Windsor (or New Windsor, as it is sometimes styled) is absent from the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, but that is most likely an oversight. For what it’s worth, the only theater listed at Windsor in the 1926 FDY was called the Grand, for which no seating capacity was given. However, the April 26, 1924 issue of Exhibitors Herald featured a capsule movie review from George Roberts of the Cozy Theatre, New Windsor.
The Cozy must have been the unnamed theater that was being auctioned off for Mr. Roberts that year, as noted in this ad from the classified section of the September 18 issue ofExhibitors Herald:
“OPERA HOUSE AND MOVING PICTURE THEATRE at Auction at New Windsor, Ill. Building 110x28 ft. on Main street, A-l location. Complete equipment. Simplex machines. 250 chair capacity. 700 population in rich farming community. Best in Middle West. Auction held at premises Friday, September 17th, at one p. m. Possession January 1st, 1927, or immediately if purchaser assumes film contracts. 10% cash. Balance on possession. For particulars write or wire Geo. W. Roberts, Owner, or E. Boultinghouse & Son, Auctioneers, Aledo, Illinois.”
It’s probably too late to write or wire Messrs. Roberts or Boultinghouse about the details, but the dimensions of the building do just about match those of the theater on the Sanborn map– though probably a large percentage of the storefronts of that period did. It seems likely enough though that whoever bought the Cozy renamed it the Grand.
In the 1929 FDY the theater at Windsor was a 300-seeat house, again called the Cozy. In 1934 it was listed as a silent house called the Family, and was closed. In 1935 it was open again and called the Windsor. It was still operating as the Windsor in 1940, 1945, and 1946. Throughout this period it is listed with 300 seats. In the 1947 FDY the Windsor is joined by a 275-seat house called the Dutchess [sic], but the town being a small as it was I suspect the Windsor had merely been renovated and renamed and the Year Book just didn’t keep their records up-to-date. There is no way this tiny town could have supported two theaters in the 1940s, or probably any time in its history.
In any case, if the Cozy was the house that had been at 1218 Main in 1913 and 1922, then that was probably where Windsor’s movie houses were into the 1940s, at least.
The Temple Theatre was advertised in the Cass City Chronicle in the issue of December 10, 1954. The Strand already had CinemaScope equipment at that time, and the Cass Theatre had just installed it, but the Temple did not. The Temple was clearly the “B” house by then.
A house called the Illinois Theatre is listed (alone) at Newman in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. It listed neither address nor seating capacity, so I don’t know that it was this house.
A booklet published for the Centennial of Newman in 1957 (scan at Internet Archive) says that a new Opera House was built there in 1904, following the destruction of the old one by fire. This theater could have been that 1904 opera house.
A movie house called the Illinois Theatre was listed at Newman in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The centennial booklet makes references to a Mr. E. C. Root having bought a moving picture machine and shown movies in town in 1910, though it doesn’t say where, and there is another reference from the same year saying “Tom’s up-to-date theatre was showing the latest silent movies for 5 and 10 cents admission.” The booklet doesn’t say who “Tom” was, and makes no other references to his theater, but as the line is immediately followed by one talking about a stage show at the Opera House I get the impression that they were different theaters.
A Grand Theatre (airdome not mentioned) is one of three movie houses listed at Oakland in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.
The November 18, 1916 issue of Moving Picture World also mentions the Grand: “Oakland, Ill.—H. R. Barricklaw, a former exhibitor here, has purchased the Grand Theater.”
It’s possible that there was also an indoor Grand Theatre, as a house of that name with 250 seats is the only theater listed at Oakland in the 1926 through 1929 FDYs. Oakland vanishes from the year book from 1930 through 1933, with the exception of 1932 when the Grand is listed again, but as a silent house which is closed. The 150-seat Oakland Theatre appears in the 1934 edition. If there was an indoor Grand it’s possible that it was downsized and re-opened as the Oakland sometime in 1933.
Of the three theaters listed at Oakland in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory one entry says “OAKLAND — Lyric Theatre, cor. Pike St.” No location were given for the other two houses, the Grand Theatre and the Pastime Theatre.
Dismantled in 1957. That year, the December 21 issue of Boxoffice reported that “Mr. and Mrs. Cecil Allen recently sold all of the equipment for their Oakland Theatre to an equipment buyer and theatre owner. The house had been dark since August 11.”
The November 13 issue of Motion Picture Exhibitor had reported Cecil Allen’s offer to sell the theater building and its equipment to the local Chamber of Commerce. A lost opportunity for Oakland.
