knadles: The second page of the Boxoffice article I linked to in my previous comment has a black and white photo of the Coral’s auditorium (here) though it is small and the scan is rather blurry.
The April 1, 1937, issue of Motion Picture Daily said that the opening of the newsreel theater being built inside Grand Central Station had been set for May 3.
The Majestic apparently became the Loyal in 1937. The April 1 issue of Motion Picture Daily said that Springer & Cocalis would reopen the Loyal Theatre, formerly the Majestic, in Washington Heights, on April 2.
The Schuyler Theatre’s name was misspelled by Motion Picture Daily in its item of April 1, 1937, about the opening of the house: “Zimmerman, Noble and Yoost will open the new Schuler at 84th St. and Columbus Avenue tomorrow night.”
The Coyle Theatre was listed in various editions of Julius Cahn’s guide from the 1890s through the 1910s as a second floor house. The alterations in the 1920s must have been virtually a complete rebuilding to turn it into a modern movie theater.
The house apparently underwent additional alterations in 1934. An item in the April 8 issue of The Film Daily said, under the heading “Coyle Theater Enlarged” that “R. S. Coyle’s theater here is now called the New Coyle, with seating capacity increased to 999.”
Robert Coyle was still operating the house at least as late as 1945, when the July 16 issue of Motion Picture Daily mentioned him as the “…oldest
Paramount exhibitor in this territory.”
The Turn Hall which was burned in 1954 was replaced by a new building on the same site which is still occupied by the Syracuse Turners. The original hall was opened to the public on December 26, 1869. The Turn Hall Theatre was showing movies at least as early as 1911, when the July 15 issue of The Moving Picture World published a letter dated June 3 from the manager of the house, J.J. Murphy.
A photo of the auditorium of the Ohio Theatre, plus a photo of the exterior after it had become Rex Humbard’s Calvary Temple, and a photo of the projection booth can be seen in a slide show on this page of the Akron Beacon Journal web site. The accompanying article (click link at lower left of photos) by Mark J. Price says that the Ohio Theatre was designed by an Akron Engineer, John W. Egan. That probably accounts for the rather plain style of the front. I haven’t found who designed the interior, which was rather old fashioned for 1936.
The Shakespeare festival presented at the house in 1961 was mounted by Arthur Lithgow, father of actor John Lithgow. It had been scheduled for Stan Hywet Hall in Akron, where it had been presented the previous year, but by a narrow vote the Board of Directors of the Hall Foundation had ousted Lithgow, and he moved the performances to the Ohio Theatre, then still owned by television evangelist Rex Humbard, who let the festival use the theater rent-free, according to John Lithgow’s memoir, Drama: An Actor’s Education.
The Lyric Theatre is at 221 High Street. A photo of the Lyric Theatre about 1954 appears on page 53 of Fairport Harbor from the Arcadia Publishing Company (Google Books preview.) The theater was located in the Lawrence Block. Various issues of The American Contractor from late 1920 and early 1921 reported that Cleveland architect R. H. Hinsdale was designing a theater, store, and office building at Fairport for E. E. Lawrence. It must have been the Lyric.
The theater probably opened before the end of 1921. This newspaper article in which I found the address said that the Lyric closed in 1961, so it had a run of forty years.
The caption of a 1949 photo of the Aereon Theatre on this web page says that it was built in 1948. I remember the 1949 re-release of the movie San Francisco advertised on the Aereon’s marquee. It also played at my neighborhood theater around that time.
The RKO Palace was actually at 320 W. Sheridan Avenue (which was called Grand Avenue when the house opened.) The number 322 can be seen on the door to the upstairs offices at right in the 1911 photo missmelbatoast linked to.
Though the Metropolitan began presenting vaudeville at the end of March, 1909, the house had opened on January 28 with a stock company. The January 29 issue of Oklahoma State Labor News published an item about the opening.
The February 21, 1909, issue of the Oklahoma City Daily Pointer featured a large ad for the Metropolitan Theatre with, just below it, a photo of the Metropolitan Stock Company’s leading man, Hayden Stevenson.
