The earliest mention of the Gem I’ve found in the trades is in the June 17, 1916 issue of Moving Picture World, which notes a recent disaster:
“The Gem theater at Yuma Colo was partially destroyed by a cyclone which caused several deaths, injured many and did great property damage. A. B. Conant, proprietor of the house, immediately began work of rebuilding the theater and expects to be operating again in a few days.”
In ads touting the wartime movie “Pershing’s Crusaders” in Moving Picture World in August and September, 1918, the Gem is listed among theaters showing the film.
A fire started by an overhead furnace caused $2,000 damage to the Gem in early 1928, according to the January 17 issue of Film Daily.
Akron, Colorado was mentioned in the January 4, 1913 issue of Moving Picture World, but the name of the theater was not given. However, a Mr. Al C. Stewart might have been the previous owner or manager of this house. He had lately moved to Pendleton, Oregon, and by 1923 would be running the Empire Theatre in Waitsburg, Washington.
The Variety Theatre was mentioned in the December 25, 1925 issue of Exhibitors Herald. Grant L. Beach was the name of the manager at that time. Akron, Colorado was mentioned in the January 4, 1913 issue of Moving Picture World, but the name of the theater was not given.
Pitner of the Dixie Theatre, Ripley, Mississippi was submitting capsule movie reviews to the trade journal Exhibitors Herald at least as early as October, 1923.
Rob’s vintage photo of the Dixie shows it sharing a corner building with a drug store. The current Dixie Theatre (now Stage on Main) at 106 S. Main is not a corner building, so can’t be the place in the vintage photo. I think the original Dixie must have been at a different location and we’ve got the wrong address for it.
My guess would be that it was on Jefferson Street at the southeast corner of Commerce Street, just off the square, where there is some fairly new construction housing an accounting firm. This location would also fit the background scene in the photo uploaded by asimplekindofman in 2011. That looks like Commerce Street along the east side of the square. The drug store must have been at 101 S. Commerce (unless its corner entrance had a Jefferson Street address) and the theater would have been at 103 (again unless the drug store had a Jefferson Street address, in which case the theater was probably 101 S. Commerce.
unfortunately, dblinn61’s link doesn’t work. Through independent search I discovered that the May 11, 1939 Los Gatos Times won’t be available to the public on UCR’s web site until 2024. It’s available now on newspapers.com, but I don’t have a subscription to that site.
I just noticed that GaryParks' comment of September 5, 2014 confirms that the Building the Campbell Theatre was in was indeed the bank project designed in 1920 by Wolfe & Higgins. Principal Frank Delos Wolfe had been in partnership with his son Carl J. Wolf since 1912, and William E. Higgins joined the firm in 1918. Wolfe & Wolfe designed the Liberty Theatre in San Jose in 1913-14. So far I haven’t discovered any other theaters designed by the firm.
Recently processed records at the San Jose Historical Museum’s web site include the information that the Liberty Theatre was designed by the architectural firm of Wolfe & Wolfe (Frank Delos Wolfe and Carl J. Wolfe, father and son, respectively.) So far very little has been posted to the web site, but what has been is part of this page. It has one late photo of the theater, probably from shortly before its demolition.
The Alhambra was one of three movie houses listed at Knightstown in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, the others being the Grand and the Superba, the latter located on West Main Street.
The 1909-1910 Cahn guide lists the Alhambra Theatre as a 965-seat, ground floor house with a stage 30 feet deep from footlights to back wall and 60 feet between the sidewalls. The NRHP form (PDF here) for the Knightstown Historic District, which included the Alhambra, says that the 1897-98 IOOF Lodge building and Alhambra Opera House was designed by architect John Adam Hasecoster, and the theater was remodeled in 1940 with plans by New Castle architect C. Frank Mitchell. It was probably at that time that the building lost much of its original Romanesque Revival detailing.
