The March 3, 1945, issue of Boxoffice had this ad for General Electric air conditioning which featured a cross-section of Proctor’s Theatre in Troy, where GE equipment had been installed in 1940.
In the January 23, 1919, issue of The Albany Evening Journal, 69 N.Pearl Street is given as the address of a movie house called The Annex.
The building has not been demolished, though. As of 2010, a sushi restaurant was renovating it. It had previously been an OTB shop. Currently, this is the address of what appears to be a nightclub called the Buddha Tea House. This is their Facebook page.
The building is supposed to be one of only two old commercial structures with cast iron fronts that survive in Albany.
There was at house called the Albany Theatre at least as early as 1892, and it was part of the Proctor vaudeville circuit after about 1900, but I don’t know if it was this house. It was supposed to have been designed by Francis H. Kimball, and I don’t think he did cast iron fronts. For now, this Albany Theatre looks to have been just a conversion of an existing building into a modest sized movie theater that was renamed the Albany sometime after 1919.
The Warrensburgh News of November 24, 1927, had an item about improvements to the Palace Theatre in Tupper Lake. The lobby had been doubled in size, the boxoffice moved to one side of the entrance to provide five exit doors instead of the previous two, the sidewalk had been rebuilt to eliminate stairs at the theater entrance, and a new marquee with eighty electric lights had been installed. The project had cost $5,000.
I have found references to a Mr. William A. Donovan being the operator of the Palace Theatre at Tupper Lake as early as 1915 and as late as 1931.
On October 21, 1968, the Watertown Times ran the obituary of Mrs. William A. Donovan, saying that since her marriage she had assisted her husband in the operation of Donovan’s studio gift shop and the State Theatre, so unless this Mr. Donovan was the son of the original owner, he must have operated this theater for more than half a century.
On April 5, 1923, Variety published a brief article that included this information: “Tupper Lake will be scene of picture opposition. A second house is being created by F. G. Pond, of Malone, backed by local capital.” I don’t know if Mr.Pond’s theater was built. In 1924, issues of Variety indicated that he was in financial trouble, and had been obliged to stop selling stock in his company that had intended to build theaters in several small towns upstate. In any case, the item indicates that, as of 1923, there was only one movie theater operating in Tupper Lake.
David Welling’s Cinema Houston attributes the design of the Almeda Theatre to the firm of MacKie & Kamrath. The Karl Kamrath Collection at the University of Texas, Austin, has one drawing of the Almeda Theatre, but the Interstate Theatre Collection at the Dallas Public Library has 13 sheets of plans for the Almeda, attributed to architects Raymond F. Smith of Dallas J. W. Denhart of Houston.
It’s possible that both firms worked on this house. I can’t find anything else about J. W. Denhart. Perhaps he worked in MacKie & Kamrath’s office? Maybe somebody in Texas can check the collections, especially the Interstate Collection, and see if they give any clues.
There are nine sheets of plans for the Wayside Theatre in the Interstate Theatre Collection at the Dallas Public Library. The Wayside Theatre was designed by Pettigrew & Worley.
Thirteen sheets of drawings for the Denton Theatre and a house called the Varsity Theatre are preserved in the Interstate Theatre Collection at the Dallas Public Library. The plans are by Dallas architect John Rowland Thompson, and are dated c1969. I don’t see a Varsity Theatre listed for Denton at Cinema Treasures. It was located on Hinkle Drive.
Plans for the Village Theatre preserved in the Interstate Theatre Collection at the Dallas Public Library were drawn by architects Fooshee & Cheek (Marion Fooshee and James B. Cheek.) The firm designed the Highland Park Village Shopping Center, which was established in 1929 and gradually expanded. Cheek’s friend, artist Reveau Bassett, painted the murals in the Village Theatre. I’m not sure if any of the murals have survived.
Does your browser have a “Find” feature? (I use Opera, and “Find” is in the drop-down menu of the “Edit” section at the top, but other browsers might be different.) If so, you can use it to search any plain text web page (such as this one.) It won’t find text in image formats such as .jpg or .png, or on Flash pages, or PDF files, but if you’ve got “Find” it will speed up searching pages such as the Interstate collection.