An item datelined Arcola in the October 31, 1908 Moving Picture World said that “Mr. Tait is preparing to open a moving picture show in the Lyons room on Main Street.” I don’t know if that was this house or not. The Lyons family has been prominent in Arcola for a long time and have had their name on a lot of things. It might be that one of them owned the clothing store that occupied this space in 1907.
The August 13, 1921 MPW suggest that the house was still in operation then with this item: “ARCOLA, ILL.— Samuel Sholom has purchased Olympic Theatre and leased it to A. C. Metcalf.”
Konrad Schiecke’s Historic Movie Theatres in Illinois says that the Ritz Theatre in Arcola opened as the Arcola Theatre in 1928. It is listed (with no seating capacity given) as a “New” theater in the 1928 FDY, alongside the old 800-seat Arcola, and as the 400-seat Arcola Theatre in 1929. Oddly, the Arcola is listed as a silent house in 1932 and as silent and closed in 1933. It appears as the Ritz Theatre in the 1934 FDY, finally equipped for sound.
The Arcolan Theatre and Olympian Theatre are both listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.
Konrad Schiecke’s Historic Movie Theatres in Illinois says that the Ritz Theatre in Arcola opened as the Arcola Theatre in 1928, so that was probably the last year in which this house operated, at least under that name.
The 1928 FDY lists the 800 seat Arcola (almost certainly this house) and a “New” theater with no capacity listed, and the 1929 edition lists the Arcola with 400 seats (the capacity of the later Ritz) and a house called the Empress, with no capacity listed, but it was probably the old Arcolan/Arcola renamed. Like many smaller towns Arcola vanishes from the 1930 FDY, but it is back with the 400-seat Arcola and the Empress (no capacity listed, but marked as a silent house) in 1931. From 1932 on only the Arcola (or Ritz) is listed.
I wonder if this could have been the Grand Theatre, a West Frankfort house I’ve found mentioned only in disaster-related journals in 1915? It burned on May 4 that year, with an estimated loss of $20,000 according to one of the publications.
Boxoffice of March 25, 1974 reported that bricks had fallen from the west wall of the Strand Theatre in West Frankfort. The house had been shuttered since October, 1973, and had ben the towns' last operating movie theater.
The 1925-built Cameo Theatre is listed in the 1929 FDY with 800 seats. It was one of six movie houses listed for the two Bristols (no British euphemism intended) that year. The NRHP registration form for the Bristol Commercial Historic District says the Cameo’s façade was remodeled in 1950 and again in 1970. Since the form was prepared there has been another major remodeling of the façade, and the current Art Deco look is entirely ahistorical, having been created for the 2021 reopening of the house.
Since reopening, the Cameo has launched a new official web site. It gives the current seating capacity as 510.
If the caption of a photo on page 79 of the book “Bristol,” by George Stone (Google Books preview) is correct, then rivest266’s comment immediately above actually applies to the theater that was next door to the Isis, at 503 State Street, which we have listed as the State Theatre, but which was earlier called the Eagle.
The NRHP registration form for the Bristol Commercial Historic District has a paragraph each for the buildings at 503 and 505 State Street, and does say that the State was at 503, and treats the two structures, both built in 1890, as two separate buildings. However, while the two have different facades, Google’s satellite view shows that they share a single roof, undivided by the common wall we would expect with two separate buildings. I suspect that the researchers for the historic district nomination might not have dug deeply enough into the building’s history, and I think we should consider the possibility that the State, with its eventual listed seating capacity of 750, actually occupied the sites of both the Eagle and the Isis, both of which were smaller.
In any case, while the Isis was not listed in the 1926 FDY it is listed in the 1929 edition, with a capacity of 650, and though the Eagle is also listed that year, the book gives no seating capacity for it. Both houses are named in the listing for the Goebel Theatres company (the others were the Columbia and Cameo) in the 1929 Bristol City Directory, but only the Columbia, Cameo and Isis get individual listings, and while the managers and projectionists of the Columbia, Isis and Cameo are listed at their home addresses, no such personnel are listed for the Eagle. From this I would surmise that the Isis was still in operation at 505 in 1929, but the Eagle, at 503, though still extant, was closed. Tellingly, the addresses in the 1929 directory for Goebel Theatres and the Isis were the same, 505 State Street.
Here is a link to the official web web site of the Woodward Theater. Though now primarily a live music venue and event center, the house is equipped to show movies and has hosted several film events since its renovation in 2014 (see the “Film Exhibitions” section on the site’s “Event Venue” menu.)