Given the later troubles the theater had with labor organizations (in 1929, when it was theonly non-union theater in Oklahoma City, it was damaged by a bomb during a dispute with the projectionists and stage hands unions) this item from the October 29, 1910, issue of The Oklahoma Labor Unit is a bit ironic. It recommends a play called Lost Paradise to union members, noting that the producers, the North Brothers Stock Company, had made a sizable contribution to the Labor Temple fund. “The Metropolitan is fair to union labor,” it said, “and for this reason has always been liberally patronized by union people….”
The horseshoe sign missmelbatoast made reference to says Billiards and Pool on it, so it wasn’t a movie theater at the time that photo was taken. That isn’t to say that it couldn’t have been converted to one later, though. Most early nickelodeons were in converted storefronts.
The Lange-Family Theatre was mentioned in the February 21, 1925, issue of The Reel Journal, though with its name misspelled:
“J. Bucklin has taken over the management of the Lang Family Theatre, 5118 Shaw avenue, St. Louis. He formerly was manager of the St. Louis Exhibitors Supply Company.”
Property Shark says the building was built in 1914. That could be about right. The style of the building fits the period. It’s even possible that it was built as a movie theater, though I’ve been unable to find any references to it in the early trade journals.
A 1929 issue of the Monticello Republican Watchman (with no date visible) carries an ad for the Royal Furniture Company located at 128 Pike Street, Port Jervis, with the tag line “Opposite Strand Theatre.” As there were no other theaters opposite 128 Pike, Strand must have been an aka for the State Theatre.
I’ve found nothing on the Internet or in any publication of the period indicating that the New Theatre at 129-135 Pike Street ever met with any disaster, so that, too, must have been an aka for the State at 131 Pike.
The State Theatre was either opened as a house called the New Theatre or it was built on the site of the New Theatre. This page from the Minisink Valley Historical Society says “The New Theatre was at 32 Sussex St. and the Palace Theatre was as at 69 Fowler St. The New Theatre would later move to its location at 129-135 Pike Street.”
The New Theatre was listed in the 1913-1914 Cahn guide as a ground floor house with a stage 38x75 feet, and over 1,000 seats; 590 in the orchestra, 184 in the balcony, 300 in the gallery, and 6 boxes. As I don’t know the year the house moved from Sussex Street to Pike Street, I don’t know which of the two locations the Cahn listing described.
The caption of a photo on page 69 of Port Jervis, by Matthew M. Osterberg, says that the State Theatre had once been called the Strand Theatre. As we have a Strand Theatre listed here, but located on Sussex Street, and I’ve found references to both the State and the Strand being in operation simultaneously in the 1970s, we are dealing with two different theaters.
The Strand and the Ritz are the only Port Jarvis theaters that were advertised in the Monticello Republican Watchman in the early 1930s (the Palace closed in 1927 and reopened as the Royal in late 1932.) It’s possible that the New Theatre on Pike Street did operate as the Strand before becoming the State, and that the Strand on Sussex Street opened after the Pike Street house was renamed the State.
Royal Theatre was an aka for the Palace Theatre. The Middletown Times Herald of November 21, 1932, said that the Palace Theatre in Port Jervis, closed for almost five years, would reopen as the Royal Theatre on November 23. The renovated house was to be operated by Aurora Amusement Company.
The address of the Palace/Royal Theatre was 69 Fowler Street. Property Shark says that 69 Fowler Street is a two-story building of 8,712 square feet built in 1920. Google Maps has no street view, but Bing Maps has a bird’s-eye view.
Advertisements for the architect in issues of the Monticello Republican Watchman spell his name Emil Motl. The NRHP listing for the Rialto uses the spelling Motel, though. It’s possible that he eventually Americanized his name, but as late as 1940 the census lists an Emil Motl, age 53, living in Monticello, New York.
This comment by dw438 on a Cinema Treasures news post says that the Town Theatre was down the block from the Glen Cove Theatre, beyond a McDonald’s, and was torn down and replaced by shops in the 1970s. The front store in the strip mall north of McDonalds is the Wild Fig restaurant, which has an address of 157 Glen Street. As the Town Theatre is gone, that’s probably the closest we’ll get to its address until an old directory listing shows up. The Glen Cove Theatre building is still standing, occupied by a Dollar Tree Store.
This comment by potato222 on a Cinema Treasures news post tells us where the Glen Cove Theatre was located. It was converted to a CVS pharmacy which has since relocated to a new building next door.