The single reference to Dunne is near the bottom of the page, and it says: “Dallas, Texas – Tower Theatre. Conversion of building at Elm St., Pacific and St. Paul. W. Scott Dunne, Arch. (2 sheets) August 10, 1936.”
I don’t think Interstate ever had a theater in Seguin, and that’s why it isn’t mentioned on that page. The collection is probably not exhaustive, though. There could have been quite a bit of stuff that was lost before the heap in the Majestic was salvaged.
If 100 N. Main Street is the correct address for the State Theatre, and if Kingfisher has not altered its numbering system since that address was published, then the theater had to have been at the south end of the block, probably on the parking lot next to what is now Snider’s Catering, which is at 102 N. Main (Royce was probably using “across the street” rather loosely.) Obviously, if that’s where it was then it has been demolished.
Regular members who submit pages for theaters don’t have the ability to alter them once they are posted. The theater editor is Ken Roe, and he makes all the changes.
Email to will reach him, but he’s very busy so his response might be slow.
The Grand Theatre is at 416 N. Oak Avenue, and is for sale.
The records of the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company, held by the University of Texas, show that Fort Worth architect A. B. Withers ordered the terra cotta for the Grand Theatre in Mineral Wells. As the records in the collection span the years 1914 to 1941, Withers had to have been the original architect, probably sometime around 1921 when the Estey organ was installed. I haven’t discovered who designed the streamline modern remodeling in 1948.
The theater was probably at 302 Neville. The first storefront would have been 300 and the storefront on the other side of the theater entrance would have been 304.
The timeline I linked to earlier mentions the first Lyric Theatre that opened on Main Street in 1913. It also mentions the H & M Shoe store at Heber and Neville Streets collapsing in a snowstorm on March 13, 1993. That must have been this theater’s building. The T-shaped intersection has only one other corner, and the building on it is quite old and still standing.
As Dunne died in 1937, before the classic theaters he designed came to be as widely appreciated as they are now, it’s possible that his papers were not preserved. Two pages of plans for the Tower Theatre in Houston are part of the Interstate Theatre Circuit collection at the Dallas Public Library, but I haven’t come across any references to any others that have survived.
Even now there are surprising gaps in the information available about Dunne. The Texas State Historical Association’s online Handbook of Texas has a page for Alfred C. Finn, with whom Dunne collaborated on the design of the Melba Theatre in Dallas in 1921, but there is no page for Dunne himself. He is mentioned on Finn’s page, and that’s it.
Jay C. Henry’s Architecture in Texas: 1895-1945 attributes the design of the Texas Theatre to Dunne, and the book was published by the University of Texas Press, so I would imagine it was well researched. I don’t have the book itself, and none of the libraries in my area have it, but you’d probably be able to find it in a library in Texas. If it is a scholarly book, as it appears to be from the Google Books preview, the author should cite his sources, and the source for his claim that Dunne designed the Texas should be there.
The DocSouth page for the 1930 Carolina Theatre on Tarboro Street doesn’t say anything about Erle Stillwell designing it. He did design the 1939 Carolina Theatre on Goldsboro Street that was later renamed the Colony Theatre.
The recent opening of A. J. Price’s Carolina Theatre, which later became the Drake Theatre, was noted in the June 2, 1930, issue of The Film Daily.
The Piety Theatre was destroyed by a fire on January 29, 1940. This web page about a building that across the street from the theater has a scan of a newspaper photo of the ruined movie house.
Here is a photo of the Joy Rio Theatre in the 1940s. Although demolished, this house has immortality of a sort. It was the setting for the short story “Mysteries of the Joy Rio Theatre” by Tennessee Williams, first published in 1941. In 1954, Williams published “Hard Candy”, a reworking of the original story, still set in the Rio Theatre.
