The groundbreaking for the Columbus Theatre was reported in the May 27, 1926, issue of The Lincoln Star. Local investors in Columbus were building the house, which had been leased to the World Realty Co., theater operators of Omaha.
An April 19, 2008, post in the Caruthersville forum at Topix said that the Gem Theatre had been torn down a couple of months earlier.
The Saturday, January 17, 1942, issue of the Blytheville, Arkansas Courier-News said that the Rodgers theater circuit had opened the Gem Theatre in Caruthersville the previous Thursday. It wasn’t clear from the item if the Gem was then new or if it had just been taken over and reopened by Rodgers. The item also said that the opening of the Gem gave Caruthersville four operating theaters, but it only mentioned the Rodgers Theatre and the Stadium Theatre.
The January 2, 1942, issue of The Film Daily also had an item about the Gem:
“A new theater is being erected in Caruthersville, Mo., to be operated by I. W. Rodgers & Co. It will be christened the Gem Theater.”
1942 is the first year the Gem appears in the Film Daily Yearbook. It was also the first year for the Stadium Theatre and for a 286-seat house called the Cozy Theatre, which was listed as closed. The Cozy must have been the fourth theater mentioned in the newspaper item.
The Paris Theatre is still open and has converted to digital projection. I can’t find an official web site, but there is a Facebook page.
There’s probably little, if anything, remaining of the old Lincoln Theatre. An article about the remodeling of Kerasotes' Broadway Theatre at Cape Girardeau in the October 19, 1970, issue of Boxoffice said that Kerasotes Theatres had also completely rebuilt the Lincoln Theatre in Paris, Illinois before reopening it as the Paris Theatre the previous May.
I suspect that the theater name should be spelled Rodgers rather than Rogers. This history on the web site of the Rodgers Theatre in Poplar Bluff mentions that I. W. Rodgers operated a theater in Caruthersville. It was probably this house.
The Liberty Theatre in Caruthersville was mentioned in the May 20, 1915, edition of the Hayti, Missouri Herald. The paper also mentioned a Dixie Theatre in Caruthersville.
The March 4, 1922, edition of The Southeast Missourian newspaper of Cape Girardeau had an ad marking the 10th anniversary of Paramount Pictures with listings of movies scheduled to appear that month at twelve theaters in the region, and the Liberty Theatre at Caruthersville was among them.
It’s quite possible that the Perry Street Theatre never became the Cox Theatre. In fact I have no idea why I made the assumption in that comment (though as I was on the Internet at 6:07 pm there’s a good chance my dinner was late and my blood sugar had crashed, taking my higher brain functions with it.)
There is an old postcard that shows up now and then at auction websites depicting a “Cox-Pier-Theatre” on the Cape May Boardwalk (it might have been the postcard in teecee’s long-dead link), but I don’t know if that house was called the Cox Theatre, the Pier Theatre, the Cox Pier Theatre, or something else altogether (it might even have been the Palace Theatre, a house opened by J. P. Cox in 1916.) Houses called Cox’s Old Pier, Cox’s New Pier, and Cox’s Palace were all mentioned in the 1924 FDY. There’s not much information about Cape May’s old theaters on the Internet, so it might be quite a while before anybody comes along to fill in the gaps.
Anyway, my apologies for assuming that Mr. Cox had only one theater. It was pretty stupid of me.
Alan, the “Firm” field on this page says that the Beverly Theatre was designed by William Riseman Associates. Riseman himself might have been the lead architect, but it was a large and busy firm so most of their projects would have been team efforts, and various associates might have taken the lead on any number of projects.
The links to the Boxoffice articles in my earlier comment are dead, but the articles are still available online for the time being. The web site is no longer easily navigable internally, so here are direct links to each page of the first 1942 article:
An article about the reopening of the Arlington Theatre in the August 1, 1963, issue of the Arlington Heights Herald credited the architectural firm of Smith & Neubek with the plans for the remodeling. The same firm did the plans for the remodeling of the Coral Theatre in Oak Lawn for the same exhibitor.
There’s a very good chance that whoever designed the Sandon Theatre was one of the young architects who had worked for a time in Wright’s office. Wright and his own mentor, Louis Sullivan, were the chief progenitors of the Prairie style.
A few genealogy web sites have pages with references to the four Sandon brothers (Harry, Sam, Bill, and Cash) who opened this theater in 1916. One page says that prior to opening the Sandon Theatre they operated a house called the Wonderland Theatre, also in Mankato, which they purchased in 1913. The Sandon brothers had been itinerant musicians, and after going into the exhibition business frequently played in their own theaters. They later operated theaters in Jackson, Blue Earth, and Elmore.