Judging from Street View, the Glen Cove Theatre building is now occupied by a Dollar Tree store. The Internet says that the Dollar Tree is at 217 Glen Street, ergo that must have been the address of the Glen Cove Theatre. The building has the late Midcentury Modern look one might expect from a theater built around 1960.
The nomination form for the Chapel Street Historic District says that the entrance to the College Theatre was not moved to College Street until 1933:
“With the Shubert Theater and the Roger Sherman both fronting on College Street, this block became the core of the New Haven theater area. In 1929 the Crown Theater was constructed around the corner on Crown Street and in 1933 the entrance to the Hyperion was moved from Chapel to College Street so that it could compete more readily with the Roger Sherman. The interior remodelling of the Hyperion emphasized the screen over the stage. Part of the reason behind this costly renovation effort was the growing popularity of movies, but also it was the result of competition.”
The nomination form also notes that the building that became the new entrance to the theater was an existing structure built in 1915:
262-264 College St. (1880; facade 1915). Loews Theater (Carll’s Opera House/Hyperion Theater/College St. Theater). 3-story brick theater with early 20th-century Neoclassical Revival terra cotta facade. One bay wide. Theater marquee shelters a recessed entrance.“
The College Theatre was still standing when the nomination form was written in 1984.
Andrew Craig Morrison’s Theaters says that the Carll’s Opera House/Hyperion/College Theatre was at 1030-1032 Chapel Street. So does This plan of Carll’s. A 1921 New York Times article about the fire at the Rialto Theatre on College Street also says that the Hyperion Theatre was located “…around the corner from the Rialto, in Chapel Street….”
Sometime after 1921, the entrance was reoriented to College Street. This article (which Lost Memory linked to in an earlier comment) about the partial collapse of the Hyrperion Theatre in 1998 indicates that the theater had already been condemned and that preparations for demolition had been begun at the time of the collapse. The auditorium is gone, but the 1920s College Street entrance built for Loew’s is still there.
The article I linked to in my previous comment says that the Hyperion Theatre was located “…around the corner from the Rialto, in Chapel Street, and the roofs of the theaters come close together.” That means the Rialto must have been in the 200 block of College Street, just south of Chapel Street. The article also notes that the Rialto was across the street from and north of the Shubert Theatre, which is still standing at 247 College Street.
This photo of the Rialto in ruins shows the side wall and stage house of the Hyperion Theatre behind it. When the Hyperion was rebuilt as Loew’s College Theatre, its entrance was moved from Chapel Street to College Street. The new entrance was most likely built on part of the site of the Rialto, so the Rialto’s address must have been very close to that of Loew’s College, which was at 262 College Street.
The Almo Theatre did not last very long. It is listed in the 1914-1915 city directory, and it is mentioned a few times in The Moving Picture World in 1916, but it does not appear in the 1920 city directory. The 1920 directory lists only two theaters in Rocky Mount: the Palace, at 228 S. Main (this address was later changed to 238 Main SW) and the Opera House at 143 N. Main. Because some addresses on Main Street were shifted a bit sometime during the 1920s, it’s possible that the modern address of the Almo’s building would be different than the 210 N. listed in the 1914 directory.
John and Charles Arrington, operating as Arrington Bros., dominated the movie theater business in Rocky Mount during the 1910s and beyond. At various times they controlled the Almo, Grand/Palace, Cameo, and Lyric Theatres, as well as the Opera House. Charles H. Arrington, the younger brother, eventually served as President of the regional MPTOA affiliate, Theater Owners of North and South Carolina. Charles Arrington was still operating the Cameo Theatre at least as late as 1948.
The April 13, 1929, issue of Motion Picture News had this item:
“W. E. Armstrong, operator of the Manhattan, Rocky Mount, N. C, expects to open his new house there in the next sixty days with sound.”
I believe this new house was the Savoy-Booker T Theatre.
The Manhattan Theatre was listed in city directories at 118 W. Thomas Street. The address was listed as vacant in the 1930 directory, but the Manhattan Theatre was listed there in the 1934 and 1936 directories. The Manhattan must have closed for a while after the Savoy was opened. The Ritz first appears in the 1948 directory, but at 133 W. Thomas (I think this might have been an error, as the Ritz is listed at 120 W. Thomas beginning with the 1950 directory.)
