The Oklahoman Theatre at Hobart is included on a list of theaters designed by architect Leonard H. Bailey that appeared in the October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald-World.
The October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald World lists the State Theatre in Flint as one of several houses designed by architect George J. Bachmann.
A section listing theater architects appeared in the October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald World, and the Fox Theatre in Everett was listed as the work of Seattle architect William Aitken.
This web page with a history of Fort Collins from 1900-1919 says that “[t]he Empress was a one-story brick structure with a facade with two central double door entrances, clerestory windows, and an overhanging hood sheltering the entrance area of the theater.” The building now at this location is brick, but looks very modern and is two stories tall, so the Empress building must have been either altered, or demolished and replaced with a new building.
The Empress Theatre in Fort Collins changed hands in 1927, according to this item from the July 15 issue of The Film Daily:
“Opposition Bought at Ft. Collins
“Fort Collins, Colo. — Frank Fairchild, Max Kohn and Gus Kohn, who operate the Lyric, have taken over the Empress. The house is closed for remodeling.”
The September 15 issue mentioned the theater again, but said that its name was being changed:
“Change Theater Name
“Fort Collins, Colo. — The Empress, which is being remodeled by the new owner, C.&F. Amusement Co., proprietor of the Lyric and the America, will be renamed the New America.”
The September 23 issue had this item:
“Reopen Colorado House
“Fort Collins, Colo. — The New America has reopened after being closed three months for extensive alterations.”
The name C.&F. Amusement Company in the September 15 item makes me suspect that the July 15 item had misspelled the name Cohn as Kohn, and this in turn makes me wonder if a Gus and Max Cohn in Fort Collins were the same Gus and Max Cohn who had, in the 1910s, been connected with the Bell Circuit of theaters in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Lyric Theatre that C.&F. operated in 1927 was not the house currently listed here as the Lyric Cinema Cafe, but an earlier house that was apparently located at 137 E. Mountain Avenue. It was in operation at least as early as 1917.
As for the Empress still being listed in the 1928 Film Daily Yearbook, when the name had been changed the previous year, I can only surmise that the editors of that publication didn’t read The Film Daily. Perhaps they mistrusted it because of its frequent misspellings.
Multiple sources indicate that the Lyric Theatre was adjacent to its replacement, the Blue Fox Theatre, but none of them say which side it was on. The Lyric moved at least once, a move being reported in the August 5, 1909, issue of the Idaho County Free Press.
Gertrude Wagner’s obituary says that she and her husband, Al, moved to Grangeville in 1927. The last location of the Lyric had a Wurlitzer organ installed in 1928, according to PSTOS. It was removed in 1931.
The report on the opening of the Opera House in Clarksburg that appeared in the June 29, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World gives the house an even larger seating capacity than the other sources I’ve seen:
“Jack Marks Opens Opera House
“Is a 1,400-Seat House in Clarksburg, a Town of 11,000 Population and Cost $150,000.
“ONE of the finest motion picture theaters in the South threw open its doors on Monday, June 10, when a special invitation performance was followed by the
first public showing of Goldwyn’s ‘Joan of Plattsburg,’ starring Mabel Normand, in Jack Marks’s new $150,000 cinema palace, the Opera House, at Clarksburg, W. Va. The Opera House succeeds as the premier screen theater of Clarksburg the Orpheum, also built and owned by Mr. Marks.
“Clarksburg, with 11,000 population, points with a show of pardonable pride to the Opera House. Its seating capacity is 1,400, 800 of which is on the main floor. Every seat in the house is 22 inches wide, insuring the maximum of comfort for patrons. The stage is 40 by 70 feet, big enough to accommodate any road attraction, no matter how pretentious. There are fourteen dressing rooms and one large chorus room, big enough for seventy-five members of a company.
“The lobby is gorgeously wrought. It is finished in Italian marble, with a floor of black and white tile. The screen is of gold fibre, adjusted to a throw of 115 feet from two motor-driven Simplex machines installed in a concrete projection booth 14 feet square. All of the seats are leather upholstered and there is not a post in the house.
