I wonder if the State Theatre that appeared in the 1933 listings was the original America/American Theatre? According to the page that said the Empress was in a one story building there was a third movie house opened at 150 W. Mountain Avenue around 1925. If the writer was right about that, at least, that must have been the America. The State is still listed in the 1943 FDY, with 375 seats.
In any case, the Empress was renamed the America in 1927, and is still listed with 891 seats in 1943. The Lyric was listed as closed. All three houses were controlled by Fox Intermountain Theaters.
Scott’s link, plus our page for theMaya Theatre. They do look very nearly identical, and they both bear some resemblance to some other theaters designed in the 1940s by S. Charles Lee. There are two cards in the L.A. library’s California Index that cite items about Lee-designed projects in Dinuba and Perris.
The item about the project in Perris is from Southwest Builder & Contractor of September 21, 1945, and says that Lee was drawing plans for a $75,000 theater at Perris for Tom Sharpe. The Dinuba theater was a pre-war project noted in the October 1, 1940, issue of the same publication. It was a 600-seat house that Lee was designing for Leo L. Smith, and was to cost $35,000.
It looks as though Lee just recycled his 1940 Dinuba design for this 1945 house in Perris. I also see a resemblance to Lee’s somewhat larger and fancier 1940 Temple Theatre in Temple City, California. Like these two, the Temple had an auditorium with a gabled roof. I’d dearly love to see interiors of the Perris and the Maya, as the Temple had a king post truss roof which I thought was unique, but perhaps these two houses had them as well.
The City of Perris bought the Perris Theatre a few years ago and, according to this article from the April 9, 2011, issue of the Press-Enterprise, had already spent $75,000 on exterior renovations.
The article also reveals that this house was never called the Chief Theatre. That name had been placed on the building by the producers of a 1993 movie called Calendar Girl, which was partly shot in Perris.
The MetroLux 12 opened on November 10, 1995. MetroLux Theatres moved its operations to its new 14-screen multiplex on October 28, 2005, so the last day of operation for this house was probably the 27th. After sitting vacant for several years, the property was converted into the new home of Foundations Church in 2013.
There was once a source on the Internet attributing the design of a MetroLux Theatre in Loveland to the Baltimore architectural firm Development Design Group, but it has been removed (I believe it was on DDG’s own web site, but unfortunately I can’t find it now even on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.) I originally thought that the project referred to was the MetroLux 14, but I have since found that that house was designed by another firm, so it must have been the MetroLux 12 that was designed by DDG.
The expanded Rialto Theatre Center was opened in April, 2012. This article from the Reporter-Herald, published shortly before the opening, features an interactive graphic with plans of the first two floors of the new building adjacent to the historic theater.
This house was called the Orchards Twin rather than Orchard Twin, as Orchards is the name of the shopping center in which it was located. The shopping center was built in 1976, so the theater was probably opened around that time. It was a Commonwealth Theatres house.
I found the Kiva Theatre at Durango mentioned in the October 13, 1928, issue of Motion Picture News. The item, about the owner of the house recovering from an operation, referred to the Kiva as having been “recently built.”
As the Romanesque Revival business block in which the theater’s entrance was located appears to date from the 19th century, the Kiva must have been either a conversion from some other use or in an addition to the building. I suspect that it was the latter.
The 1960 postcard view shows the theater’s entrance on Main Avenue, but the second photo to which kencmcintyre linked on April 14, 2009, shows that the entrance had been moved around to 8th Street by 1982. I think that the auditorium must have been located in the building to the west, extending down to Narrow Gauge Avenue. This building would have been large enough to hold 550 seats, while the ground floor of the old business block would probably not have been.
The Lyric Theatre was in a building a bit east of the Kissock Block. Here is a view of the entrance dated ca. 1915. The entrance of the Lyric is recognizable in this small photo, dated ca. 1923, which shows the three buildings between Remington Street and Montezuma Fuller Alley. The Lyric was in the center building. All three have been demolished. The side wall of the Kissock Block is visible at far right.
This photo shows a fire at the Lyric Theatre, but is undated. This weblog post has a 1925 Sanborn Map showing the Lyric’s location, and says that the house opened in 1913 and was demolished in 1962.
The Oshkosh Theatre is on a list of the works of the Milwaukee architectural firm of Dick & Bauer that was published in the October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald-World.
A list of theaters designed by the Milwaukee architectural firm of Dick & Bauer was published in the October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald-World, and it lists the Capitol Theatre at Racine among their works. It’s possible that J. Mandor Matson was the supervising architect for the project, but he was apparently just beginning his career around 1920 when the Capitol was built (the earliest project I’ve seen attributed to him in the trade publications dates from 1922.)
The Capitol Theatre was in operation by 1930, when its design was attributed to architect Walter Earl Bort, in association with architect John H. Ladehoff, in the October 25 issue of Exhibitors Herald-World.
The Bluebird Theatre in Petersburg was designed by architect Fred A. Bishop, according to a partial list of his works that appeared in the October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald-World.
The Tivoli Theatre was designed by architect Leonard H. Bailey. It was (as the Princess Theatre) on a list of theaters he had designed that was published in the October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald-World.
I think that the Temple Theatre in Ardmore might be the house that appears as the Shrine Theatre in a list of theaters designed by architect Leonard H. Bailey that appeared in the October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald-World. There is a Masonic lodge on the fifth floor of the building.
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.
Yes, there is definitely a second floor there.
