Regarding this paragraph in my comment of December 5, 2010:
“An advertisement for Philadelphia building contractors R.C. Ballinger & Co. in a 1907 edition of Sweet’s Catalog of Building Construction listed the Alvin Theatre among the projects the company had built, and said that the house was designed by an Indianapolis architectural firm called Reed Brothers. I’ve been unable to find any other references to that firm on the Internet.”
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but “Reed Brothers” might have been an error by whoever put together the ad in Sweet’s Catalog. Before establishing their practice in San Francisco, that city’s noted theater architects James and Merritt Reid had operated an office in Evansville, Indiana, along with their younger brother Watson Reid. The Evansville office was sold in 1891, the same year the Alvin Theatre was built. The Reids then moved to California, though Watson eventually returned to their native Canada to practice architecture there.
This is probably not enough information to establish that San Francisco’s Reid Brothers designed the Alvin Theatre, but, if the Sweet’s ad got both the name and the city wrong, it opens the tantalizing possibility that they did. It would be interesting if their first theater design turned out to have been in Pittsburgh, and not in that other hill town where they became famous.
StarryGreen: Yes, the description now states that the Warner opened as the Grand Theatre, but it didn’t say that at the time I asked the question. When I first visited Cinema Treasures I wondered why so many comments just repeated things that were already stated in the theater descriptions, but it turned out to be the other way around.
The descriptions are periodically updated by the site’s editor with new information that is posted in comments, such as K2’s reply to my question, confirming my suspicion that this house was once the Grand. Be sure to check back now and then to see if something new has been discovered about the theater.
The Hub was San Francisco’s oldest operating movie theater when Boxoffice of March 25, 1968, noted that the venerable house had recently celebrated its 59th anniversary week (bottom of center column.)
The auction ended months ago, but for now the listing is still on display for this vintage postcard showing the Grand Theatre in Rutland, which the seller dated 1911 (if you scroll down you might see a larger version- you might have to click “view original listing” first.) The building is easily recognizable, despite the alterations which have been made to it since then.
Around 1915, the Samuel Lewis Store next door to the Grand became the location of an early nickelodeon, the Colonial Theatre. There used to be a photo of it available, too, but it has vanished from the Internet.
Partial linkrot repair: The cable channel Planet Green is no longer in operation, and the URL of its web site now redirects to a web site called the Mother Nature Network. It has several items about Greensburg (use the site’s internal search) but none of them are about the theater.
The City of Greesnburg web site,however, has several pages mentioning the Twilight (internal search again), including pages with the two pre-tornado photos and the rendering of the new building.
Also, here is Silicon Sam’s Google Street View link in clickable form.
Those views both date from 2012, and there has been progress since then. The Twilight Theatre now has its own web site, and more recent photos can be seen there in the “Construction” section. In addition, there are a couple more vintage photos of the Twilight at the “History” link, under the “About” section. The new Twilight will have a 27' x 55' screen, so it will rival those in much larger cities.
The new Twilight Theatre was designed by Spangenberg Phillips Tice Architecture, the Wichita firm that has designed projects for Warren Theatres. The firm donated the plans for the new house.
The Spring, 2009 newsletter of the Rutland Food Co-op (PDF here) has a brief history of their building. It was built by the local Shriners, with construction beginning in 1909, and the house opened as the Shrine Theatre on January 9, 1913. The article says that the Strand opened in the former lobby of the Shrine Theatre in 1920, but I don’t think the part of the Wales Street building that the lobby occupied was anywhere big enough for the theater, so it must have been in the Shrine Theatre auditorium.
The auditorium, however, was quite large, with far more than the 600 seats we have listed for the Strand. The 1913-1914 Cahn-Leighton guide lists the Shrine Theatre with 1,400 seats, 900 on the main floor and 500 in the balcony. In the 1937 city directory, the Strand’s listing caries the notation “road shows”, an indication that it must have been a large house with stage facilities.
The carved “Ray Beane” over the food co-op entrance was added quite some time after the building was built, when Mr. Beane operated a tire store in the space. The theater entrance was where there is now a blank wall with some bulletin boards on it. The auditorium is now the winter home of the Rutland farmers market.
The Grand was the smaller of two theaters listed for Rutland in the 1913-1914 edition of the Cahn-Leighton guide. It was a ground-floor house with 1,221 seats; 519 on the main floor, 402 in the balcony, and 300 in the gallery. Roger Flint was the resident manager of the Grand and of the 1,400-seat Shrine Theatre.
The Grand was not listed in the 1909-1910 Cahn guide, so it must have been built between 1910 and 1913. I think the top of the auditorium has been removed, though. The building as it is now isn’t tall enough to have housed a 400-seat balcony, let alone a gallery above that. There’s no stage house, either, though the Cahn guide described the Grand as having a large stage. In short, the front of the theater is still there, and the lower walls of the auditorium might still exist, but everything else is gone.
Usually, when a duplicate shows up the older page gets to stay, but I think that’s because whoever submitted the first one might be miffed if theirs was the one eliminated. As Chuck submitted both of these pages that won’t be a problem here.