The March 18, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had this item about the opening of the Sandon:
“Mankato, Minn.—A modern moving picture theater has been opened by Sandon Brothers on Walnut street. It has seating capacity of 850 and cost $40,000.”
I’d love to know who the architect of the Sandon Theatre was. The Prairie style was rarely used for theaters, though its geometric elements had some influence on the zig-zag phase of the Art Deco style. In fact, two Prairie school architects, the husband and wife team of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, emigrated to Australia in 1914, and a few years later they designed there one of the iconic theaters of the Art Deco period, the Melbourne Capitol Theatre.
This Cozy doesn’t appear to have been part of a chain. An item about G. A. Peterson appeared in the July 1, 1927, issue of Motion Picture News that suggests he only operated in Hollis:
“The Peterson Freezem Cooling System, an Oklahoma product, will open a factory in Oklahoma City, it was announced this week. G. A. Peterson, an exhibitor of Hollis, Okla., is president of the concern.”
Cozy appears to have been a fairly popular name for theaters at one time, but I don’t know of any chain of them. There was an independently operated Cozy Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles at least as late as the 1960s. It was a tiny grind house on Broadway. I never went to it, but it had one of my favorite downtown marquees.
If the Lyric was on Main Street and the Time on Front Street then the Lyric was certainly a different theater and should have its own page.
The Time might be older than we thought, though. The “Theater Changes” column of the September 26, 1935, issue of The Film Daily listed a “Times” Theatre at Mankato as a house recently closed. It’s possible that “Times” was a typo for Time, and if so then the house might have first opened under that name in 1935, or even earlier.
For some reason Google Maps is fetching for us a location in the village of St. Clair, several miles from Mankato.
The opening of the Urban Theatre was noted in the November 4, 1936, issue of Motion Picture News:
“Open at North Mankato
“North Mankato, Minn., Nov. 3. — The Urban, 800-seat house built by H. E. Gilbert, Minneapolis contractor, and leased to Phil Gillman of St. Paul, was given a civic opening, participated in by the Chamber of Commerce, Mankato’s junior chamber and the Mayor.
“A parade was led by the high school band and included floats. Speeches were made from a platform in front of the house and the Mayor snipped a ribbon to signalize the opening.”
By 1937, the Urban had different operators, who entered a partnership with the regional Paramount-Publix subsidiary, the Minnesota Amusement Company. This item is from the July 9, 1937, issue of The Film Daily:
“Sheldon Grenge and his associates, Nick and Don Grenge, have entered into an agreement through which the Urban Theater, North Mankato, will be operated in conjunction with the Minnesota Amusement Co. theaters in Mankato. Don Grenge will continue as manager of the Urban.”
There were inconsistent reports of the Urban’s seating capacity. The Urban was clearly the unnamed house in this item from the September 5, 1936, issue of The Film Daily:
“H. C. Gilbert will open his new $50,000 theater at North Mankato, Minn., about Oct. 1. House seats 650.”
The October 5, 1936, issue of Motion Picture News had this item:
“The new 800-seat Urban at North Mankato. Minn., has been leased by Harry E. Gilbert to Phil Gillman.”
The inconsistent reports of the seating capacity were typical of the trade journals, including The Film Daily and its Yearbook, which too often gave inaccurate seat counts.
An article titled “Standard Theatres Built Under Cooperative System” by architect G. E. Eichenlaub, published in the October 13, 1923, issue of Exhibitors Herald features two photos of the Geitner Theatre (article begins at this link and continues here.) The Geitner was one of the houses built from one of Eichenlaub’s standard plans for small-town theaters.
S. G. Harsh, operator of the 249-seat Princess Theatre in Mapleton, Iowa, wrote numerous brief movie reviews that were published in Exhibitors Herald in the last quarter of 1823. He also had two reviews in the May 30, 1925, issue of The Moving Picture World. I’m not sure that it was the same theater that operated in the American Legion Hall, though. Theater owners sometimes moved from one building to another, taking the name with them.
Mapleton had an opera house to which I’ve found references from 1909 and 1929. There is also an item datelined Mapleton, IA., in The Moving Picture World of January 2, 1915, which says: “John Robinson is planning to make extensive alterations to his one-story moving picture theater to cost about $2,000.” It seems likely that these were two different theater buildings. Either (or both, or neither) might have become the Princess, Orpheum, and/or Maple.