I don’t know if the address of the building was shifted from 118 to 120 sometime between 1936 and 1950, or if the Ritz was actually next door to the site of the Manhattan. There are currently no adjacent buildings.
In any case, the modern address of the theater is 150 W. Thomas, as can be seen in Street View. This web site has a brief history of the neighborhood and has short videos of the Booker T and Manhattan Theatres, showing photos of the buildings before and after the recent renovations.
knadles: The second page of the Boxoffice article I linked to in my previous comment has a black and white photo of the Coral’s auditorium (here) though it is small and the scan is rather blurry.
The April 1, 1937, issue of Motion Picture Daily said that the opening of the newsreel theater being built inside Grand Central Station had been set for May 3.
The Majestic apparently became the Loyal in 1937. The April 1 issue of Motion Picture Daily said that Springer & Cocalis would reopen the Loyal Theatre, formerly the Majestic, in Washington Heights, on April 2.
The Schuyler Theatre’s name was misspelled by Motion Picture Daily in its item of April 1, 1937, about the opening of the house: “Zimmerman, Noble and Yoost will open the new Schuler at 84th St. and Columbus Avenue tomorrow night.”
The Coyle Theatre was listed in various editions of Julius Cahn’s guide from the 1890s through the 1910s as a second floor house. The alterations in the 1920s must have been virtually a complete rebuilding to turn it into a modern movie theater.
The house apparently underwent additional alterations in 1934. An item in the April 8 issue of The Film Daily said, under the heading “Coyle Theater Enlarged” that “R. S. Coyle’s theater here is now called the New Coyle, with seating capacity increased to 999.”
Robert Coyle was still operating the house at least as late as 1945, when the July 16 issue of Motion Picture Daily mentioned him as the “…oldest Paramount exhibitor in this territory.”
The Palace Theatre building is now occupied by Dee’s, a record and video store that also sells Cricket Wireless services.
The Turn Hall which was burned in 1954 was replaced by a new building on the same site which is still occupied by the Syracuse Turners. The original hall was opened to the public on December 26, 1869. The Turn Hall Theatre was showing movies at least as early as 1911, when the July 15 issue of The Moving Picture World published a letter dated June 3 from the manager of the house, J.J. Murphy.
A photo of the auditorium of the Ohio Theatre, plus a photo of the exterior after it had become Rex Humbard’s Calvary Temple, and a photo of the projection booth can be seen in a slide show on this page of the Akron Beacon Journal web site. The accompanying article (click link at lower left of photos) by Mark J. Price says that the Ohio Theatre was designed by an Akron Engineer, John W. Egan. That probably accounts for the rather plain style of the front. I haven’t found who designed the interior, which was rather old fashioned for 1936.
The Shakespeare festival presented at the house in 1961 was mounted by Arthur Lithgow, father of actor John Lithgow. It had been scheduled for Stan Hywet Hall in Akron, where it had been presented the previous year, but by a narrow vote the Board of Directors of the Hall Foundation had ousted Lithgow, and he moved the performances to the Ohio Theatre, then still owned by television evangelist Rex Humbard, who let the festival use the theater rent-free, according to John Lithgow’s memoir, Drama: An Actor’s Education.
The Lyric Theatre is at 221 High Street. A photo of the Lyric Theatre about 1954 appears on page 53 of Fairport Harbor from the Arcadia Publishing Company (Google Books preview.) The theater was located in the Lawrence Block. Various issues of The American Contractor from late 1920 and early 1921 reported that Cleveland architect R. H. Hinsdale was designing a theater, store, and office building at Fairport for E. E. Lawrence. It must have been the Lyric.
The theater probably opened before the end of 1921. This newspaper article in which I found the address said that the Lyric closed in 1961, so it had a run of forty years.
The caption of a 1949 photo of the Aereon Theatre on this web page says that it was built in 1948. I remember the 1949 re-release of the movie San Francisco advertised on the Aereon’s marquee. It also played at my neighborhood theater around that time.
The RKO Palace was actually at 320 W. Sheridan Avenue (which was called Grand Avenue when the house opened.) The number 322 can be seen on the door to the upstairs offices at right in the 1911 photo missmelbatoast linked to.