I wonder if the State Theatre that appeared in the 1933 listings was the original America/American Theatre? According to the page that said the Empress was in a one story building there was a third movie house opened at 150 W. Mountain Avenue around 1925. If the writer was right about that, at least, that must have been the America. The State is still listed in the 1943 FDY, with 375 seats.
In any case, the Empress was renamed the America in 1927, and is still listed with 891 seats in 1943. The Lyric was listed as closed. All three houses were controlled by Fox Intermountain Theaters.
Scott’s link, plus our page for theMaya Theatre. They do look very nearly identical, and they both bear some resemblance to some other theaters designed in the 1940s by S. Charles Lee. There are two cards in the L.A. library’s California Index that cite items about Lee-designed projects in Dinuba and Perris.
The item about the project in Perris is from Southwest Builder & Contractor of September 21, 1945, and says that Lee was drawing plans for a $75,000 theater at Perris for Tom Sharpe. The Dinuba theater was a pre-war project noted in the October 1, 1940, issue of the same publication. It was a 600-seat house that Lee was designing for Leo L. Smith, and was to cost $35,000.
It looks as though Lee just recycled his 1940 Dinuba design for this 1945 house in Perris. I also see a resemblance to Lee’s somewhat larger and fancier 1940 Temple Theatre in Temple City, California. Like these two, the Temple had an auditorium with a gabled roof. I’d dearly love to see interiors of the Perris and the Maya, as the Temple had a king post truss roof which I thought was unique, but perhaps these two houses had them as well.
The City of Perris bought the Perris Theatre a few years ago and, according to this article from the April 9, 2011, issue of the Press-Enterprise, had already spent $75,000 on exterior renovations.
The article also reveals that this house was never called the Chief Theatre. That name had been placed on the building by the producers of a 1993 movie called Calendar Girl, which was partly shot in Perris.
The MetroLux 12 opened on November 10, 1995. MetroLux Theatres moved its operations to its new 14-screen multiplex on October 28, 2005, so the last day of operation for this house was probably the 27th. After sitting vacant for several years, the property was converted into the new home of Foundations Church in 2013.
There was once a source on the Internet attributing the design of a MetroLux Theatre in Loveland to the Baltimore architectural firm Development Design Group, but it has been removed (I believe it was on DDG’s own web site, but unfortunately I can’t find it now even on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.) I originally thought that the project referred to was the MetroLux 14, but I have since found that that house was designed by another firm, so it must have been the MetroLux 12 that was designed by DDG.
The expanded Rialto Theatre Center was opened in April, 2012. This article from the Reporter-Herald, published shortly before the opening, features an interactive graphic with plans of the first two floors of the new building adjacent to the historic theater.
This house was called the Orchards Twin rather than Orchard Twin, as Orchards is the name of the shopping center in which it was located. The shopping center was built in 1976, so the theater was probably opened around that time. It was a Commonwealth Theatres house.
I found the Kiva Theatre at Durango mentioned in the October 13, 1928, issue of Motion Picture News. The item, about the owner of the house recovering from an operation, referred to the Kiva as having been “recently built.”
As the Romanesque Revival business block in which the theater’s entrance was located appears to date from the 19th century, the Kiva must have been either a conversion from some other use or in an addition to the building. I suspect that it was the latter.
The 1960 postcard view shows the theater’s entrance on Main Avenue, but the second photo to which kencmcintyre linked on April 14, 2009, shows that the entrance had been moved around to 8th Street by 1982. I think that the auditorium must have been located in the building to the west, extending down to Narrow Gauge Avenue. This building would have been large enough to hold 550 seats, while the ground floor of the old business block would probably not have been.
The Lyric Theatre was in a building a bit east of the Kissock Block. Here is a view of the entrance dated ca. 1915. The entrance of the Lyric is recognizable in this small photo, dated ca. 1923, which shows the three buildings between Remington Street and Montezuma Fuller Alley. The Lyric was in the center building. All three have been demolished. The side wall of the Kissock Block is visible at far right.
This photo shows a fire at the Lyric Theatre, but is undated. This weblog post has a 1925 Sanborn Map showing the Lyric’s location, and says that the house opened in 1913 and was demolished in 1962.
The Oshkosh Theatre is on a list of the works of the Milwaukee architectural firm of Dick & Bauer that was published in the October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald-World.
A list of theaters designed by the Milwaukee architectural firm of Dick & Bauer was published in the October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald-World, and it lists the Capitol Theatre at Racine among their works. It’s possible that J. Mandor Matson was the supervising architect for the project, but he was apparently just beginning his career around 1920 when the Capitol was built (the earliest project I’ve seen attributed to him in the trade publications dates from 1922.)
The web site Encyclopedia of the Great Plains has this brief article about architects Ellery Lathrop Davis and Walter F. Wilson.
The Capitol Theatre was in operation by 1930, when its design was attributed to architect Walter Earl Bort, in association with architect John H. Ladehoff, in the October 25 issue of Exhibitors Herald-World.
The Bluebird Theatre in Petersburg was designed by architect Fred A. Bishop, according to a partial list of his works that appeared in the October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald-World.
The Tivoli Theatre was designed by architect Leonard H. Bailey. It was (as the Princess Theatre) on a list of theaters he had designed that was published in the October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald-World.
I think that the Temple Theatre in Ardmore might be the house that appears as the Shrine Theatre in a list of theaters designed by architect Leonard H. Bailey that appeared in the October 25, 1930, issue of Exhibitors Herald-World. There is a Masonic lodge on the fifth floor of the building.
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.