The May 21, 1936, issue of The Film Daily said that the Avalon Theatre in Lawrenceville, Illinois, had been transfered to D. Frisina by Mrs. Hurley Gould.
This weblog post from the Lawrence County Historical Society has two photos of the Avalon Theatre at 716 11th Street. The second of them is a view looking north along the east side of 11th Street toward State Street. I believe the Palace Theatre is in the last building on the block. There is a marquee and vertical sign, but I can’t quite make out the name on the vertical. That building must be at 710 11th Street, though, as it is about three doors north of the Avalon.
This weblog post from the Lawrence County Historical Society is titled Hurley Gould – Moving Picture Theatre Owner. Mrs. Gould owned a number of theaters in and around Lawrence, including the Avalon. There are two photos of the Avalon near the end of the post. The first must be from 1941, the year The Lady Eve was released. Judging from the parked cars, the second is from the 1920s.
This weblog post at Coal Region Notebook says that the State Theatre was at the southeast corner of Third and Hickory Streets. This comment by Stick82 on our Victoria Theatre page says that the State was located where the Post Office is now. The Post Office is indeed at the southeast corner of E. Third and Hickory Streets. The Post Office is at 1 S. Hickory, but I don’t know which street the theater fronted on.
This weblog post has two small photos of the Victoria Theatre. The building extend along W. Third Street from Pear Street to Maple Street, but the entrance was at the corner of Pear Street (which looks more like an alley to me.)
I think 1971 would have been too late. I wonder if somebody else ran a movie theater in the space before Odyssey moved in? That grille really looks familiar.
The thing with Google’s street views is very odd. The restaurant our image is trapped in isn’t even at the right address, and the address works fine at Google Maps itself. It must be some sort of error in their software that fetches the image to embed in our page.
This web page by architect Steven Ohlhaber has information about the Boulevard Cinemas. Ohlhaber was project architect for Strauss Architects (now SDG Architects,) designers of the building shell. The theater interior was designed by The Henry Architects, Seattle.
The Boulevard Cinemas project consisted of a large existing warehouse building with a modern addition. The large auditoriums are in the new part of the complex and the smaller auditoriums in the remodeled warehouse.
The page has several photos, but I find the application displaying them a bit cranky, creating double exposures (or maybe it’s just my browser.)
I think I might have been to this theater, but if I was it was probably no later than 1969, and maybe a year or two earlier. All I recall of the night is that a group of friends took me to see a revival of that version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Mickey Rooney played Puck. I remember it being a tiny storefront theater on the south side of Hollywood Boulevard some distance east of the freeway.
It was on the ground floor of a fairly large old building, and I think there was some fancy grillwork over the storefront such as this building has. If it wasn’t this theater, then there was another, similar storefront house somewhere along this stretch of the boulevard around the same time. I have no memory of the theater’s name, though.
(Here is a street view. The one on our page is trapped in a restaurant in the next block and you can’t get to the street from it. I’ve seen this Street View glitch on a couple of other Cinema Treasures pages recently, but I can’t remember which ones. It’s very annoying.)
The web site of Seattle architectural firm The Henry Architects lists the Sterling Cinema 6 in San Bernardino as one of their projects. There is one photo of it in their slide show.
The web site of Seattle architectural firm The Henry Architects lists the Pruneyard Cinema 7 as one of their projects. There is one photo of it on their slide show.
The web site of Seattle architectural firm The Henry Architects lists the CineLux Tenant Station 11 as one of their projects. There is one photo of it in their slide show.
The Avery Theatre was designed by St. Paul, Minnesota, architect Henry E. Waldron, of the Sperry Realty Company. The theater was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.
The Avery’s web site has information about the history of the house and the renovation process. A drop-down menu from the ABOUT on the main page has a link headed RESTORATION PROCESS, and that page has a link from which to download a PDF of the NRHP Registration form, which contains several historic photos.
The page also has a link to a time line of the restoration, and at the end of the time line are links to PDFs of the two parts of a tabloid published by The Leader, the local newspaper, at the time of the theater’s reopening in August, 2013. These contain several photos of the renovation as well as additional historic photos of the theater.
My links in the previous comment are not going directly to the pages. The ca.1918 postcard with the “It” Theatre is at result 5 of the 8, and the 1939 photo of the Strand is at result 7.
An article in the March 15, 1965, issue of the Hagerstown, Maryland, Daily Mail said that the Strand Theatre Building in Waynesboro had been gutted by a fire. The building, it said, was nearly 100 years old, and had not been used as a theater since the 1940s.
