracy City, Tennessee, was mentioned in the September 7, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World, so if the house in the photo was built in 1926 there was an earlier Dixie Theatre in Tracy City.
Ron: 1837 in your comment must be a typo. The Internet Broadway Database says that The French Maid, by Edward E. Rice, opened at the Herald Square Theatre in September, 1897. The length of the run is unknown, but perhaps the date on your clock indicates the closing of the play, an event that was sometimes observed by a ceremony of some sort. It might also commemorate the 100th performance of the play. If it opened in September and had eight or nine performances a week (six evening and two or three matinees) then December 20 would be about right for the 100th performance.
The theater itself was opened in 1883 as the New Park Theatre and was remodeled and reopened as the Herald Square Theatre in 1894.
There is modern construction at 106 Third Avenue NW, so the Palace has been demolished. There is a glimpse of the Palace Theatre’s marquee in this photo from the 1920s. The house can be seen in the background again in this 1933 photo
The April 6, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World mentions Harry Hartman of the Palace Theatre, Mandan, North Dakota, as a recent visitor to Minneapolis. The May 4 issue of the same publication has this item:
“Harry L. Hartman, of the Palace theater, at Mandan, N. D., has boosted the Third Liberty Loan in his city with a specially constructed U-Boat on wheels, operated by a man, pedaling within. The U-Boat made a decided hit in the Loan drive at Mandan and brought some patrons to the Palace as well.”
Those are the earliest mentions by name of the Palace that I’ve found, but it’s likely that the Palace Theatre was the house Hartman was planning to build in the summer of 1916, according to the November 6, 1915, issue of MPW:
“H. L. Hartman, manager of the Grand theater at Mandan, N. D., has purchased the interest of Rex Sanderson in the Grand and Rex theaters and now is sole owner of both houses. Plans for erecting a new theater now will be held in abeyance until next summer.”
The October 7, 1916, issue of MPW indicated that the new theater project was nearing completion:
“Mandan. N. D. — H. L. Hartman has announced that the new Hartman theater here will be ready for the opening about October 15. This theater is said to be one of the finest not only in the Dakotas but in the entire northwest.”
There must have been some delay, judging from this item from the October 21 issue of the journal:
“Mandan. N. D. — The Grand theater has been closed. Shows will be given at the Rex until the new Mandan theater is opened.”
I haven’t yet found the exact opening date of the Palace Theatre, but it was probably open before the end of 1916.
A number of Maud Humphrey’s illustrations can be seen on this web page. She illustrated a number of children’s books as well as drawing advertisements. Mellin’s Baby Food was among her clients.
A letter from A. C. Russell of the New Iris Theatre, Velva, North Dakota, was published in the October 13, 1923, issue of Exhibitors Herald. Velva’s movie house was called simply the Iris Theatre when a letter from its earlier operator, L. K. Sivertson, was published in Motography of January 13, 1917. That letter was dated December 26, 1916.
The April 1, 1954, issue of Motion Picture Daily said that the Lake Theatre in Powers Lake, North Dakota, had recently been equipped for CinemaScope movies.
The diagram in the article says the new seats are 60 inches wide. Sixty inches is five feet! They look to be a couple of feet taller than they are wide, too- I’d say about seven feet from floor to top of seat back. Gerry Lopez must be a giant. In the photo he looks to be almost as wide as the back of the seat he’s in, and his head extends above the top of it. So if the CEO of AMC is ten feet tall and weighs about seven or eight hundred pounds, it’s no wonder they think they need to re-seat their theaters. Maybe they should just hire a smaller CEO and save their money.
LOL Wall Street Journal. When did their graphics department get so innumerate? It should be obvious to anyone with a sense of proportion that the rows are five feet deep, not the seats five feet wide.
The Vernon Theatre was originally a project of the Dusenbury brothers. This item is from the February 7, 1914, issue of Motography:
A follow-up item appeared in the May 2 issue of the same publication:An early report on the project appeared in the September 13, 1913, issue of The American Contractor:Dawson & Holbrook also designed the downtown Columbus house that was long known as the Knickerbocker Theatre, and might have planned the conversion of the old Grand Opera House on State Street into a movie theater around 1914.This house was built in 1914 and opened as the Empress Theatre. This PDF with data from the Library of Congress Historic American Buildings survey was prepared shortly before the front of the building was demolished in 1980. The document notes Horace L. Chapman as the owner of the building prior to 1919, but says that it was built in 1915-1916.