A book about Oswego County published in 1895 said that the Betts Opera House was built by Dr. James N. Betts in 1883. A partial transcription of the book can be found on this web page.
In May, 1927, F. W. Hohman was operating both the Hohman Opera House in Pulaski and the Allen Opera House in Sandy Creek as movie theaters. They were advertised in the May 5 issue of the Sandy Creek News that year (PDF here.)
The January 10, 1947, issue of The Film Daily said that the new Palace Theatre in Seguin had been opened.
Also interesting: The April 10, 1935, issue of the same publication had a brief notice saying that the New Austin Theatre at Seguin had been opened. It was originally an Inca Amusement Co. house, but a few weeks later there was a notice saying that it had been transferred to East Texas Theatres. We don’t have an Austin Theatre currently listed for Seguin at Cinema Treasures.
It was not unusual for busy firms such as Dunne’s to have a local architect act as supervisor for the construction of a theater that was located any great distance from the firm’s office, so it is possible that Dunne designed the Texas and Eickenroht was the supervising architect. However, I’ve found no period sources naming either Dunne or Eickenroht in connection with the Texas Theatre.
Eickenroht filled out questionnaires for the AIA in 1946 and 1953 (PDF here.) Only the 1946 questionnaire mentions a theater, and that is the San Pedro Playhouse in San Antonio, which was, and is, a legitimate house.
I don’t know if Dunne’s papers have been preserved. If they have been, I haven’t found their location.
There is a possibility, though slim, that the Texas was written up in Boxoffice around the time of its construction, and the architect might have been named in the article, but unfortunately the magazine has blocked search engines from its archive, so the only way to find out would be to go through the issues from that period one by one. Only a small percentage of theaters ever got articles in the magazine, though, and a large percentage of of those that did were major houses.
A glimpse of Proctor’s Grand Theatre in Albany can be seen at far right in this photo.
The March 3, 1945, issue of Boxoffice had this ad for General Electric air conditioning which featured a cross-section of Proctor’s Theatre in Troy, where GE equipment had been installed in 1940.
In the January 23, 1919, issue of The Albany Evening Journal, 69 N.Pearl Street is given as the address of a movie house called The Annex.
The building has not been demolished, though. As of 2010, a sushi restaurant was renovating it. It had previously been an OTB shop. Currently, this is the address of what appears to be a nightclub called the Buddha Tea House. This is their Facebook page.
The building is supposed to be one of only two old commercial structures with cast iron fronts that survive in Albany.
There was at house called the Albany Theatre at least as early as 1892, and it was part of the Proctor vaudeville circuit after about 1900, but I don’t know if it was this house. It was supposed to have been designed by Francis H. Kimball, and I don’t think he did cast iron fronts. For now, this Albany Theatre looks to have been just a conversion of an existing building into a modest sized movie theater that was renamed the Albany sometime after 1919.
The Warrensburgh News of November 24, 1927, had an item about improvements to the Palace Theatre in Tupper Lake. The lobby had been doubled in size, the boxoffice moved to one side of the entrance to provide five exit doors instead of the previous two, the sidewalk had been rebuilt to eliminate stairs at the theater entrance, and a new marquee with eighty electric lights had been installed. The project had cost $5,000.
I have found references to a Mr. William A. Donovan being the operator of the Palace Theatre at Tupper Lake as early as 1915 and as late as 1931.
On October 21, 1968, the Watertown Times ran the obituary of Mrs. William A. Donovan, saying that since her marriage she had assisted her husband in the operation of Donovan’s studio gift shop and the State Theatre, so unless this Mr. Donovan was the son of the original owner, he must have operated this theater for more than half a century.
On April 5, 1923, Variety published a brief article that included this information: “Tupper Lake will be scene of picture opposition. A second house is being created by F. G. Pond, of Malone, backed by local capital.” I don’t know if Mr.Pond’s theater was built. In 1924, issues of Variety indicated that he was in financial trouble, and had been obliged to stop selling stock in his company that had intended to build theaters in several small towns upstate. In any case, the item indicates that, as of 1923, there was only one movie theater operating in Tupper Lake.