According to Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi, by Jerry Dallas, the Amite Theatre was in the same building which had earlier housed the second Alamo Theatre. Like its predecessor, the Amite was an African American house.
The second Alamo had opened as the New Alamo Theatre around 1927, and occupied the building on Amite Street for more than twenty years. Arthur Lehman leased the building from the Orkin family, and when his lease ran out Ad and Andrew Orkin renovated the house and reopened it as the Amite Theatre in January, 1949, a few weeks before the Alamo reopened in its new location on Farish Street.
The Amite Theater survived for less than a decade, closing in 1958. The new Alamo outlasted it by more than twenty years.
The well-researched paper Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi, by Jerry Dallas (PDF here), says that the third Alamo Theatre opened on February 26, 1949. Arthur Lehman’s new, 750-seat Alamo had been designed to present live performances as well as movies, and for many years brought big-name African American entertainers to Jackson audiences.
The Alamo actually outlived all of downtown Jackson’s white theaters, lasting into the early 1980s, but it had closed by 1983.
Jerry Dallas’s Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi gives the sequence of names this theater had as follows: Opened by the summer of 1941 as the Ray Theatre; renamed the Joy Theatre by 1943; renamed the Park Theatre from July 18, 1948, until closing in 1950.
The New Joy was a different theater, at 215 West Capitol Street, which had previously been called the Buck and the Gay. The operations of the Joy and the New Joy actually overlapped for about two and a half years.
Jerry Dallas’s Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi says that the Booker-T Theatre was in a new brick building erected on the site of the first Alamo Theatre.
My apologies to Jerry Dallas. He did say that the Paramount was originally intended to have 1,800 seats but opened with 1,668. It was not his error, but the fact that I was reading the Google cache of a PDF which failed to render the numbers correctly.
Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi, by Jerry Dallas (PDF here– see page 4) says that there were two adjacent houses Capitol Street called the New Majestic Theatre. The first house opened on September 14, 1913, at 126 E. Capitol Street, and the second, soon built on the adjacent lot at 124 E. Capitol, opened on October 22, 1915. The first New Majestic was then remodeled for use as a Woolworth 5&10 cent store.
The second New Majestic opened with 1,250 seats, and was designed in the Spanish Renaissance style. At some time after the Paramount Theatre opened across the street (both houses were under the same ownership), the Majestic was relegated to second runs, and it closed in July, 1951.
There was also the original Majestic Theatre, located in the 100 block of West Capitol Street. After the first New Majestic opened, the Old Majestic continued to operate until the fall of 1914. A footnote says that by the time it closed it was known as the Little Majestic Theatre.
This photo of the Majestic shows a bit of the first New Majestic Theatre building in the background, after it had been converted into a Woolworth store (right click on this photo to select larger sizes.)
My previous comments are irrelevant. This theater was already listed at Cinema Treasures under its later name, the Royal Music Hall.
Ken Roe: mecooper77 has uploaded a nice collection of photos for this theater. Is it possible to move them to the Royal page before this page is removed, or at least notify mecooper that they will have to be re-uploaded there?
(Or you could break from precedent and just eliminate the Royal page and rename this one- though we would then lose CSWalczak’s photo link on that page.)
This theater has been entirely demolished, as long ago as 1961 according to Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi, by Jerry Dallas (PDF here.)
The Century Theatre can be seen in this vintage postcard. It was in the third building from the corner of President Street. The corner building is still standing, but the next two buildings have been replaced by a parking lot.
Also, Jerry Dallas’s paper Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi (PDF here) gives the address of the Century as 510 E. Capitol Street.
mecooper77 is correct that the Century Theatre building has been entirely demolished. The Century Theatre was in the five-story building with the shed-like entrance canopy seen in this early postcard. The three-story building on the corner of President Street is still standing, but the next two buildings in the photo have been replaced by a parking lot.
The October 4, 1937, issue of The Film Daily said that the Bijou Theatre in Xenia, Ohio, had been renamed the Xenia Theatre. The October 21 issue had this item:
“Xenia, O. — A continuous run policy every day is proving successful in the new Chakeres-Xenia Theater. Before the opening of this new de luxe theater in the Greene County capital none of the city’s three theaters even maintained a daily matinee policy.”
One of the other two theaters then operating in Xenia was called the Ohio, but I haven’t yet found the name of the third house.
I think there were two narrow aisles flanking the continental seats. There are two doors, one to each side, at the back of the auditorium. The Beverly Theatre might have already been fairly old in 1938, as the seats appear to have wooden backs. The owners probably couldn’t afford more than a new coat of paint to spruce the place up.
The Grand Theatre was built for African-American audiences. Boxoffice of June 25, 1938, said the house had opened on May 11. It was designed by Raymond F. Smith for the Community Amusement Company.
Bids were received for construction of a another new African American theater, seating 500, for the Bijou Amusement Company, on June 7. The magazine didn’t give the name of this second Fort Worth project.