The October 22, 1949 issue of Boxoffice said that the 500-seat Roxy Theatre, being built at West Frankfort for the Fox Midwest circuit, was slated to open Thanksgiving Day. The item said the house was at the site of the old Rex Theatre, and construction had begun in May, 1948, after the building’s previous tenants had vacated.
So the 1928 theater might have been in the the building built for the New Grand in 1924. Though only the Family was listed in the 1926 FDY, both the Family and Grand Theatres were listed in the 1927, 1928 and 1929 editions, and the whole town vanished from the 1930 edition. Trade journal reports indicate that the Grand changed hands at least twice within a few months of opening, so it must have been struggling. The 1926 FDY lists houses called the Family Theatre in both West Frankfort and Frankfort Heights, but doesn’t list the New Grand.
A bit more confusion arises from a report in the July, 1915 issue of Safety Engineering that a fire had damaged the Grand Theatre in West Frankfort on May 15. The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists only a house called the Arc Theatre at West Frankfort and none at Frankfort Heights. The book did miss a lot of theaters though, so it doesn’t mean the Family wasn’t in operation then, or that the Arc didn’t have local competition.
The Strand, Rex, and State Theatres in West Frankfort were all mentioned in the February 23, 1929 issue of Universal Weekly. There is some chance that the State might have been a house opened in 1924 as the Majestic Theatre by William Muhlenbach and sold by him to the Reed, Yemm & Hayes Circuit in 1927, according to the July 5 issue of Film Daily that year. Reed, Yemm & Hayes also owned the Rex Theatre at that time. The Majestic was still listed in the 1929 FDY. However, the 400-seat Majestic would have needed significant alterations to reach the State’s capacity of 698.
A James Clayton, of the Strand Theatre at West Frankfort, was publishing capsule movie reviews in Exhibitors Herald at least as early as the issue of December 30, 1922. I suspect that an item in the July 24, 1918 Film Daily pertained to the Star/Strand. It said simply that Frank Lowry, owner of the Princess Theatre at Salem, Illinois, planned to build a 900-seat movie theater at West Frankfort. The timing is right for the project to have been in operation as the Star in 1919.
This house was undoubtedly on E. Main Street, as the Frankfort Heights area is that direction from downtown West Frankfort. Frankfort Heights was the original town of Frankfort, founded in the 1810s. In the late 19th century a new north-south railroad line bypassed the town to its west and local businesses began moving to a new townsite adjacent to the tracks, and that became the nucleus of West Frankfort.
An April 4, 1925 article in Exhibitors Herald noted that two small theaters in Frankfort Heights had escaped serious damage from a storm that had recently destroyed movie houses in several towns in the region. It didn’t give the names of the theaters, but one must have been the Family and the other a theater called the New Grand, which the February 23, 1924 issue of The Reel Journal had said was slated to open on March 1. The New Grand might have been a renovation of a house called the American Theatre, which the February 3 Reel Journal had said had been temporarily closed.
Theatre #! was renamed the Hill Theatre sometime before closing on July 1, 1950. In 1951, the building was sold to the Baptist church, which moved it to a different location for use as a sanctuary.
An article about a nuclear accident that took place in Los Alamos on August 21, 1945, indicates that Theatre #2 was in operation by that date. The theater was used for religious services and sometimes for meetings related to the work of the Manhattan Project as well.
The 280-seat Conway Theatre makes its first appearance in Film Daily Year Book in 1946, suggesting a 1945 opening. Also listed is the 225-seat Opera House, and I don’t know that we can rule out a double-listing of a remodeled and renamed house. 1945 was a difficult year to open a new theater, given the strict ongoing limits on construction that prevailed for several years after the war. The Opera House was in operation by 1914, and the 1922 Cahn guide listed it with 250 seats, though FDY always listed it with 225 seats.
Here’s an item from the April 5, 1919 issue of Moving Picture World:
“When the moving picture theatre at Midland, Ontario, owned by A. Bugg, was destroyed by fire, the Regal Films, Limited, Toronto, lost twelve reels of pictures, including a print of ‘My Four Years in Germany.’”
Information in the summer, 2013 issue of the Huronia Museum’s newsletter (PDF here) indicates that the Model was in operation by 1915 at the location where the Capitol Theatre would later be, in a building that had been built around 1900.