I see the theater’s mini-marquee under the vertical “HOTEL” sign, but which door is the entrance to the theater? It’s very confusing, especially since there’s no box office nor any poster cases in sight.
Also, I notice that they use the -er spelling of the T word on the marquee.
The recent photo Life’s Too Short referred to immediately follows the vintage photo in btreat’s photostream. Also, I ought to have noted in my comment that my first link is the same vintage photo Life’s Too Short linked to.
The January 2, 1892, issue of The New York Clipper carried an announcement saying that the Pythian Opera House at Union City, Indiana, had opened on December 23 under the management of H. Cadwallader and F. H. Bowen.
The June 29, 1893, issue of the Monroeville, Indiana Breeze reported a major fire at Union City that had destroyed or damaged several buildings. The Pythian Opera House suffered a loss of $31,000.
The obituary of Charles Cadwallader in the February 24, 1944, issue of the Union City Times-Gazette included these lines:
“In the early 1890’s he rebuilt what is now the Grand Theater on Pearl street after it had been partially destroyed by fire. It had been called the Pythian Opera House, but he named it the Cadwallader Theater, which name it bore when the funeral services were held there for Governor Isaac P. Gray, another Union City resident, in February, 1895.”
A few lines about the opera house appeared in an article in the Winchester Journal of February 17, 1892. While the reporter was unstinting in his praise of the opera house, he could not forgo including a bit of snark about the newspapers in the rival city in which it was located:
“While at Union City between trains last Monday, a representative of this paper was shown through the new Pythian Opera House of that city, by the courtesy of Messrs J. F. Rubey and G. W. Patchell. We have no hesitancy in saying it is a gem, the finest building of the kind we have seen anywhere, and one that would be a credit to a city several times the size of Union City. Of course we had read descriptions of the building in the Union City papers; but they are so given to exaggerating everything in their town and abusing everything in Winchester, that neither ourselves or any body else believed what they said. However, this is the one time in their history that they told the truth—we don’t give them much credit for that, though, as the reality is so perfect that their vivid imaginations couldn’t create much more substantial or beautiful fixtures and furnishings. Seriously speaking, we don’t blame the citizens of the State Line town for being proud of the handsome structure. It is complete in every particular and tastefully furnished throughout. The stage is a very large one, capable of seating two hundred persons comfortably, while the auditorium and gallery will seat six or eight hundred more. The building is modern throughout, and contains besides a large and handsome banquet and dancing hall, a fine lodge room with all the necessary reception, property. and committee rooms, it is lighted with incandescent and arc electric lights, and must present a very fine appearance when lighted up. The Congressional Convention of this District will be held in this building, on the 21st of April, and we can assure all who may attend that they will be comfortably and elegantly provided for.”
The Miami Theatre was at 236 W. Pearl Street. It was mentioned in the January 7, 1928 issue of Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World, so must have been in operation by 1927. The Grand was a few doors east at (approximately) 224 W.Pearl.
Scott Higbee commenting at Water Winter Wonderland says that the Crown Theatre was at 14521 State Street. It now houses an auto body shop. The quonset is still visible in Google satellite view, but you can’t get a really good look at it with street view. The front is a conventional building. A tiny bit of the quonset shows behind it in this street view angle.
The groundbreaking for the Columbus Theatre was reported in the May 27, 1926, issue of The Lincoln Star. Local investors in Columbus were building the house, which had been leased to the World Realty Co., theater operators of Omaha.
An April 19, 2008, post in the Caruthersville forum at Topix said that the Gem Theatre had been torn down a couple of months earlier.
The Saturday, January 17, 1942, issue of the Blytheville, Arkansas Courier-News said that the Rodgers theater circuit had opened the Gem Theatre in Caruthersville the previous Thursday. It wasn’t clear from the item if the Gem was then new or if it had just been taken over and reopened by Rodgers. The item also said that the opening of the Gem gave Caruthersville four operating theaters, but it only mentioned the Rodgers Theatre and the Stadium Theatre.
The January 2, 1942, issue of The Film Daily also had an item about the Gem:
1942 is the first year the Gem appears in the Film Daily Yearbook. It was also the first year for the Stadium Theatre and for a 286-seat house called the Cozy Theatre, which was listed as closed. The Cozy must have been the fourth theater mentioned in the newspaper item.Here is a photo of the Gem Theatre taken in the late 1990s.