“Music will be supplied by an orchestra and a large organ. The house is decorated throughout A pea green velour curtain covers in ivory and pale green the big asbestos drop.
“The Opera House is the twenty-fourth amusement place
Mr. Marks has either built or owned or both. He began in the show business at Anderson, Ind., with a house seating 198. From that time success followed success. His Orpheum at Clarksburg has shown more than 700 pictures to satisfied audiences.”
The only photo of the Moore Opera House I’ve found online is this one unfortunately marred by a digital watermark and located on a web site with pop-up ads.
There were plans to remodel the Bijou Theatre in 1918, according to this item in the May 4 issue of The Moving Picture World:
“ANDERSON, S. C. — Bijou theater has plans by Casey & Fant for improvements to theater to include removal of second balcony, redecoration of interior, making screen fourteen feet square, installing ventilating and heating systems and indirect lighting.”
Joseph Huntley Casey and Charles William Fant Sr. were Anderson’s leading architects of the period.
Alan: Such discrepancies often arise from the fact that old theaters are likely to be reseated at some point in their history, reducing their original capacity in order to provide more leg room and, sometimes, wider seats. But then, both figures might come from The Film Daily Yearbook, which is not always the most reliable source, but it is often the only source we’ve got. Personally, looking at the size of the auditorium in Google’s satellite view, I’d have guessed that this house opened with more than 700 seats.
The M&S circuit took over this house in 1922, according to this item from the March 18 issue of Real Estate Record and Builders Guide:
“Leases a New East Side Theatre
“The newly organized New Law Theatre Corporation, having for directors B. and C. Mayer and L. Schneider, leased for a term of 10 years the 2-sty theatre building, 40.0x70, at 23-27 Second av. M. D. Bohrar, attorney, represents the new company.”
The January 14 issue of the same publication had noted that, on January 4, the M&S circuit had bought the theater at 13-17 Second Avenue (the Woolworth Theatre, later called the Majestic.)
The name of the street is Gasser Drive. The extensive development the theater is part of is controlled by the Peter A. and Vernice H. Gasser Foundation, and Cinemark leases the property. The 2,095-seat multiplex opened on November 9, 2012.
The architect of record is Kip E. Daniel, managing director and principal of the architecture division of The Beck Group, an integrated design and construction company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Sacramento-based LPAS Architecture + Design served as site architects.
This PDF has a drawing, floor plans, and construction details of the theater.
According to this article in Boxoffice of August 30, 1971, the BremenTowne Theatre opened as a single-screen house. There is a photo of the 1,023-seat auditorium. The house was designed by the architectural firm of Robert Taylor & Associates.
For what it’s worth, newspaper articles from 1971 also call the house the BremenTowne Theatre, spelled and capitalized exactly the way Boxoffice did it. A Chicago Tribune article from as late as January 19, 1994, still called it the Brementowne Theater.
Both CinemaTour and our description say that the theater was moved to the other side of the mall and rebuilt as a quad at some point. DeadMalls has a page for the Brementown Mall which says pretty much the same thing, but it also says that the Mall opened in 1973, which means the theater would have predated it by two years.
The exterior photo and an architectural drawing illustrating the Boxoffice article show an outside entrance to the theater, so I suspect that DeadMalls is right about the mall having been built in 1973. Whether the original theater building was demolished or incorporated into the mall and converted to another use, I don’t know. All the information available on the Internet is pretty sketchy.
If the theater did move from the west end of the mall to the east end when the mall was built, then we actually have two entirely different theaters of the same name here. The house that opened in 1971 was a big, impressive theater. It would have been terribly wasteful for it to have been demolished, or even converted to another use, after only a couple of years, but it looks like that might be what happened.
The August 30, 1971, Boxoffice article about the addition of a second auditorium to the Chris-Town Theatre, which I cited in an earlier comment, can be seen online at this link. From the photo on the first page of the article, as well as various parts of the text, I get the impression that the Chris-Town 1 and Chris-Town 2 didn’t share any common areas inside, though the article never explicitly says that this was the case.