It also says that the architect is unknown, but the Internet provides evidence that the theater was designed by the firm of Dawson & Holbrook. Here is an item from the April 11, 1914, issue of The American Contractor:
Currently, Amazon has on sale a 1915 print ad from the O. W. Ketcham Terra Cotta Works, and the ad features a photo of this house, captioned "Empress Theatre Building, Columbus, O. Dawson & Holbrook, Architects.” Here is a link (though it is probably temporary.) Amazon doesn’t say what magazine the ad was published in, but it might turn up at the Internet Archive or Google Books eventually.Architects Dawson & Holbrook designed at least one other built theater in Columbus, the Vernon, and in 1914 they were selected to design a new theater to be built on the site of the Grand Opera House on State Street, though it appears that he opera house was merely renovated around that time, and I haven’t been able to discover if the plans for that project were done by Dawson & Holbrook.
John Siebrand, operator of the New Grand Theatre, submitted capsule reviews to Exhibitors Herald in the early 1920s. This one was published in the December 31, 1921, issue:
He was more pleased with the public response to another movie which he reviewed in the January 21, 1922 issue:The Woodland Theatre building is located at 549 Park Street. LoopNet has a recent street view. At some point the theater entrance was moved from the center of the front, which has a pediment, to an adjacent storefront, but the old marquee was left in place.
The only vintage decorations left on the facade are a few medallions and a pair of thin, engaged Solomonic columns in a false portico on the second floor, but it looks like it might have been a very pretty little building at one time, perhaps of Spanish or Italian Renaissance style.
Here is a bit more in formation about the Shaw-Hayden Theatre, from the “Contracts Awarded” column of the August 9, 1919, issue of The American Contractor:
Architect William Stanley Ferguson designed at least three other theaters in the Cleveland area.There was also a Colonial Theatre, which was later (or earlier- I haven’t been able to discover the correct order) called the White Way Theatre, located at 106 E. Broad Street. It’s mentioned in the PDF I linked to in my first comment.
As for the theaters on Wilson Avenue, it’s possible that there were two (at 112 and at 114-116) or maybe there was only one theater with three different names and its address got shifted over the years. The PDF makes it clear that the parking lot south of Robert’s Jewelers is where the Dunn Theatre was located.
The recent opening of Louis R. Lurie and Howard J. Sheehan’s Rialto Theatre in Eureka was noted in the July 12, 1918, issue of Variety. Lurie and Sheehan also owned the Rialto Theatre in San Francisco.
The American Theatre was completed on April 6, 1912, after 85 days of construction. The house was the subject of a brief article in the October 5, 1912, issue of The Moving Picture World. The structure was framed in concrete and steel, with brick curtain walls. The stage, with a fifty-foot fly loft, was large enough to accommodate legitimate productions as well as vaudeville. Half the seating capacity was in the balcony, which featured the same luxurious appointments as the main floor. The house boasted an $8,000 pipe organ to provide musical accompaniment to the silent movies.
According to this web page, the Liberty Theatre was installed in the Mantle Block, an office and retail building at 14-20 W. Main Street built in 1892. The Mantle Block was designed by architect H. M. Patterson, who later moved to Los Angeles and designed the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood.
The Mantle Block is still standing, occupied by part of the Piccadilly Museum of Transportation Memorabilia and Advertising Art. It’s an interesting Romanesque Revival building with a few Gothic touches. As the theater opened in 1916, more than a decade after Patterson moved to Los Angeles, it’s unlikely that he had anything to do with the alterations for the theater. The entire building is still standing, even though the theater was dismantled long ago.
Exactly when the house was dismantled I don’t know, but it was presenting movies and vaudeville at least as late as 1933, and in 1935 it was hosting weekly wrestling matches, according to various items in the Butte Standard.
First Citizens Bank is on the odd-numbered side of the street. The Dunn Theatre had to have been on the lot just south of where Robert’s Jewelers is in the current Street View. Robert’s is at 112 S. Wilson.
This PDF describes historic buildings in Dunn’s downtown, and it says that the Dunn Theatre was adjacent to the north of the Wellons Mercantile Building, which is at 120-124 S. Wilson Avenue. The theater was where the parking lot is now. The theater’s address was probably 116-118 S. Wilson.
Capsule movie reviews by O. Troyer of the Lyric Theatre, Rugby, N.D., were published in issues of Exhibitors Herald from 1920 through 1924.