The Strand Theatre was in operation by 1924, when the Cumberland Valley Volunteer Firefighters Association held its 23rd annual meeting there.
A small photo on page 183 of Waynesboro as We Knew it, by Todd Andrew Dorsett, (Google Books preview) shows Main Street east from Center Square in 1939. The Strand was in the building at the northeast corner of the square. The lower floor is obscured by a bus in the photo, but the theater’s vertical sign can be seen (though not easily read.)
Another page of Dorsett’s book (I hope this link goes right to it) has a ca.1918 postcard view east across Center Square, and the site of the Strand is occupied by an earlier theater called the “It” (the name usually appears in quotes in old publications.) The “It” Theatre first appears by name in the trade publications in 1910, but this item from the May 22, 1909, issue of The Moving Picture World is probably about it:
“Waynesboro, Pa.—Cashier W. H. Gelbach, of the Citizens Bank, has contracted with A. R. Warner for the building of a new moving picture theater on Center Square.”
In the 1918 postcard the “It” Theatre occupies a building with a gabled end facing the square rather than the two-story flat-roofed structure which had the Strand’s entrance, but if the report of the fire in the 1965 Daily Mail article is correct, and the Strand’s building was then almost 100 years old, it must have been the same building.
The last mention I’ve found in the trade magazines of the “It” Theatre is this item from The Moving Picture World of April 6, 1918:
“Theater at Waynesboro Sold.
“Waynesboro, Pa. — The ‘It’ theater, in this city, for some time owned by John Karper, has changed hands, having been purchased by Watson & Daley of Hagerstown, Md. The management of the ‘It’ was assumed by Watson & Daley on March 16. After extensive repairs and improvements they will add a program of vaudeville to the moving pictures.”
I’ve tried to find a connection between Watson and Daley and the Strand Theatre, but failed. In fact the only mention of the Strand I’ve found is a brief mention in The Film Daily in 1943. Still I think it very likely that the Strand was the “It” Theatre remodeled and renamed.
Here is an item from the January 30, 1915, issue of The American Contractor:
“Waynesboro, Pa. — Opera House, Apt. & Store Bldg.: 5 sty. 75x75, 84x85 & 75x100. Archt. J. W. Woltz. Owner Arcade Corp. Plans ready for bids Feb. 15.”
It took almost two years for the project to be completed, though. This announcement appeared in the October 14, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“Waynesboro, Pa.— Manager A. R. Zook announces that his new opera house, Waynesboro. Pa., will soon be thrown open to the public. This theater is one of the most beautiful in the entire state of Pennsylvania and should meet with the greatest success.”
Page 151 of Waynesboro as We Knew it, by Todd Andre Dorsett (Google Books preview) has a large version of the photo Lost Memory linked to earlier.
J. W. Woltz was Waynesboro’s leading architect of the period, practicing in the city from 1893 until his death in 1918. He must have been a very conservative fellow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so Victorian a building as the Arcade Theatre that was built as late as 1916. It would have fit right in to San Francisco of the 1870s.
The Star Theatre was most likely a storefront nickelodeon of the sort that flourished during the 1900s and 1910s. Even very small towns often had one or two, but if there was an existing theater to compete with they usually didn’t last long. They were like web sites at GeoCities.
I haven’t been able to find the Star Theatre mentioned in any of the trade publications from the era that are available on the Internet.
The name Colonial Theatre goes way back in Lebanon, but I don’t know if it was originally in the same building that became the Avon. Here is an item (somewhat belated, it appears) from the October 10, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“The Colonial, Lebanon, will move into the picture show auditorium made a part of the new Rural Loan Association building. The Colonial will be running in the new location before October 1.”
The November 7 issue of the same magazine had another item about the Colonial:
:“The New Colonial theater, Lebanon, Ind., will be reopened for business now soon. The work of remodeling and redecorating is about complete.”
From the two items, is sounds as though the theater might have temporarily occupied the auditorium of the Rural Loan Association building while its own building was being remodeled.
Another reference to the Colonial comes from the February 13, 1915, issue of Domestic Engineering:
“Clarence Miller, of Lebanon, recently finished the heating and plumbing in the two-story fireproof Colonial Theater building. This contract amounted to $1,100.”