As I noted earlier, architects Pearson, Wuesthoff & Skinner designed the Chris-Town 2.
This article from Boxoffice of August 30, 1971, tells of plans for Holiday Theatres 3-6, and features a drawing of the proposed house. It says that the four-screen expansion had been planned by Denver theater designer Mel C. Glatz.
The 1972 article that Tinseltoes linked to earlier has two photos of the quad as it had been completed. That article also says that the multiplex was to be expanded again, with the addition of four more screens, but as it is still listed here as the Holiday Six I guess that second expansion was never carried out.
The Bruton Terrace IV Theatre was featured in this single-page article in Boxoffice of August 30, 1971. There are four photos. The 1,500-seat quad, operated by Texas Cinema Corporation, was designed by architect Charles Taylor.
Showcase Cinemas 4 & 5 were featured in this single-page article from Boxoffice of August 30, 1971. There are photos of the box office and concession stand. The article doesn’t specifically say if the new twin was a separate building unconnected to the earlier three screens, but I get the impression that it was. For one thing, the concession stand looked just about big enough to serve the 1,424 seats of the twin, and no more.
An article about the ABC Cinema was featured in the “Modern Theatre” section of Boxoffice on August 30, 1971. On opening, the single-screen house had 700 seats. The article confirms John Rowland Thompson (John R. Thompson & Associates) as the architect of this theater.
Also, Movie Tavern’s official page for this house currently lists it with only four screens, not five.
Here is a clickable link to the 1971 Boxoffice article kornpopper76 cited about the conversion of the Cooper 70 into a triplex. The seating capacity of the Cooper 1-2-3 was 1,656, with 832 seats in the original theater and 406 and 418 in Cinemas 2 and 3, respectively. Theater designer Mel C. Glatz collaborated with the architectural firm of Knight & Rorman on the expansion project.
Hhc632: I’m not from Colorado Springs, but could the theater you recall be the Cinema 70, located on Chelton Road just off of East Platte?
As for the multiplex at the mall, the only one we have listed is Picture Show at Citadel Crossing, which is actually across the street and apparently didn’t open until the early 1990s, so it probably isn’t the one you remember. I’ve seen a couple of references to a theater having operated in the mall in the 1970s, but haven’t found any details about it, other than that it has been closed and probably demolished for the expansion of a department store. It isn’t listed at Cinema Treasures yet.
In a 1921 telephone directory, 39 N. Oak Street was listed as the address of the Arcade Theatre, featuring moving pictures. That year, Mt. Carmel also had the Valentine Theatre, at 14 S. Oak, and the Theatorium, at 112 S. Oak, both also moving picture houses. There might have been other theaters that didn’t have telephones yet.
The address of the Lyric Restaurant, still located in the former theater, is 33 W. Center Street. Here is a Google Street View, since ours isn’t currently working.
The Lyric Theatre was noted in the “Among the Picture Theaters” feature of The Moving Picture World for March 22, 1913 (scan here). The house had been recently built for owner-operator Richard Dabb, on the site of his earlier theater of the same name.
The Oklahoman Theatre at Hobart is included on a list of theaters designed by architect Leonard H. Bailey that appeared in the October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald-World.
The October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald-World listed the Michigan Theatre in Flint as having been designed by architect George J. Bachmann.
The October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald World lists the State Theatre in Flint as one of several houses designed by architect George J. Bachmann.
A section listing theater architects appeared in the October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald World, and the Fox Theatre in Everett was listed as the work of Seattle architect William Aitken.
This web page with a history of Fort Collins from 1900-1919 says that “[t]he Empress was a one-story brick structure with a facade with two central double door entrances, clerestory windows, and an overhanging hood sheltering the entrance area of the theater.” The building now at this location is brick, but looks very modern and is two stories tall, so the Empress building must have been either altered, or demolished and replaced with a new building.