The Model Theatre and Arthur Bugg had both been mentioned in the April 6, 1918 issue of Canadian Moving Picture Digest. Earlier, the house had been operated by someone else, as the July 8, 1916 issue of Motion Picture News had mentioned “…Lieut. Bill Duncan, for many years in charge of the Model theatre, of Midland, Ont…..”
The restored Model Theatre was still operated by Arthur Bugg in 1929, when they were mentioned together in the March 23 issue of Universal Weekly.
Windsor (or New Windsor, as it is sometimes styled) is absent from the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, but that is most likely an oversight. For what it’s worth, the only theater listed at Windsor in the 1926 FDY was called the Grand, for which no seating capacity was given. However, the April 26, 1924 issue of Exhibitors Herald featured a capsule movie review from George Roberts of the Cozy Theatre, New Windsor.
The Cozy must have been the unnamed theater that was being auctioned off for Mr. Roberts that year, as noted in this ad from the classified section of the September 18 issue ofExhibitors Herald:
It’s probably too late to write or wire Messrs. Roberts or Boultinghouse about the details, but the dimensions of the building do just about match those of the theater on the Sanborn map– though probably a large percentage of the storefronts of that period did. It seems likely enough though that whoever bought the Cozy renamed it the Grand.In the 1929 FDY the theater at Windsor was a 300-seeat house, again called the Cozy. In 1934 it was listed as a silent house called the Family, and was closed. In 1935 it was open again and called the Windsor. It was still operating as the Windsor in 1940, 1945, and 1946. Throughout this period it is listed with 300 seats. In the 1947 FDY the Windsor is joined by a 275-seat house called the Dutchess [sic], but the town being a small as it was I suspect the Windsor had merely been renovated and renamed and the Year Book just didn’t keep their records up-to-date. There is no way this tiny town could have supported two theaters in the 1940s, or probably any time in its history.
In any case, if the Cozy was the house that had been at 1218 Main in 1913 and 1922, then that was probably where Windsor’s movie houses were into the 1940s, at least.
The Temple Theatre was advertised in the Cass City Chronicle in the issue of December 10, 1954. The Strand already had CinemaScope equipment at that time, and the Cass Theatre had just installed it, but the Temple did not. The Temple was clearly the “B” house by then.
The Cass Theatre showed its first CinemaScope movie, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” on December 12, 1954.
A house called the Illinois Theatre is listed (alone) at Newman in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. It listed neither address nor seating capacity, so I don’t know that it was this house.
A booklet published for the Centennial of Newman in 1957 (scan at Internet Archive) says that a new Opera House was built there in 1904, following the destruction of the old one by fire. This theater could have been that 1904 opera house.
A movie house called the Illinois Theatre was listed at Newman in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The centennial booklet makes references to a Mr. E. C. Root having bought a moving picture machine and shown movies in town in 1910, though it doesn’t say where, and there is another reference from the same year saying “Tom’s up-to-date theatre was showing the latest silent movies for 5 and 10 cents admission.” The booklet doesn’t say who “Tom” was, and makes no other references to his theater, but as the line is immediately followed by one talking about a stage show at the Opera House I get the impression that they were different theaters.
A Grand Theatre (airdome not mentioned) is one of three movie houses listed at Oakland in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.
The November 18, 1916 issue of Moving Picture World also mentions the Grand: “Oakland, Ill.—H. R. Barricklaw, a former exhibitor here, has purchased the Grand Theater.”
It’s possible that there was also an indoor Grand Theatre, as a house of that name with 250 seats is the only theater listed at Oakland in the 1926 through 1929 FDYs. Oakland vanishes from the year book from 1930 through 1933, with the exception of 1932 when the Grand is listed again, but as a silent house which is closed. The 150-seat Oakland Theatre appears in the 1934 edition. If there was an indoor Grand it’s possible that it was downsized and re-opened as the Oakland sometime in 1933.
Of the three theaters listed at Oakland in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory one entry says “OAKLAND — Lyric Theatre, cor. Pike St.” No location were given for the other two houses, the Grand Theatre and the Pastime Theatre.
Dismantled in 1957. That year, the December 21 issue of Boxoffice reported that “Mr. and Mrs. Cecil Allen recently sold all of the equipment for their Oakland Theatre to an equipment buyer and theatre owner. The house had been dark since August 11.”
The November 13 issue of Motion Picture Exhibitor had reported Cecil Allen’s offer to sell the theater building and its equipment to the local Chamber of Commerce. A lost opportunity for Oakland.