The 1921 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide lists the Colonial Theatre at Lebanon as a 500-seat house with a rather small stage 20 feet by 21 feet. The guide says there were also two movie theaters at Lebanon, one playing vaudeville twice a week, but it doesn’t name them. The town’s population was 6,257 in 1920, so three theaters was not unreasonable.
Okay, the Strand and the Crescent/Elite were not the same theater. The Strand Theatre Company incorporated in late 1914 and the theater was open by 1915, while the Elite was still there in 1917 when an item in The Moving Picture World said it was being renovated. This is the October 3, 1914, item about the incorporation of the Strand company:
“The Strand theater of Nashville has applied for a charter of incorporation, listing the capital stock of the company at $25,000. The incorporators are Hugh M. Waddle, Roy C Shelton, H. A. Waddle, J. B. Brent and Frank Pierce.”
An interesting item shows up in the August 26, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. It indicates that the Strand was a “reverse theater,” with the screen at the entrance end of the house and the projection booth at the back of the building:
“Nashville, Tenn.—An actual demonstration of the feasibility of the new building ordinance recently enacted by the City Commission was had when fire broke out in the operating booth at the Strand theater on August 2d. The new law provides that no theater shall be constructed with the operating room in the front of the house, but that all seats must face the entrance, with the screen toward the street. The Strand was the first theater erected under these provisions, and it was due largely to the new arrangement that no panic ensued when a dense smoke quickly filled the auditorium, for the crowd was compelled to move away from the fire instead of toward it. The blaze started during the showing of ‘The Scarlet Road,’ when the film broke and became entangled In the projection machine, spreading quickly to a nearby pile of reels and destroying film to the amount of $2,000. The equipment was damaged about $200 worth, and all losses were covered by insurance. Operator C. L. Wheeler was painfully burned about the hands. Operator Carter was also slightly burned.”
This item is the first I’ve ever heard of a city requiring that movie theaters be built with the reverse pattern. Reverse theaters have been fairly rare, but if this law was on the books for any great length of time, Nashville must have a large share of them.
The 1917 item says that the Elite was then being operated by Crescent Amusement as a five-cent house, and was being renovated.
If the Fifth Avenue Elite was missing from the 1928 list, that means there were at least five Elite Theatres in Nashville over the years.
Actually, I’m not even sure how you pronounce “Lafayette” in Nashville. It gets pronounced more than one way in California. I rhyme the first two syllables with coffee.
I was wondering because I found an item about the Elite Theatre on Fifth Avenue in the August 25, 1917, issue of The Moving Picture World. If it wasn’t the same house as the Strand then it isn’t listed at Cinema Treasures yet. Do you know what become of that Elite? The 1917 item is the only mention of it I’ve been able to find.
I am wondering if the Strand is the same theater that DavePrice says in this comment was opened around 1908-1909 as the Crescent Theatre and renamed the Elite Theatre around 1910. It was at 233 Fifth Avenue, but the address might have shifted, especially if there was a major remodeling at some point.
DavePrice: Is there any chance that the Crescent/Elite Theatre at 233 Fifth Avenue is the house that we have listed as the Strand Theatre at 235 Fifth Avenue?
Page 27 of this PDF has a photo of a derailed streetcar with the Home Theatre in the background. The document says that streetcar service in Portage ended in 1916, so the Home Theatre was in operation by then.
I had a friend in high school who had lived in Portage, but he never mentioned the names of any theaters there.
Stick82 says the State Theatre fronted on Hickory, the second building from the corner. The most likely address was thus 3 South Hickory Street.
The May 21, 1936, issue of The Film Daily said that the Avalon Theatre in Lawrenceville, Illinois, had been transfered to D. Frisina by Mrs. Hurley Gould.
This weblog post from the Lawrence County Historical Society has two photos of the Avalon Theatre at 716 11th Street. The second of them is a view looking north along the east side of 11th Street toward State Street. I believe the Palace Theatre is in the last building on the block. There is a marquee and vertical sign, but I can’t quite make out the name on the vertical. That building must be at 710 11th Street, though, as it is about three doors north of the Avalon.
This weblog post from the Lawrence County Historical Society is titled Hurley Gould – Moving Picture Theatre Owner. Mrs. Gould owned a number of theaters in and around Lawrence, including the Avalon. There are two photos of the Avalon near the end of the post. The first must be from 1941, the year The Lady Eve was released. Judging from the parked cars, the second is from the 1920s.
Stick82: Did the State Theatre front on Third Street, or on Hickory Street like the Post Office does?