The following item appeared in the May 8, 1926, issue of Motion Picture News:
I don’t know if the new theater got built or not. It’s possible that it was just a new home for the Lyric.Someone was advertising in the classified section of The Moving Picture World in late 1913, seeking to buy a movie theater in a small town west of Chicago. The address the advertiser gave for responses was Grand Theater, Oakes, N.D.. The building in the photo does look old enough to have been around in 1913, so it might have been this same house.
The Trail Theatre would not have opened until sometime the 1950s, as construction on New Town itself wasn’t begun until early that decade. New Town was built to replace three small towns that were inundated by Lake Sakakawea, the reservoir behind Garrison Dam. It’s possible that there was an earlier Trail Theatre in Van Hook, Legion Park, or Sanish, the towns drowned by the lake, and that its signage was moved to New Town.
This page at CinemaTour Forums has a photo of the back of the Trail Theatre, which shows that it was a bit unconventional for a quonset hut. Most quonsets have a semi-circular roof, but the Trail’s roof has a slight peak to it, like a Gothic arch. Perhaps this form made it easier for the roof to withstand North Dakota’s heavy snowfalls?
Judging from Google Street View, the Alma Mater Theater operates in the auditorium of an old school.
NRHP nomination forms do sometimes have mistakes, but the Film Daily Yearbooks have more. This particular NRHP form, prepared by a planning firm in Fargo, cites Traill County assessment and real estate records as well as items published in the local newspapers as early as 1927 as sources, so it looks to be reliable.
The editors of the Yearbooks were not very good at updating their records, unfortunately. The theater in the neighborhood I grew up in was listed in the Yearbook as late as 1963, even though it had been converted into a church at least five years earlier. I’ve also found some cases where a theater didn’t get listed in the Yearbook until some years after it had opened.
The “Circuits” section of the Yearbooks is even more unreliable than the theater listings. I have come across theaters listed under circuits which had vanished from the main theater listings decades earlier.
Film Daily itself was probably more reliable overall than the Yearbooks, but even then you have to be wary of such things as seat counts, which were frequently wrong, and the magazine was loaded with misspellings and typos.
A document from the Grundy County Historical Society mentions that the Dixie Theatre was across the street from a Presbyterian church that once stood at the southeast corner of Laurel and Depot Streets.
There is a photo of the theater at the bottom of page 85 of Marion County in Vintage Postcards, by Billyfrank Morrison (Google Books preview.) Judging from the photo, the Dixie must have been on Laurel Street at the northeast corner of Depot Street. The caption says that the theater was built in 1926 and closed in 1960, and the building burned down in the late 1970s.
The Dixie Theatre at Tracy City, Tennessee, was mentioned in the September 7, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World, so if the house in the photo was built in 1926 there was an earlier Dixie Theatre in Tracy City.
Ron: 1837 in your comment must be a typo. The Internet Broadway Database says that The French Maid, by Edward E. Rice, opened at the Herald Square Theatre in September, 1897. The length of the run is unknown, but perhaps the date on your clock indicates the closing of the play, an event that was sometimes observed by a ceremony of some sort. It might also commemorate the 100th performance of the play. If it opened in September and had eight or nine performances a week (six evening and two or three matinees) then December 20 would be about right for the 100th performance.
The theater itself was opened in 1883 as the New Park Theatre and was remodeled and reopened as the Herald Square Theatre in 1894.
“Frank Gilbreath is now manager of the Topic Theater at Mandan, N. D., succeeding Wuerst & Foster,” said The Moving Picture World in July, 1914.
There is modern construction at 106 Third Avenue NW, so the Palace has been demolished. There is a glimpse of the Palace Theatre’s marquee in this photo from the 1920s. The house can be seen in the background again in this 1933 photo
The April 6, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World mentions Harry Hartman of the Palace Theatre, Mandan, North Dakota, as a recent visitor to Minneapolis. The May 4 issue of the same publication has this item:
Those are the earliest mentions by name of the Palace that I’ve found, but it’s likely that the Palace Theatre was the house Hartman was planning to build in the summer of 1916, according to the November 6, 1915, issue of MPW:The October 7, 1916, issue of MPW indicated that the new theater project was nearing completion:There must have been some delay, judging from this item from the October 21 issue of the journal:I haven’t yet found the exact opening date of the Palace Theatre, but it was probably open before the end of 1916.