An item datelined Arcola in the October 31, 1908 Moving Picture World said that “Mr. Tait is preparing to open a moving picture show in the Lyons room on Main Street.” I don’t know if that was this house or not. The Lyons family has been prominent in Arcola for a long time and have had their name on a lot of things. It might be that one of them owned the clothing store that occupied this space in 1907.
The August 13, 1921 MPW suggest that the house was still in operation then with this item: “ARCOLA, ILL.— Samuel Sholom has purchased Olympic Theatre and leased it to A. C. Metcalf.”
Konrad Schiecke’s Historic Movie Theatres in Illinois says that the Ritz Theatre in Arcola opened as the Arcola Theatre in 1928. It is listed (with no seating capacity given) as a “New” theater in the 1928 FDY, alongside the old 800-seat Arcola, and as the 400-seat Arcola Theatre in 1929. Oddly, the Arcola is listed as a silent house in 1932 and as silent and closed in 1933. It appears as the Ritz Theatre in the 1934 FDY, finally equipped for sound.
The Arcolan Theatre and Olympian Theatre are both listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.
Konrad Schiecke’s Historic Movie Theatres in Illinois says that the Ritz Theatre in Arcola opened as the Arcola Theatre in 1928, so that was probably the last year in which this house operated, at least under that name.
The 1928 FDY lists the 800 seat Arcola (almost certainly this house) and a “New” theater with no capacity listed, and the 1929 edition lists the Arcola with 400 seats (the capacity of the later Ritz) and a house called the Empress, with no capacity listed, but it was probably the old Arcolan/Arcola renamed. Like many smaller towns Arcola vanishes from the 1930 FDY, but it is back with the 400-seat Arcola and the Empress (no capacity listed, but marked as a silent house) in 1931. From 1932 on only the Arcola (or Ritz) is listed.
I wonder if this could have been the Grand Theatre, a West Frankfort house I’ve found mentioned only in disaster-related journals in 1915? It burned on May 4 that year, with an estimated loss of $20,000 according to one of the publications.
Boxoffice of March 25, 1974 reported that bricks had fallen from the west wall of the Strand Theatre in West Frankfort. The house had been shuttered since October, 1973, and had ben the towns' last operating movie theater.
The 1925-built Cameo Theatre is listed in the 1929 FDY with 800 seats. It was one of six movie houses listed for the two Bristols (no British euphemism intended) that year. The NRHP registration form for the Bristol Commercial Historic District says the Cameo’s façade was remodeled in 1950 and again in 1970. Since the form was prepared there has been another major remodeling of the façade, and the current Art Deco look is entirely ahistorical, having been created for the 2021 reopening of the house.
Since reopening, the Cameo has launched a new official web site. It gives the current seating capacity as 510.
If the caption of a photo on page 79 of the book “Bristol,” by George Stone (Google Books preview) is correct, then rivest266’s comment immediately above actually applies to the theater that was next door to the Isis, at 503 State Street, which we have listed as the State Theatre, but which was earlier called the Eagle.
The NRHP registration form for the Bristol Commercial Historic District has a paragraph each for the buildings at 503 and 505 State Street, and does say that the State was at 503, and treats the two structures, both built in 1890, as two separate buildings. However, while the two have different facades, Google’s satellite view shows that they share a single roof, undivided by the common wall we would expect with two separate buildings. I suspect that the researchers for the historic district nomination might not have dug deeply enough into the building’s history, and I think we should consider the possibility that the State, with its eventual listed seating capacity of 750, actually occupied the sites of both the Eagle and the Isis, both of which were smaller.
In any case, while the Isis was not listed in the 1926 FDY it is listed in the 1929 edition, with a capacity of 650, and though the Eagle is also listed that year, the book gives no seating capacity for it. Both houses are named in the listing for the Goebel Theatres company (the others were the Columbia and Cameo) in the 1929 Bristol City Directory, but only the Columbia, Cameo and Isis get individual listings, and while the managers and projectionists of the Columbia, Isis and Cameo are listed at their home addresses, no such personnel are listed for the Eagle. From this I would surmise that the Isis was still in operation at 505 in 1929, but the Eagle, at 503, though still extant, was closed. Tellingly, the addresses in the 1929 directory for Goebel Theatres and the Isis were the same, 505 State Street.
Here is a link to the official web web site of the Woodward Theater. Though now primarily a live music venue and event center, the house is equipped to show movies and has hosted several film events since its renovation in 2014 (see the “Film Exhibitions” section on the site’s “Event Venue” menu.)