Though the Metropolitan began presenting vaudeville at the end of March, 1909, the house had opened on January 28 with a stock company. The January 29 issue of Oklahoma State Labor News published an item about the opening.
The February 21, 1909, issue of the Oklahoma City Daily Pointer featured a large ad for the Metropolitan Theatre with, just below it, a photo of the Metropolitan Stock Company’s leading man, Hayden Stevenson.
Given the later troubles the theater had with labor organizations (in 1929, when it was theonly non-union theater in Oklahoma City, it was damaged by a bomb during a dispute with the projectionists and stage hands unions) this item from the October 29, 1910, issue of The Oklahoma Labor Unit is a bit ironic. It recommends a play called Lost Paradise to union members, noting that the producers, the North Brothers Stock Company, had made a sizable contribution to the Labor Temple fund. “The Metropolitan is fair to union labor,” it said, “and for this reason has always been liberally patronized by union people….”
The horseshoe sign missmelbatoast made reference to says Billiards and Pool on it, so it wasn’t a movie theater at the time that photo was taken. That isn’t to say that it couldn’t have been converted to one later, though. Most early nickelodeons were in converted storefronts.
The Lange-Family Theatre was mentioned in the February 21, 1925, issue of The Reel Journal, though with its name misspelled:
Property Shark says the building was built in 1914. That could be about right. The style of the building fits the period. It’s even possible that it was built as a movie theater, though I’ve been unable to find any references to it in the early trade journals.A 1929 issue of the Monticello Republican Watchman (with no date visible) carries an ad for the Royal Furniture Company located at 128 Pike Street, Port Jervis, with the tag line “Opposite Strand Theatre.” As there were no other theaters opposite 128 Pike, Strand must have been an aka for the State Theatre.
I’ve found nothing on the Internet or in any publication of the period indicating that the New Theatre at 129-135 Pike Street ever met with any disaster, so that, too, must have been an aka for the State at 131 Pike.
The State Theatre was either opened as a house called the New Theatre or it was built on the site of the New Theatre. This page from the Minisink Valley Historical Society says “The New Theatre was at 32 Sussex St. and the Palace Theatre was as at 69 Fowler St. The New Theatre would later move to its location at 129-135 Pike Street.”
The New Theatre was listed in the 1913-1914 Cahn guide as a ground floor house with a stage 38x75 feet, and over 1,000 seats; 590 in the orchestra, 184 in the balcony, 300 in the gallery, and 6 boxes. As I don’t know the year the house moved from Sussex Street to Pike Street, I don’t know which of the two locations the Cahn listing described.
The caption of a photo on page 69 of Port Jervis, by Matthew M. Osterberg, says that the State Theatre had once been called the Strand Theatre. As we have a Strand Theatre listed here, but located on Sussex Street, and I’ve found references to both the State and the Strand being in operation simultaneously in the 1970s, we are dealing with two different theaters.
The Strand and the Ritz are the only Port Jarvis theaters that were advertised in the Monticello Republican Watchman in the early 1930s (the Palace closed in 1927 and reopened as the Royal in late 1932.) It’s possible that the New Theatre on Pike Street did operate as the Strand before becoming the State, and that the Strand on Sussex Street opened after the Pike Street house was renamed the State.
Royal Theatre was an aka for the Palace Theatre. The Middletown Times Herald of November 21, 1932, said that the Palace Theatre in Port Jervis, closed for almost five years, would reopen as the Royal Theatre on November 23. The renovated house was to be operated by Aurora Amusement Company.
The address of the Palace/Royal Theatre was 69 Fowler Street. Property Shark says that 69 Fowler Street is a two-story building of 8,712 square feet built in 1920. Google Maps has no street view, but Bing Maps has a bird’s-eye view.
Advertisements for the architect in issues of the Monticello Republican Watchman spell his name Emil Motl. The NRHP listing for the Rialto uses the spelling Motel, though. It’s possible that he eventually Americanized his name, but as late as 1940 the census lists an Emil Motl, age 53, living in Monticello, New York.