This history of Fort Collins from 1900-1919 mentions an earlier Lyric Theatre, which was apparently located at 137 E. Mountain Avenue.
The Empress Theatre in Fort Collins changed hands in 1927, according to this item from the July 15 issue of The Film Daily:
The September 15 issue mentioned the theater again, but said that its name was being changed:The September 23 issue had this item:The name C.&F. Amusement Company in the September 15 item makes me suspect that the July 15 item had misspelled the name Cohn as Kohn, and this in turn makes me wonder if a Gus and Max Cohn in Fort Collins were the same Gus and Max Cohn who had, in the 1910s, been connected with the Bell Circuit of theaters in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Lyric Theatre that C.&F. operated in 1927 was not the house currently listed here as the Lyric Cinema Cafe, but an earlier house that was apparently located at 137 E. Mountain Avenue. It was in operation at least as early as 1917.As for the Empress still being listed in the 1928 Film Daily Yearbook, when the name had been changed the previous year, I can only surmise that the editors of that publication didn’t read The Film Daily. Perhaps they mistrusted it because of its frequent misspellings.
Multiple sources indicate that the Lyric Theatre was adjacent to its replacement, the Blue Fox Theatre, but none of them say which side it was on. The Lyric moved at least once, a move being reported in the August 5, 1909, issue of the Idaho County Free Press.
Gertrude Wagner’s obituary says that she and her husband, Al, moved to Grangeville in 1927. The last location of the Lyric had a Wurlitzer organ installed in 1928, according to PSTOS. It was removed in 1931.
The report on the opening of the Opera House in Clarksburg that appeared in the June 29, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World gives the house an even larger seating capacity than the other sources I’ve seen:
The only photo of the Moore Opera House I’ve found online is this one unfortunately marred by a digital watermark and located on a web site with pop-up ads.There were plans to remodel the Bijou Theatre in 1918, according to this item in the May 4 issue of The Moving Picture World:
Joseph Huntley Casey and Charles William Fant Sr. were Anderson’s leading architects of the period.Alan: Such discrepancies often arise from the fact that old theaters are likely to be reseated at some point in their history, reducing their original capacity in order to provide more leg room and, sometimes, wider seats. But then, both figures might come from The Film Daily Yearbook, which is not always the most reliable source, but it is often the only source we’ve got. Personally, looking at the size of the auditorium in Google’s satellite view, I’d have guessed that this house opened with more than 700 seats.
The M&S circuit took over this house in 1922, according to this item from the March 18 issue of Real Estate Record and Builders Guide:
The January 14 issue of the same publication had noted that, on January 4, the M&S circuit had bought the theater at 13-17 Second Avenue (the Woolworth Theatre, later called the Majestic.)The architect of record for the Cinemark Station Park XD 14 at Farmington is Kip E. Daniel of The Beck Group.
The name of the street is Gasser Drive. The extensive development the theater is part of is controlled by the Peter A. and Vernice H. Gasser Foundation, and Cinemark leases the property. The 2,095-seat multiplex opened on November 9, 2012.
The architect of record is Kip E. Daniel, managing director and principal of the architecture division of The Beck Group, an integrated design and construction company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Sacramento-based LPAS Architecture + Design served as site architects.
This PDF has a drawing, floor plans, and construction details of the theater.
The architect of record for the Cinemark 18 at Pittsburgh Mills is Kip E. Daniel of The Beck Group.
According to this article in Boxoffice of August 30, 1971, the BremenTowne Theatre opened as a single-screen house. There is a photo of the 1,023-seat auditorium. The house was designed by the architectural firm of Robert Taylor & Associates.
For what it’s worth, newspaper articles from 1971 also call the house the BremenTowne Theatre, spelled and capitalized exactly the way Boxoffice did it. A Chicago Tribune article from as late as January 19, 1994, still called it the Brementowne Theater.
Both CinemaTour and our description say that the theater was moved to the other side of the mall and rebuilt as a quad at some point. DeadMalls has a page for the Brementown Mall which says pretty much the same thing, but it also says that the Mall opened in 1973, which means the theater would have predated it by two years.