The Alhambra was still standing when the NRHP application was made in 1986, but a few years later the structure, which had operated briefly as a theater in the early 1980s after having closed in 1966, had deteriorated to such an extent that it had to be demolished. Its site is now a small public park.
This web page has a bit of information about the Casino, and a photo showing that it was clearly not in the building that is on the site today. The old Casino was a nice Georgian Colonial Revival building.
Correction: I was looking at the wrong page when I wrote that comment. The Grand and Joie were listed in the 1926 FDY. The two listed in the 1914 AMPD were the Lyric and the Pathé. That sort of doubles the choices, and a French theater name in a town called Paris isn’t likely to make the search easier.
The building erected for the new Joie Theatre in 1921 was designed by Carl Boller, according to the announcement in the January 22 issue of The American Contractor that year.
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists two theaters at Paris, called the Grand and the Joie, but provides no details about either. I’ve been unable to find either of them mentioned in the trade journals of the period. Odds seem pretty good that this building housed one or the other of them.
The earliest mention of the Strand I’ve found in the trade journals is in the March 19, 1927 issue of Exhibitors Herald. Paris was not listed in that year’s FDY, but the Strand was the only house listed the following year. The 1926 FDY had listed two houses at Paris, the Grand and the Joie, neither with a seating capacity given.
A Mr. G. Carey, the owner of the Strand in 1927, was a prolific contributor of capsule movie reviews to trade journals into the early 1930s. Back in 1914, the two houses listed at Paris in the American Motion Picture Directory were called the Lyric and the Pathé. A house called the Pastime was mentioned in the December 17, 1921 Exhibitors Herald.
There was a notice of the closing of the Grand Theatre at Odin in the January 14, 1937 issue of Film Daily.
The only movie house listed at Odin in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory was called the Prize Theatre, and it was located at the corner of Laurel [sic] and North Main Street. Laurel was apparently a typo for Laury Street, and North Main was the former name of Kirkwood Street. It seems possible that the Prize was an aka for the Grand.
A history of Odin’s Masonic Lodge has this to say:
“In 1962 the Lodge bought the Sugg Building that once housed Wooters Insurance Office, Odin Drug Store and Odin Kroger Store downstairs and the Grand Theatre and a bowling alley upstairs. It was rebuilt into what now is the Lodge upstairs, accessed by a chair lift, and downstairs a dining room and two rental spaces.”
This Flickr page has a photo of the Masonic Lodge. Neither Google nor Bing Maps offers a street view of the location, but judging from the satellite view and the shape of the buildings in the photo, the lodge is located at 202 E. Kirkwood Street, which is a very short distance east of Laury Street. As the Grand was an upstairs house in a very small town, it’s likely that its space was multi-purpose, and thus probably had a flat floor and movable seats, so it might have switched back and forth between being a movie house and a skating rink multiple times. It might have operated as a movie venue intermittently all the way until the Gem Theatre opened.
A capsule movie review by Ray Hollingshead of the Gem Theatre, Odin, Illinois, Appeared in the October 20, 1951 issue of Boxoffice. Mr. Hollingshead highly (no pun intended) recommended the exploitation film “Marijuana”, which he said brought in good business both nights that it ran.
Back in 1949, the Gem was offered for sale in the classified section of the January 15 issue of Boxoffice. The house was being sold due to the dissolution of a partnership. $8,000 was the required down payment for the 268-seat theater in the town of 1,850 population.
This item from the February 5, 1916 issue of Moving Picture World gives another aka for the Empress/Rialto. Unfortunately the aka is Temple, which was the name of yet another Ironwood theater of the period, so we might have some conflation going on somewhere. I’ve posted the item to our Temple Theatre page as well:
“W. T. Kelly, who has leased the Empress theater property at Ironwood, Mich., from O'Donnell & Nolan has made a number of changes. The building has been remodeled and hereafter will be known as the Temple theater. Triangle service will be used on Mondays and Thursdays, Paramount service on Wednesday and Saturday and other high class features the rest of the time. Admission will be ten and twenty cents. A twelve-piece orchestra will be used in connection with the Triangle films. Manager Kelly has renamed the former Temple theater of Ironwood the Strand and will operate a five and ten cent show there.”