This weblog post at Coal Region Notebook says that the State Theatre was at the southeast corner of Third and Hickory Streets. This comment by Stick82 on our Victoria Theatre page says that the State was located where the Post Office is now. The Post Office is indeed at the southeast corner of E. Third and Hickory Streets. The Post Office is at 1 S. Hickory, but I don’t know which street the theater fronted on.
This weblog post has two small photos of the Victoria Theatre. The building extend along W. Third Street from Pear Street to Maple Street, but the entrance was at the corner of Pear Street (which looks more like an alley to me.)
I think 1971 would have been too late. I wonder if somebody else ran a movie theater in the space before Odyssey moved in? That grille really looks familiar.
The thing with Google’s street views is very odd. The restaurant our image is trapped in isn’t even at the right address, and the address works fine at Google Maps itself. It must be some sort of error in their software that fetches the image to embed in our page.
This web page by architect Steven Ohlhaber has information about the Boulevard Cinemas. Ohlhaber was project architect for Strauss Architects (now SDG Architects,) designers of the building shell. The theater interior was designed by The Henry Architects, Seattle.
The Boulevard Cinemas project consisted of a large existing warehouse building with a modern addition. The large auditoriums are in the new part of the complex and the smaller auditoriums in the remodeled warehouse.
The page has several photos, but I find the application displaying them a bit cranky, creating double exposures (or maybe it’s just my browser.)
I think I might have been to this theater, but if I was it was probably no later than 1969, and maybe a year or two earlier. All I recall of the night is that a group of friends took me to see a revival of that version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Mickey Rooney played Puck. I remember it being a tiny storefront theater on the south side of Hollywood Boulevard some distance east of the freeway.
It was on the ground floor of a fairly large old building, and I think there was some fancy grillwork over the storefront such as this building has. If it wasn’t this theater, then there was another, similar storefront house somewhere along this stretch of the boulevard around the same time. I have no memory of the theater’s name, though.
(Here is a street view. The one on our page is trapped in a restaurant in the next block and you can’t get to the street from it. I’ve seen this Street View glitch on a couple of other Cinema Treasures pages recently, but I can’t remember which ones. It’s very annoying.)
The web site of Seattle architectural firm The Henry Architects lists the Sterling Cinema 6 in San Bernardino as one of their projects. There is one photo of it in their slide show.
The web site of Seattle architectural firm The Henry Architects lists the Pruneyard Cinema 7 as one of their projects. There is one photo of it on their slide show.
The web site of Seattle architectural firm The Henry Architects lists the CineLux Tenant Station 11 as one of their projects. There is one photo of it in their slide show.
The Avery Theatre is open again, showing movies seven nights a week, with a matinée on Sunday.
This is their web site.
The Avery Theatre was designed by St. Paul, Minnesota, architect Henry E. Waldron, of the Sperry Realty Company. The theater was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.
The Avery’s web site has information about the history of the house and the renovation process. A drop-down menu from the ABOUT on the main page has a link headed RESTORATION PROCESS, and that page has a link from which to download a PDF of the NRHP Registration form, which contains several historic photos.
The page also has a link to a time line of the restoration, and at the end of the time line are links to PDFs of the two parts of a tabloid published by The Leader, the local newspaper, at the time of the theater’s reopening in August, 2013. These contain several photos of the renovation as well as additional historic photos of the theater.
My links in the previous comment are not going directly to the pages. The ca.1918 postcard with the “It” Theatre is at result 5 of the 8, and the 1939 photo of the Strand is at result 7.
An article in the March 15, 1965, issue of the Hagerstown, Maryland, Daily Mail said that the Strand Theatre Building in Waynesboro had been gutted by a fire. The building, it said, was nearly 100 years old, and had not been used as a theater since the 1940s.
The Strand Theatre was in operation by 1924, when the Cumberland Valley Volunteer Firefighters Association held its 23rd annual meeting there.
A small photo on page 183 of Waynesboro as We Knew it, by Todd Andrew Dorsett, (Google Books preview) shows Main Street east from Center Square in 1939. The Strand was in the building at the northeast corner of the square. The lower floor is obscured by a bus in the photo, but the theater’s vertical sign can be seen (though not easily read.)