As the building is currently for sale, the Grand Theatre must not have been demolished. It most recently served as a church, but might be vacant now.
The Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to identifies Jack Corgan as the architect of the Westwood Theatre.
David Welling’s Cinema Houston attributes the design of the Almeda Theatre to the firm of MacKie & Kamrath. The Karl Kamrath Collection at the University of Texas, Austin, has one drawing of the Almeda Theatre, but the Interstate Theatre Collection at the Dallas Public Library has 13 sheets of plans for the Almeda, attributed to architects Raymond F. Smith of Dallas J. W. Denhart of Houston.
It’s possible that both firms worked on this house. I can’t find anything else about J. W. Denhart. Perhaps he worked in MacKie & Kamrath’s office? Maybe somebody in Texas can check the collections, especially the Interstate Collection, and see if they give any clues.
There are nine sheets of plans for the Wayside Theatre in the Interstate Theatre Collection at the Dallas Public Library. The Wayside Theatre was designed by Pettigrew & Worley.
Thirteen sheets of drawings for the Denton Theatre and a house called the Varsity Theatre are preserved in the Interstate Theatre Collection at the Dallas Public Library. The plans are by Dallas architect John Rowland Thompson, and are dated c1969. I don’t see a Varsity Theatre listed for Denton at Cinema Treasures. It was located on Hinkle Drive.
Plans for the Village Theatre preserved in the Interstate Theatre Collection at the Dallas Public Library were drawn by architects Fooshee & Cheek (Marion Fooshee and James B. Cheek.) The firm designed the Highland Park Village Shopping Center, which was established in 1929 and gradually expanded. Cheek’s friend, artist Reveau Bassett, painted the murals in the Village Theatre. I’m not sure if any of the murals have survived.
Does your browser have a “Find” feature? (I use Opera, and “Find” is in the drop-down menu of the “Edit” section at the top, but other browsers might be different.) If so, you can use it to search any plain text web page (such as this one.) It won’t find text in image formats such as .jpg or .png, or on Flash pages, or PDF files, but if you’ve got “Find” it will speed up searching pages such as the Interstate collection.
The single reference to Dunne is near the bottom of the page, and it says: “Dallas, Texas – Tower Theatre. Conversion of building at Elm St., Pacific and St. Paul. W. Scott Dunne, Arch. (2 sheets) August 10, 1936.”
I don’t think Interstate ever had a theater in Seguin, and that’s why it isn’t mentioned on that page. The collection is probably not exhaustive, though. There could have been quite a bit of stuff that was lost before the heap in the Majestic was salvaged.
If 100 N. Main Street is the correct address for the State Theatre, and if Kingfisher has not altered its numbering system since that address was published, then the theater had to have been at the south end of the block, probably on the parking lot next to what is now Snider’s Catering, which is at 102 N. Main (Royce was probably using “across the street” rather loosely.) Obviously, if that’s where it was then it has been demolished.
Regular members who submit pages for theaters don’t have the ability to alter them once they are posted. The theater editor is Ken Roe, and he makes all the changes.
Email to will reach him, but he’s very busy so his response might be slow.
The Grand Theatre is at 416 N. Oak Avenue, and is for sale.
The records of the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company, held by the University of Texas, show that Fort Worth architect A. B. Withers ordered the terra cotta for the Grand Theatre in Mineral Wells. As the records in the collection span the years 1914 to 1941, Withers had to have been the original architect, probably sometime around 1921 when the Estey organ was installed. I haven’t discovered who designed the streamline modern remodeling in 1948.
The theater was probably at 302 Neville. The first storefront would have been 300 and the storefront on the other side of the theater entrance would have been 304.
The timeline I linked to earlier mentions the first Lyric Theatre that opened on Main Street in 1913. It also mentions the H & M Shoe store at Heber and Neville Streets collapsing in a snowstorm on March 13, 1993. That must have been this theater’s building. The T-shaped intersection has only one other corner, and the building on it is quite old and still standing.