This comment by dw438 on a Cinema Treasures news post says that the Town Theatre was down the block from the Glen Cove Theatre, beyond a McDonald’s, and was torn down and replaced by shops in the 1970s. The front store in the strip mall north of McDonalds is the Wild Fig restaurant, which has an address of 157 Glen Street. As the Town Theatre is gone, that’s probably the closest we’ll get to its address until an old directory listing shows up. The Glen Cove Theatre building is still standing, occupied by a Dollar Tree Store.
This comment by potato222 on a Cinema Treasures news post tells us where the Glen Cove Theatre was located. It was converted to a CVS pharmacy which has since relocated to a new building next door.
Judging from Street View, the Glen Cove Theatre building is now occupied by a Dollar Tree store. The Internet says that the Dollar Tree is at 217 Glen Street, ergo that must have been the address of the Glen Cove Theatre. The building has the late Midcentury Modern look one might expect from a theater built around 1960.
The nomination form for the Chapel Street Historic District says that the entrance to the College Theatre was not moved to College Street until 1933:
The nomination form also notes that the building that became the new entrance to the theater was an existing structure built in 1915:The College Theatre was still standing when the nomination form was written in 1984.Andrew Craig Morrison’s Theaters says that the Carll’s Opera House/Hyperion/College Theatre was at 1030-1032 Chapel Street. So does This plan of Carll’s. A 1921 New York Times article about the fire at the Rialto Theatre on College Street also says that the Hyperion Theatre was located “…around the corner from the Rialto, in Chapel Street….”
Sometime after 1921, the entrance was reoriented to College Street. This article (which Lost Memory linked to in an earlier comment) about the partial collapse of the Hyrperion Theatre in 1998 indicates that the theater had already been condemned and that preparations for demolition had been begun at the time of the collapse. The auditorium is gone, but the 1920s College Street entrance built for Loew’s is still there.
The article I linked to in my previous comment says that the Hyperion Theatre was located “…around the corner from the Rialto, in Chapel Street, and the roofs of the theaters come close together.” That means the Rialto must have been in the 200 block of College Street, just south of Chapel Street. The article also notes that the Rialto was across the street from and north of the Shubert Theatre, which is still standing at 247 College Street.
This photo of the Rialto in ruins shows the side wall and stage house of the Hyperion Theatre behind it. When the Hyperion was rebuilt as Loew’s College Theatre, its entrance was moved from Chapel Street to College Street. The new entrance was most likely built on part of the site of the Rialto, so the Rialto’s address must have been very close to that of Loew’s College, which was at 262 College Street.
The Almo Theatre did not last very long. It is listed in the 1914-1915 city directory, and it is mentioned a few times in The Moving Picture World in 1916, but it does not appear in the 1920 city directory. The 1920 directory lists only two theaters in Rocky Mount: the Palace, at 228 S. Main (this address was later changed to 238 Main SW) and the Opera House at 143 N. Main. Because some addresses on Main Street were shifted a bit sometime during the 1920s, it’s possible that the modern address of the Almo’s building would be different than the 210 N. listed in the 1914 directory.
John and Charles Arrington, operating as Arrington Bros., dominated the movie theater business in Rocky Mount during the 1910s and beyond. At various times they controlled the Almo, Grand/Palace, Cameo, and Lyric Theatres, as well as the Opera House. Charles H. Arrington, the younger brother, eventually served as President of the regional MPTOA affiliate, Theater Owners of North and South Carolina. Charles Arrington was still operating the Cameo Theatre at least as late as 1948.
The April 13, 1929, issue of Motion Picture News had this item:
I believe this new house was the Savoy-Booker T Theatre.The Manhattan Theatre was listed in city directories at 118 W. Thomas Street. The address was listed as vacant in the 1930 directory, but the Manhattan Theatre was listed there in the 1934 and 1936 directories. The Manhattan must have closed for a while after the Savoy was opened. The Ritz first appears in the 1948 directory, but at 133 W. Thomas (I think this might have been an error, as the Ritz is listed at 120 W. Thomas beginning with the 1950 directory.)
I don’t know if the address of the building was shifted from 118 to 120 sometime between 1936 and 1950, or if the Ritz was actually next door to the site of the Manhattan. There are currently no adjacent buildings.
In any case, the modern address of the theater is 150 W. Thomas, as can be seen in Street View. This web site has a brief history of the neighborhood and has short videos of the Booker T and Manhattan Theatres, showing photos of the buildings before and after the recent renovations.