Another page of Dorsett’s book (I hope this link goes right to it) has a ca.1918 postcard view east across Center Square, and the site of the Strand is occupied by an earlier theater called the “It” (the name usually appears in quotes in old publications.) The “It” Theatre first appears by name in the trade publications in 1910, but this item from the May 22, 1909, issue of The Moving Picture World is probably about it:
In the 1918 postcard the “It” Theatre occupies a building with a gabled end facing the square rather than the two-story flat-roofed structure which had the Strand’s entrance, but if the report of the fire in the 1965 Daily Mail article is correct, and the Strand’s building was then almost 100 years old, it must have been the same building.The last mention I’ve found in the trade magazines of the “It” Theatre is this item from The Moving Picture World of April 6, 1918:
I’ve tried to find a connection between Watson and Daley and the Strand Theatre, but failed. In fact the only mention of the Strand I’ve found is a brief mention in The Film Daily in 1943. Still I think it very likely that the Strand was the “It” Theatre remodeled and renamed.Here is an item from the January 30, 1915, issue of The American Contractor:
It took almost two years for the project to be completed, though. This announcement appeared in the October 14, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:Page 151 of Waynesboro as We Knew it, by Todd Andre Dorsett (Google Books preview) has a large version of the photo Lost Memory linked to earlier.J. W. Woltz was Waynesboro’s leading architect of the period, practicing in the city from 1893 until his death in 1918. He must have been a very conservative fellow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so Victorian a building as the Arcade Theatre that was built as late as 1916. It would have fit right in to San Francisco of the 1870s.
The Star Theatre was most likely a storefront nickelodeon of the sort that flourished during the 1900s and 1910s. Even very small towns often had one or two, but if there was an existing theater to compete with they usually didn’t last long. They were like web sites at GeoCities.
I haven’t been able to find the Star Theatre mentioned in any of the trade publications from the era that are available on the Internet.
The name Colonial Theatre goes way back in Lebanon, but I don’t know if it was originally in the same building that became the Avon. Here is an item (somewhat belated, it appears) from the October 10, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World:
The November 7 issue of the same magazine had another item about the Colonial:From the two items, is sounds as though the theater might have temporarily occupied the auditorium of the Rural Loan Association building while its own building was being remodeled.Another reference to the Colonial comes from the February 13, 1915, issue of Domestic Engineering:
The 1921 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide lists the Colonial Theatre at Lebanon as a 500-seat house with a rather small stage 20 feet by 21 feet. The guide says there were also two movie theaters at Lebanon, one playing vaudeville twice a week, but it doesn’t name them. The town’s population was 6,257 in 1920, so three theaters was not unreasonable.Okay, the Strand and the Crescent/Elite were not the same theater. The Strand Theatre Company incorporated in late 1914 and the theater was open by 1915, while the Elite was still there in 1917 when an item in The Moving Picture World said it was being renovated. This is the October 3, 1914, item about the incorporation of the Strand company:
An interesting item shows up in the August 26, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. It indicates that the Strand was a “reverse theater,” with the screen at the entrance end of the house and the projection booth at the back of the building:This item is the first I’ve ever heard of a city requiring that movie theaters be built with the reverse pattern. Reverse theaters have been fairly rare, but if this law was on the books for any great length of time, Nashville must have a large share of them.The 1917 item says that the Elite was then being operated by Crescent Amusement as a five-cent house, and was being renovated.
If the Fifth Avenue Elite was missing from the 1928 list, that means there were at least five Elite Theatres in Nashville over the years.
Actually, I’m not even sure how you pronounce “Lafayette” in Nashville. It gets pronounced more than one way in California. I rhyme the first two syllables with coffee.
I was wondering because I found an item about the Elite Theatre on Fifth Avenue in the August 25, 1917, issue of The Moving Picture World. If it wasn’t the same house as the Strand then it isn’t listed at Cinema Treasures yet. Do you know what become of that Elite? The 1917 item is the only mention of it I’ve been able to find.
I am wondering if the Strand is the same theater that DavePrice says in this comment was opened around 1908-1909 as the Crescent Theatre and renamed the Elite Theatre around 1910. It was at 233 Fifth Avenue, but the address might have shifted, especially if there was a major remodeling at some point.
DavePrice: Is there any chance that the Crescent/Elite Theatre at 233 Fifth Avenue is the house that we have listed as the Strand Theatre at 235 Fifth Avenue?
Page 27 of this PDF has a photo of a derailed streetcar with the Home Theatre in the background. The document says that streetcar service in Portage ended in 1916, so the Home Theatre was in operation by then.
I had a friend in high school who had lived in Portage, but he never mentioned the names of any theaters there.