The Paris Theatre is still open and has converted to digital projection. I can’t find an official web site, but there is a Facebook page.
There’s probably little, if anything, remaining of the old Lincoln Theatre. An article about the remodeling of Kerasotes' Broadway Theatre at Cape Girardeau in the October 19, 1970, issue of Boxoffice said that Kerasotes Theatres had also completely rebuilt the Lincoln Theatre in Paris, Illinois before reopening it as the Paris Theatre the previous May.
I suspect that the theater name should be spelled Rodgers rather than Rogers. This history on the web site of the Rodgers Theatre in Poplar Bluff mentions that I. W. Rodgers operated a theater in Caruthersville. It was probably this house.
The Liberty Theatre in Caruthersville was mentioned in the May 20, 1915, edition of the Hayti, Missouri Herald. The paper also mentioned a Dixie Theatre in Caruthersville.
The March 4, 1922, edition of The Southeast Missourian newspaper of Cape Girardeau had an ad marking the 10th anniversary of Paramount Pictures with listings of movies scheduled to appear that month at twelve theaters in the region, and the Liberty Theatre at Caruthersville was among them.
It’s quite possible that the Perry Street Theatre never became the Cox Theatre. In fact I have no idea why I made the assumption in that comment (though as I was on the Internet at 6:07 pm there’s a good chance my dinner was late and my blood sugar had crashed, taking my higher brain functions with it.)
There is an old postcard that shows up now and then at auction websites depicting a “Cox-Pier-Theatre” on the Cape May Boardwalk (it might have been the postcard in teecee’s long-dead link), but I don’t know if that house was called the Cox Theatre, the Pier Theatre, the Cox Pier Theatre, or something else altogether (it might even have been the Palace Theatre, a house opened by J. P. Cox in 1916.) Houses called Cox’s Old Pier, Cox’s New Pier, and Cox’s Palace were all mentioned in the 1924 FDY. There’s not much information about Cape May’s old theaters on the Internet, so it might be quite a while before anybody comes along to fill in the gaps.
Anyway, my apologies for assuming that Mr. Cox had only one theater. It was pretty stupid of me.
Alan, the “Firm” field on this page says that the Beverly Theatre was designed by William Riseman Associates. Riseman himself might have been the lead architect, but it was a large and busy firm so most of their projects would have been team efforts, and various associates might have taken the lead on any number of projects.
Smith & Neubek also handled the remodeling of the Arlington Theatre in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
The links to the Boxoffice articles in my earlier comment are dead, but the articles are still available online for the time being. The web site is no longer easily navigable internally, so here are direct links to each page of the first 1942 article:
Page 1, page two, page 3 and page 4.
Here are links to the second 1942 article:
Page 1and page 2.
Here is the link to the 1962 article:
Short, no illustrations.
An article about the reopening of the Arlington Theatre in the August 1, 1963, issue of the Arlington Heights Herald credited the architectural firm of Smith & Neubek with the plans for the remodeling. The same firm did the plans for the remodeling of the Coral Theatre in Oak Lawn for the same exhibitor.
There’s a very good chance that whoever designed the Sandon Theatre was one of the young architects who had worked for a time in Wright’s office. Wright and his own mentor, Louis Sullivan, were the chief progenitors of the Prairie style.
A few genealogy web sites have pages with references to the four Sandon brothers (Harry, Sam, Bill, and Cash) who opened this theater in 1916. One page says that prior to opening the Sandon Theatre they operated a house called the Wonderland Theatre, also in Mankato, which they purchased in 1913. The Sandon brothers had been itinerant musicians, and after going into the exhibition business frequently played in their own theaters. They later operated theaters in Jackson, Blue Earth, and Elmore.
The March 18, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had this item about the opening of the Sandon:
I’d love to know who the architect of the Sandon Theatre was. The Prairie style was rarely used for theaters, though its geometric elements had some influence on the zig-zag phase of the Art Deco style. In fact, two Prairie school architects, the husband and wife team of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, emigrated to Australia in 1914, and a few years later they designed there one of the iconic theaters of the Art Deco period, the Melbourne Capitol Theatre.This Cozy doesn’t appear to have been part of a chain. An item about G. A. Peterson appeared in the July 1, 1927, issue of Motion Picture News that suggests he only operated in Hollis:
Cozy appears to have been a fairly popular name for theaters at one time, but I don’t know of any chain of them. There was an independently operated Cozy Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles at least as late as the 1960s. It was a tiny grind house on Broadway. I never went to it, but it had one of my favorite downtown marquees.If the Lyric was on Main Street and the Time on Front Street then the Lyric was certainly a different theater and should have its own page.