Kelly’s management of the house lasted for only a little over a year. Here is an item from the April 6, 1917 issue of Variety confirming the end of Kelly’s operation of the house, though it doesn’t mention the brief name change to Grand Theatre: “The Temple, Ironwood, Mich., has changed hands, owner Kelly withdrawing from its management. Under the new regime the Temple returns to the W. V. M. A. fold and will have a five-act show booked in by Paul Goudron, starting Apr. 28. The house has been offering films of late.”
It appears that more than one house at Ironwood was called the Temple Theatre. I’ve also posted this item from the February 5, 1916 issue of Moving Picture World to our Rialto (aka Empress) Theatre page:
“W. T. Kelly, who has leased the Empress theater property at Ironwood, Mich., from O'Donnell & Nolan has made a number of changes. The building has been remodeled and hereafter will be known as the Temple theater. Triangle service will be used on Mondays and Thursdays, Paramount service on Wednesday and Saturday and other high class features the rest of the time. Admission will be ten and twenty cents. A twelve-piece orchestra will be used in connection with the Triangle films. Manager Kelly has renamed the former Temple theater of Ironwood the Strand and will operate a five and ten cent show there.”
The only theaters listed at Ironwood in a 1921 Michigan State directory were the Rex and the Rialto, so if this house last operated as the Strand it must have been closed by 1920
The bowling alley, part of which occupied the Columbia Theatre, has been closed for a number of years now, and the theater and two adjacent buildings it also occupied are slated for renovation and reuse for purposes not yet determined. An article in the March 29, 2019 issue of The Dalles Chronicle says that the building at 213 E. 2nd Street opened as a house called the Grand Theatre in 1911, and was later renamed the Empress Theatre. However, if this was true then by 1920 one of those names was apparently being used at another theater, as the July 10 issue of Moving Picture World mentioned “…A. Bettingen, Empress and Grand theaters, The Dalles.”
The Empress is listed in the 1926-1930 FDYs with 500 seats, and the Columbia is listed in 1931 with 450. The only house listed at The Dalles in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory is the Casino, at 312 2nd Street, so the Grand/Empress might have still been operating as a vaudeville house then.
The March 4, 1922 issue of Moving Picture World said that the plans for the new theater to be erected at Lincoln, Illinois by Steve Bennis were being prepared by “…the Levine Company, 217 Chamber of Commerce Building, Chicago….” This must have been R. Levine & Co., the Chicago design-construction firm for whom Edward P. Rupert served as principal architect during this period. The Lincoln Grand bears a strong resemblance to the Washington Theatre at Quincy, Illinois, which was designed by Rupert.
The Olive Theatre first appears in the FDY’s 1931 edition, which means a likely 1930 opening. The house is mentioned in the September 14, 1935 issue of Universal Weekly with the name of the manager, Ed Lewis. The Olive had been receiving Universal’s film service for five years, also indicating a 1930 opening.
The Olive Theatre was at the north end of a short row of stores on the west side of the 100 block of Barnes Avenue (Highway 395.) The entire row has been demolished. The address of the theater would probably have been approximately 105 N. Barnes Avenue.
This 10-page pdf file has a photo of the store building, with the theater at far right, on its fourth page and a photo of the theater interior on the fifth page.
Here is an early notice about the Malco Theatre from the July 19, 1938 issue of Film Daily:
“Malco Plans New House
“Hot Springs, Ark.—It has been announced here that Malco Theaters, Inc., plan to construct a $100,000 film theater on the site of the old Princess Theater which was destroyed by fire in 1935. Malco now operates four theaters in this city. Work on the new building will probably start next April or May. The new house will seat between 1,200 and 1,500, according to the announcement.”