As Dunne died in 1937, before the classic theaters he designed came to be as widely appreciated as they are now, it’s possible that his papers were not preserved. Two pages of plans for the Tower Theatre in Houston are part of the Interstate Theatre Circuit collection at the Dallas Public Library, but I haven’t come across any references to any others that have survived.
Even now there are surprising gaps in the information available about Dunne. The Texas State Historical Association’s online Handbook of Texas has a page for Alfred C. Finn, with whom Dunne collaborated on the design of the Melba Theatre in Dallas in 1921, but there is no page for Dunne himself. He is mentioned on Finn’s page, and that’s it.
Jay C. Henry’s Architecture in Texas: 1895-1945 attributes the design of the Texas Theatre to Dunne, and the book was published by the University of Texas Press, so I would imagine it was well researched. I don’t have the book itself, and none of the libraries in my area have it, but you’d probably be able to find it in a library in Texas. If it is a scholarly book, as it appears to be from the Google Books preview, the author should cite his sources, and the source for his claim that Dunne designed the Texas should be there.
Erle G. Stillwell’s plans for the Carolina Theatre can be seen on this page at DocSouth’s Going to the Show. The Carolina opened on November 23, 1939.
The DocSouth page for the 1930 Carolina Theatre on Tarboro Street doesn’t say anything about Erle Stillwell designing it. He did design the 1939 Carolina Theatre on Goldsboro Street that was later renamed the Colony Theatre.
The recent opening of A. J. Price’s Carolina Theatre, which later became the Drake Theatre, was noted in the June 2, 1930, issue of The Film Daily.
Here is another scan of the same photo, but it can be enlarged for great detail. The negative is dated October 29, 1941.
The Piety Theatre was destroyed by a fire on January 29, 1940. This web page about a building that across the street from the theater has a scan of a newspaper photo of the ruined movie house.
Here is a photo of the Joy Rio Theatre in the 1940s. Although demolished, this house has immortality of a sort. It was the setting for the short story “Mysteries of the Joy Rio Theatre” by Tennessee Williams, first published in 1941. In 1954, Williams published “Hard Candy”, a reworking of the original story, still set in the Rio Theatre.
A book about Oswego County published in 1895 said that the Betts Opera House was built by Dr. James N. Betts in 1883. A partial transcription of the book can be found on this web page.
In May, 1927, F. W. Hohman was operating both the Hohman Opera House in Pulaski and the Allen Opera House in Sandy Creek as movie theaters. They were advertised in the May 5 issue of the Sandy Creek News that year (PDF here.)
The January 10, 1947, issue of The Film Daily said that the new Palace Theatre in Seguin had been opened.
Also interesting: The April 10, 1935, issue of the same publication had a brief notice saying that the New Austin Theatre at Seguin had been opened. It was originally an Inca Amusement Co. house, but a few weeks later there was a notice saying that it had been transferred to East Texas Theatres. We don’t have an Austin Theatre currently listed for Seguin at Cinema Treasures.
It was not unusual for busy firms such as Dunne’s to have a local architect act as supervisor for the construction of a theater that was located any great distance from the firm’s office, so it is possible that Dunne designed the Texas and Eickenroht was the supervising architect. However, I’ve found no period sources naming either Dunne or Eickenroht in connection with the Texas Theatre.
Eickenroht filled out questionnaires for the AIA in 1946 and 1953 (PDF here.) Only the 1946 questionnaire mentions a theater, and that is the San Pedro Playhouse in San Antonio, which was, and is, a legitimate house.
I don’t know if Dunne’s papers have been preserved. If they have been, I haven’t found their location.
There is a possibility, though slim, that the Texas was written up in Boxoffice around the time of its construction, and the architect might have been named in the article, but unfortunately the magazine has blocked search engines from its archive, so the only way to find out would be to go through the issues from that period one by one. Only a small percentage of theaters ever got articles in the magazine, though, and a large percentage of of those that did were major houses.