The Time might be older than we thought, though. The “Theater Changes” column of the September 26, 1935, issue of The Film Daily listed a “Times” Theatre at Mankato as a house recently closed. It’s possible that “Times” was a typo for Time, and if so then the house might have first opened under that name in 1935, or even earlier.
For some reason Google Maps is fetching for us a location in the village of St. Clair, several miles from Mankato.
The opening of the Urban Theatre was noted in the November 4, 1936, issue of Motion Picture News:
By 1937, the Urban had different operators, who entered a partnership with the regional Paramount-Publix subsidiary, the Minnesota Amusement Company. This item is from the July 9, 1937, issue of The Film Daily:There were inconsistent reports of the Urban’s seating capacity. The Urban was clearly the unnamed house in this item from the September 5, 1936, issue of The Film Daily: The October 5, 1936, issue of Motion Picture News had this item:The inconsistent reports of the seating capacity were typical of the trade journals, including The Film Daily and its Yearbook, which too often gave inaccurate seat counts.An article titled “Standard Theatres Built Under Cooperative System” by architect G. E. Eichenlaub, published in the October 13, 1923, issue of Exhibitors Herald features two photos of the Geitner Theatre (article begins at this link and continues here.) The Geitner was one of the houses built from one of Eichenlaub’s standard plans for small-town theaters.
S. G. Harsh, operator of the 249-seat Princess Theatre in Mapleton, Iowa, wrote numerous brief movie reviews that were published in Exhibitors Herald in the last quarter of 1823. He also had two reviews in the May 30, 1925, issue of The Moving Picture World. I’m not sure that it was the same theater that operated in the American Legion Hall, though. Theater owners sometimes moved from one building to another, taking the name with them.
Mapleton had an opera house to which I’ve found references from 1909 and 1929. There is also an item datelined Mapleton, IA., in The Moving Picture World of January 2, 1915, which says: “John Robinson is planning to make extensive alterations to his one-story moving picture theater to cost about $2,000.” It seems likely that these were two different theater buildings. Either (or both, or neither) might have become the Princess, Orpheum, and/or Maple.
I see the theater’s mini-marquee under the vertical “HOTEL” sign, but which door is the entrance to the theater? It’s very confusing, especially since there’s no box office nor any poster cases in sight.
Also, I notice that they use the -er spelling of the T word on the marquee.
The recent photo Life’s Too Short referred to immediately follows the vintage photo in btreat’s photostream. Also, I ought to have noted in my comment that my first link is the same vintage photo Life’s Too Short linked to.
The Pix Theatre building is now the HGS Gallery,which is at 208 E. Main Street.
The January 2, 1892, issue of The New York Clipper carried an announcement saying that the Pythian Opera House at Union City, Indiana, had opened on December 23 under the management of H. Cadwallader and F. H. Bowen.
The June 29, 1893, issue of the Monroeville, Indiana Breeze reported a major fire at Union City that had destroyed or damaged several buildings. The Pythian Opera House suffered a loss of $31,000.
The obituary of Charles Cadwallader in the February 24, 1944, issue of the Union City Times-Gazette included these lines:
A few lines about the opera house appeared in an article in the Winchester Journal of February 17, 1892. While the reporter was unstinting in his praise of the opera house, he could not forgo including a bit of snark about the newspapers in the rival city in which it was located:The Grand Theatre was at 224 W. Pearl Street. The 1909 Cahn guide listed the Union Grand Theatre with 900 seats and a stage almost 70 feet wide.
The Miami Theatre was at 236 W. Pearl Street. It was mentioned in the January 7, 1928 issue of Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World, so must have been in operation by 1927. The Grand was a few doors east at (approximately) 224 W.Pearl.
Scott Higbee commenting at Water Winter Wonderland says that the Crown Theatre was at 14521 State Street. It now houses an auto body shop. The quonset is still visible in Google satellite view, but you can’t get a really good look at it with street view. The front is a conventional building. A tiny bit of the quonset shows behind it in this street view angle.
The article tntim linked to says that the Pike Theatre was designed by the Knoxville architectural and engineering firm Fred Manley Associates.
I’m wondering why the Capri I & II’s style is listed as Rustic. Did it have some sort of rustic features when it was the Pike?