According to the June 21, 1952 issue of Boxoffice, a contract to demolish the Annex Theatre had just been let by the city. The house had been closed for about a year, and was to be replaced by a parking lot.
The January 24, 1929 issue of Film Daily reported that the Majestic Theatre in El Dorado was being remodeled. The item was actually about the old Rialto Theatre which was being demolished to make way for its replacement, and the item noted that the Rialto’s equipment was being moved to the Majestic. Both projects were being carried out for the Arkansas Amusement Company. Multiple theater chains had “Arkansas Amusement” in their names at that time. The one interested in El Dorado was owned in part by M. A. Lightman, and as of September 23, 1927 had had 25 houses operating in the state, according to that day’s issue of Film Daily.
It turns out there was indeed a fire at Hot Springs in 1913, and it wiped out much of Malvern Avenue. It looks like it took out a couple dozen square blocks of the town. The Pekin probably only lasted about a year. It would have been pretty easy to convert a small movie house into a funeral parlor.
The earliest mention of the Gem I’ve found in the trades is in the June 17, 1916 issue of Moving Picture World, which notes a recent disaster:
In ads touting the wartime movie “Pershing’s Crusaders” in Moving Picture World in August and September, 1918, the Gem is listed among theaters showing the film.A fire started by an overhead furnace caused $2,000 damage to the Gem in early 1928, according to the January 17 issue of Film Daily.
Akron, Colorado was mentioned in the January 4, 1913 issue of Moving Picture World, but the name of the theater was not given. However, a Mr. Al C. Stewart might have been the previous owner or manager of this house. He had lately moved to Pendleton, Oregon, and by 1923 would be running the Empire Theatre in Waitsburg, Washington.
The Variety Theatre was mentioned in the December 25, 1925 issue of Exhibitors Herald. Grant L. Beach was the name of the manager at that time. Akron, Colorado was mentioned in the January 4, 1913 issue of Moving Picture World, but the name of the theater was not given.
Rob’s vintage photo of the Dixie shows it sharing a corner building with a drug store. The current Dixie Theatre (now Stage on Main) at 106 S. Main is not a corner building, so can’t be the place in the vintage photo. I think the original Dixie must have been at a different location and we’ve got the wrong address for it.
My guess would be that it was on Jefferson Street at the southeast corner of Commerce Street, just off the square, where there is some fairly new construction housing an accounting firm. This location would also fit the background scene in the photo uploaded by asimplekindofman in 2011. That looks like Commerce Street along the east side of the square. The drug store must have been at 101 S. Commerce (unless its corner entrance had a Jefferson Street address) and the theater would have been at 103 (again unless the drug store had a Jefferson Street address, in which case the theater was probably 101 S. Commerce.
unfortunately, dblinn61’s link doesn’t work. Through independent search I discovered that the May 11, 1939 Los Gatos Times won’t be available to the public on UCR’s web site until 2024. It’s available now on newspapers.com, but I don’t have a subscription to that site.
I just noticed that GaryParks' comment of September 5, 2014 confirms that the Building the Campbell Theatre was in was indeed the bank project designed in 1920 by Wolfe & Higgins. Principal Frank Delos Wolfe had been in partnership with his son Carl J. Wolf since 1912, and William E. Higgins joined the firm in 1918. Wolfe & Wolfe designed the Liberty Theatre in San Jose in 1913-14. So far I haven’t discovered any other theaters designed by the firm.
Recently processed records at the San Jose Historical Museum’s web site include the information that the Liberty Theatre was designed by the architectural firm of Wolfe & Wolfe (Frank Delos Wolfe and Carl J. Wolfe, father and son, respectively.) So far very little has been posted to the web site, but what has been is part of this page. It has one late photo of the theater, probably from shortly before its demolition.
The Alhambra was one of three movie houses listed at Knightstown in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, the others being the Grand and the Superba, the latter located on West Main Street.