The exterior photo and an architectural drawing illustrating the Boxoffice article show an outside entrance to the theater, so I suspect that DeadMalls is right about the mall having been built in 1973. Whether the original theater building was demolished or incorporated into the mall and converted to another use, I don’t know. All the information available on the Internet is pretty sketchy.
If the theater did move from the west end of the mall to the east end when the mall was built, then we actually have two entirely different theaters of the same name here. The house that opened in 1971 was a big, impressive theater. It would have been terribly wasteful for it to have been demolished, or even converted to another use, after only a couple of years, but it looks like that might be what happened.
The August 30, 1971, Boxoffice article about the addition of a second auditorium to the Chris-Town Theatre, which I cited in an earlier comment, can be seen online at this link. From the photo on the first page of the article, as well as various parts of the text, I get the impression that the Chris-Town 1 and Chris-Town 2 didn’t share any common areas inside, though the article never explicitly says that this was the case.
As I noted earlier, architects Pearson, Wuesthoff & Skinner designed the Chris-Town 2.
This article from Boxoffice of August 30, 1971, tells of plans for Holiday Theatres 3-6, and features a drawing of the proposed house. It says that the four-screen expansion had been planned by Denver theater designer Mel C. Glatz.
The 1972 article that Tinseltoes linked to earlier has two photos of the quad as it had been completed. That article also says that the multiplex was to be expanded again, with the addition of four more screens, but as it is still listed here as the Holiday Six I guess that second expansion was never carried out.
The Bruton Terrace IV Theatre was featured in this single-page article in Boxoffice of August 30, 1971. There are four photos. The 1,500-seat quad, operated by Texas Cinema Corporation, was designed by architect Charles Taylor.
Showcase Cinemas 4 & 5 were featured in this single-page article from Boxoffice of August 30, 1971. There are photos of the box office and concession stand. The article doesn’t specifically say if the new twin was a separate building unconnected to the earlier three screens, but I get the impression that it was. For one thing, the concession stand looked just about big enough to serve the 1,424 seats of the twin, and no more.
An article about the ABC Cinema was featured in the “Modern Theatre” section of Boxoffice on August 30, 1971. On opening, the single-screen house had 700 seats. The article confirms John Rowland Thompson (John R. Thompson & Associates) as the architect of this theater.
Also, Movie Tavern’s official page for this house currently lists it with only four screens, not five.
Here is a clickable link to the 1971 Boxoffice article kornpopper76 cited about the conversion of the Cooper 70 into a triplex. The seating capacity of the Cooper 1-2-3 was 1,656, with 832 seats in the original theater and 406 and 418 in Cinemas 2 and 3, respectively. Theater designer Mel C. Glatz collaborated with the architectural firm of Knight & Rorman on the expansion project.
Hhc632: I’m not from Colorado Springs, but could the theater you recall be the Cinema 70, located on Chelton Road just off of East Platte?
As for the multiplex at the mall, the only one we have listed is Picture Show at Citadel Crossing, which is actually across the street and apparently didn’t open until the early 1990s, so it probably isn’t the one you remember. I’ve seen a couple of references to a theater having operated in the mall in the 1970s, but haven’t found any details about it, other than that it has been closed and probably demolished for the expansion of a department store. It isn’t listed at Cinema Treasures yet.
In a 1921 telephone directory, 39 N. Oak Street was listed as the address of the Arcade Theatre, featuring moving pictures. That year, Mt. Carmel also had the Valentine Theatre, at 14 S. Oak, and the Theatorium, at 112 S. Oak, both also moving picture houses. There might have been other theaters that didn’t have telephones yet.
The address of the Lyric Restaurant, still located in the former theater, is 33 W. Center Street. Here is a Google Street View, since ours isn’t currently working.
The Lyric Theatre was noted in the “Among the Picture Theaters” feature of The Moving Picture World for March 22, 1913 (scan here). The house had been recently built for owner-operator Richard Dabb, on the site of his earlier theater of the same name.