The October 22, 1949 issue of Boxoffice said that the 500-seat Roxy Theatre, being built at West Frankfort for the Fox Midwest circuit, was slated to open Thanksgiving Day. The item said the house was at the site of the old Rex Theatre, and construction had begun in May, 1948, after the building’s previous tenants had vacated.
So the 1928 theater might have been in the the building built for the New Grand in 1924. Though only the Family was listed in the 1926 FDY, both the Family and Grand Theatres were listed in the 1927, 1928 and 1929 editions, and the whole town vanished from the 1930 edition. Trade journal reports indicate that the Grand changed hands at least twice within a few months of opening, so it must have been struggling. The 1926 FDY lists houses called the Family Theatre in both West Frankfort and Frankfort Heights, but doesn’t list the New Grand.
A bit more confusion arises from a report in the July, 1915 issue of Safety Engineering that a fire had damaged the Grand Theatre in West Frankfort on May 15. The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists only a house called the Arc Theatre at West Frankfort and none at Frankfort Heights. The book did miss a lot of theaters though, so it doesn’t mean the Family wasn’t in operation then, or that the Arc didn’t have local competition.
The Strand, Rex, and State Theatres in West Frankfort were all mentioned in the February 23, 1929 issue of Universal Weekly. There is some chance that the State might have been a house opened in 1924 as the Majestic Theatre by William Muhlenbach and sold by him to the Reed, Yemm & Hayes Circuit in 1927, according to the July 5 issue of Film Daily that year. Reed, Yemm & Hayes also owned the Rex Theatre at that time. The Majestic was still listed in the 1929 FDY. However, the 400-seat Majestic would have needed significant alterations to reach the State’s capacity of 698.
A James Clayton, of the Strand Theatre at West Frankfort, was publishing capsule movie reviews in Exhibitors Herald at least as early as the issue of December 30, 1922. I suspect that an item in the July 24, 1918 Film Daily pertained to the Star/Strand. It said simply that Frank Lowry, owner of the Princess Theatre at Salem, Illinois, planned to build a 900-seat movie theater at West Frankfort. The timing is right for the project to have been in operation as the Star in 1919.
This house was undoubtedly on E. Main Street, as the Frankfort Heights area is that direction from downtown West Frankfort. Frankfort Heights was the original town of Frankfort, founded in the 1810s. In the late 19th century a new north-south railroad line bypassed the town to its west and local businesses began moving to a new townsite adjacent to the tracks, and that became the nucleus of West Frankfort.
An April 4, 1925 article in Exhibitors Herald noted that two small theaters in Frankfort Heights had escaped serious damage from a storm that had recently destroyed movie houses in several towns in the region. It didn’t give the names of the theaters, but one must have been the Family and the other a theater called the New Grand, which the February 23, 1924 issue of The Reel Journal had said was slated to open on March 1. The New Grand might have been a renovation of a house called the American Theatre, which the February 3 Reel Journal had said had been temporarily closed.
Theatre #! was renamed the Hill Theatre sometime before closing on July 1, 1950. In 1951, the building was sold to the Baptist church, which moved it to a different location for use as a sanctuary.
An article about a nuclear accident that took place in Los Alamos on August 21, 1945, indicates that Theatre #2 was in operation by that date. The theater was used for religious services and sometimes for meetings related to the work of the Manhattan Project as well.
The 280-seat Conway Theatre makes its first appearance in Film Daily Year Book in 1946, suggesting a 1945 opening. Also listed is the 225-seat Opera House, and I don’t know that we can rule out a double-listing of a remodeled and renamed house. 1945 was a difficult year to open a new theater, given the strict ongoing limits on construction that prevailed for several years after the war. The Opera House was in operation by 1914, and the 1922 Cahn guide listed it with 250 seats, though FDY always listed it with 225 seats.
Here’s an item from the April 5, 1919 issue of Moving Picture World:
Information in the summer, 2013 issue of the Huronia Museum’s newsletter (PDF here) indicates that the Model was in operation by 1915 at the location where the Capitol Theatre would later be, in a building that had been built around 1900.The Model Theatre and Arthur Bugg had both been mentioned in the April 6, 1918 issue of Canadian Moving Picture Digest. Earlier, the house had been operated by someone else, as the July 8, 1916 issue of Motion Picture News had mentioned “…Lieut. Bill Duncan, for many years in charge of the Model theatre, of Midland, Ont…..”
The restored Model Theatre was still operated by Arthur Bugg in 1929, when they were mentioned together in the March 23 issue of Universal Weekly.