The 1909-1910 Cahn guide lists the Alhambra Theatre as a 965-seat, ground floor house with a stage 30 feet deep from footlights to back wall and 60 feet between the sidewalls. The NRHP form (PDF here) for the Knightstown Historic District, which included the Alhambra, says that the 1897-98 IOOF Lodge building and Alhambra Opera House was designed by architect John Adam Hasecoster, and the theater was remodeled in 1940 with plans by New Castle architect C. Frank Mitchell. It was probably at that time that the building lost much of its original Romanesque Revival detailing.
The Alhambra was still standing when the NRHP application was made in 1986, but a few years later the structure, which had operated briefly as a theater in the early 1980s after having closed in 1966, had deteriorated to such an extent that it had to be demolished. Its site is now a small public park.
This web page has a bit of information about the Casino, and a photo showing that it was clearly not in the building that is on the site today. The old Casino was a nice Georgian Colonial Revival building.
Correction: I was looking at the wrong page when I wrote that comment. The Grand and Joie were listed in the 1926 FDY. The two listed in the 1914 AMPD were the Lyric and the Pathé. That sort of doubles the choices, and a French theater name in a town called Paris isn’t likely to make the search easier.
The building erected for the new Joie Theatre in 1921 was designed by Carl Boller, according to the announcement in the January 22 issue of The American Contractor that year.
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists two theaters at Paris, called the Grand and the Joie, but provides no details about either. I’ve been unable to find either of them mentioned in the trade journals of the period. Odds seem pretty good that this building housed one or the other of them.
The earliest mention of the Strand I’ve found in the trade journals is in the March 19, 1927 issue of Exhibitors Herald. Paris was not listed in that year’s FDY, but the Strand was the only house listed the following year. The 1926 FDY had listed two houses at Paris, the Grand and the Joie, neither with a seating capacity given.
A Mr. G. Carey, the owner of the Strand in 1927, was a prolific contributor of capsule movie reviews to trade journals into the early 1930s. Back in 1914, the two houses listed at Paris in the American Motion Picture Directory were called the Lyric and the Pathé. A house called the Pastime was mentioned in the December 17, 1921 Exhibitors Herald.
A brief announcement in the January 6, 1937 issue of Variety said “Wiggins, in Paris, Ark., now ready for business.”
The Elite Electric Theatre was the only movie house listed at Crawford in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.
There was a notice of the closing of the Grand Theatre at Odin in the January 14, 1937 issue of Film Daily.
The only movie house listed at Odin in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory was called the Prize Theatre, and it was located at the corner of Laurel [sic] and North Main Street. Laurel was apparently a typo for Laury Street, and North Main was the former name of Kirkwood Street. It seems possible that the Prize was an aka for the Grand.
A history of Odin’s Masonic Lodge has this to say:
This Flickr page has a photo of the Masonic Lodge. Neither Google nor Bing Maps offers a street view of the location, but judging from the satellite view and the shape of the buildings in the photo, the lodge is located at 202 E. Kirkwood Street, which is a very short distance east of Laury Street. As the Grand was an upstairs house in a very small town, it’s likely that its space was multi-purpose, and thus probably had a flat floor and movable seats, so it might have switched back and forth between being a movie house and a skating rink multiple times. It might have operated as a movie venue intermittently all the way until the Gem Theatre opened.A capsule movie review by Ray Hollingshead of the Gem Theatre, Odin, Illinois, Appeared in the October 20, 1951 issue of Boxoffice. Mr. Hollingshead highly (no pun intended) recommended the exploitation film “Marijuana”, which he said brought in good business both nights that it ran.
Back in 1949, the Gem was offered for sale in the classified section of the January 15 issue of Boxoffice. The house was being sold due to the dissolution of a partnership. $8,000 was the required down payment for the 268-seat theater in the town of 1,850 population.
This item from the February 5, 1916 issue of Moving Picture World gives another aka for the Empress/Rialto. Unfortunately the aka is Temple, which was the name of yet another Ironwood theater of the period, so we might have some conflation going on somewhere. I’ve posted the item to our Temple Theatre page as well:
Kelly’s management of the house lasted for only a little over a year. Here is an item from the April 6, 1917 issue of Variety confirming the end of Kelly’s operation of the house, though it doesn’t mention the brief name change to Grand Theatre: “The Temple, Ironwood, Mich., has changed hands, owner Kelly withdrawing from its management. Under the new regime the Temple returns to the W. V. M. A. fold and will have a five-act show booked in by Paul Goudron, starting Apr. 28. The house has been offering films of late.”It appears that more than one house at Ironwood was called the Temple Theatre. I’ve also posted this item from the February 5, 1916 issue of Moving Picture World to our Rialto (aka Empress) Theatre page:
The only theaters listed at Ironwood in a 1921 Michigan State directory were the Rex and the Rialto, so if this house last operated as the Strand it must have been closed by 1920The bowling alley, part of which occupied the Columbia Theatre, has been closed for a number of years now, and the theater and two adjacent buildings it also occupied are slated for renovation and reuse for purposes not yet determined. An article in the March 29, 2019 issue of The Dalles Chronicle says that the building at 213 E. 2nd Street opened as a house called the Grand Theatre in 1911, and was later renamed the Empress Theatre. However, if this was true then by 1920 one of those names was apparently being used at another theater, as the July 10 issue of Moving Picture World mentioned “…A. Bettingen, Empress and Grand theaters, The Dalles.”
The Empress is listed in the 1926-1930 FDYs with 500 seats, and the Columbia is listed in 1931 with 450. The only house listed at The Dalles in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory is the Casino, at 312 2nd Street, so the Grand/Empress might have still been operating as a vaudeville house then.
The March 4, 1922 issue of Moving Picture World said that the plans for the new theater to be erected at Lincoln, Illinois by Steve Bennis were being prepared by “…the Levine Company, 217 Chamber of Commerce Building, Chicago….” This must have been R. Levine & Co., the Chicago design-construction firm for whom Edward P. Rupert served as principal architect during this period. The Lincoln Grand bears a strong resemblance to the Washington Theatre at Quincy, Illinois, which was designed by Rupert.
The Olive Theatre first appears in the FDY’s 1931 edition, which means a likely 1930 opening. The house is mentioned in the September 14, 1935 issue of Universal Weekly with the name of the manager, Ed Lewis. The Olive had been receiving Universal’s film service for five years, also indicating a 1930 opening.
The Olive Theatre was at the north end of a short row of stores on the west side of the 100 block of Barnes Avenue (Highway 395.) The entire row has been demolished. The address of the theater would probably have been approximately 105 N. Barnes Avenue.
This 10-page pdf file has a photo of the store building, with the theater at far right, on its fourth page and a photo of the theater interior on the fifth page.
Here is an early notice about the Malco Theatre from the July 19, 1938 issue of Film Daily:
According to the June 21, 1952 issue of Boxoffice, a contract to demolish the Annex Theatre had just been let by the city. The house had been closed for about a year, and was to be replaced by a parking lot.
The January 24, 1929 issue of Film Daily reported that the Majestic Theatre in El Dorado was being remodeled. The item was actually about the old Rialto Theatre which was being demolished to make way for its replacement, and the item noted that the Rialto’s equipment was being moved to the Majestic. Both projects were being carried out for the Arkansas Amusement Company. Multiple theater chains had “Arkansas Amusement” in their names at that time. The one interested in El Dorado was owned in part by M. A. Lightman, and as of September 23, 1927 had had 25 houses operating in the state, according to that day’s issue of Film Daily.
It turns out there was indeed a fire at Hot Springs in 1913, and it wiped out much of Malvern Avenue. It looks like it took out a couple dozen square blocks of the town. The Pekin probably only lasted about a year. It would have been pretty easy to convert a small movie house into a funeral parlor.