Interstate’s Yale Theatre opened on May 30, 1938. A drawing of it appeared at lower right on this page of the June 25 issue of Boxoffice. The Yale was designed by Raymond F. Smith of the Dallas firm Houston & Smith.
A photo of the auditorium of the Roxy Theatre at Kalispell appears at lower left on this page of Boxoffice, June 25, 1938. The caption does not reveal if the Roxy was a new theater or an old house that had lately been redecorated.
An architect’s rendering of the 1938 facade of the Palace Theatre, demolished after the 1946 explosion, can be seen at upper right on this page of the June 25, 1938, issue of Boxoffice the caption of the drawing says that the Palace was designed by the San Antonio architectural firm of Spillman & Spillman.
The caption says nothing about whether the Palace was entirely new construction or a remodeling, but if there was a theater on the site in the silent era it must have been one or the other.
The Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to says that the Paramount Theatre was designed by Jackson architect R. W. Naef.
An article called Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi, by Jerry Dallas, says that the Paramount was initially planned to have 800 seats, but the capacity was cut to 668 by the time it opened. The Boxoffice article claims a seating capacity of 1,800, and says that the auditorium was 76x125 feet. A 1960 view at Historic Aerials confirms that this was a very large theater, and I suspect that Boxoffice was closer to the truth than Dallas was. Perhaps the house was intended to have 1,800 seats and opened with 1,668, and Dallas lost a digit from each number.
An AIA survey form filled out by R. W. Naef’s office lists the cost of the Paramount Theatre project as $200,000, and in Mississippi, in still-depressed 1938, that would certainly have bought far more than a 700-seat theater. Also, the Boxoffice photo shows a foyer and lounge much too spacious for a small house.
Regarding this paragraph in my comment of December 5, 2010:
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but “Reed Brothers” might have been an error by whoever put together the ad in Sweet’s Catalog. Before establishing their practice in San Francisco, that city’s noted theater architects James and Merritt Reid had operated an office in Evansville, Indiana, along with their younger brother Watson Reid. The Evansville office was sold in 1891, the same year the Alvin Theatre was built. The Reids then moved to California, though Watson eventually returned to their native Canada to practice architecture there.This is probably not enough information to establish that San Francisco’s Reid Brothers designed the Alvin Theatre, but, if the Sweet’s ad got both the name and the city wrong, it opens the tantalizing possibility that they did. It would be interesting if their first theater design turned out to have been in Pittsburgh, and not in that other hill town where they became famous.
StarryGreen: Yes, the description now states that the Warner opened as the Grand Theatre, but it didn’t say that at the time I asked the question. When I first visited Cinema Treasures I wondered why so many comments just repeated things that were already stated in the theater descriptions, but it turned out to be the other way around.
The descriptions are periodically updated by the site’s editor with new information that is posted in comments, such as K2’s reply to my question, confirming my suspicion that this house was once the Grand. Be sure to check back now and then to see if something new has been discovered about the theater.
The Hub was San Francisco’s oldest operating movie theater when Boxoffice of March 25, 1968, noted that the venerable house had recently celebrated its 59th anniversary week (bottom of center column.)
The auction ended months ago, but for now the listing is still on display for this vintage postcard showing the Grand Theatre in Rutland, which the seller dated 1911 (if you scroll down you might see a larger version- you might have to click “view original listing” first.) The building is easily recognizable, despite the alterations which have been made to it since then.
Around 1915, the Samuel Lewis Store next door to the Grand became the location of an early nickelodeon, the Colonial Theatre. There used to be a photo of it available, too, but it has vanished from the Internet.
Partial linkrot repair: The cable channel Planet Green is no longer in operation, and the URL of its web site now redirects to a web site called the Mother Nature Network. It has several items about Greensburg (use the site’s internal search) but none of them are about the theater.
The City of Greesnburg web site,however, has several pages mentioning the Twilight (internal search again), including pages with the two pre-tornado photos and the rendering of the new building.
Also, here is Silicon Sam’s Google Street View link in clickable form.
Plus here is a clickable link to Keith Wondra’s photo of the theater under construction.
Those views both date from 2012, and there has been progress since then. The Twilight Theatre now has its own web site, and more recent photos can be seen there in the “Construction” section. In addition, there are a couple more vintage photos of the Twilight at the “History” link, under the “About” section. The new Twilight will have a 27' x 55' screen, so it will rival those in much larger cities.
The new Twilight Theatre was designed by Spangenberg Phillips Tice Architecture, the Wichita firm that has designed projects for Warren Theatres. The firm donated the plans for the new house.
The Spring, 2009 newsletter of the Rutland Food Co-op (PDF here) has a brief history of their building. It was built by the local Shriners, with construction beginning in 1909, and the house opened as the Shrine Theatre on January 9, 1913. The article says that the Strand opened in the former lobby of the Shrine Theatre in 1920, but I don’t think the part of the Wales Street building that the lobby occupied was anywhere big enough for the theater, so it must have been in the Shrine Theatre auditorium.
The auditorium, however, was quite large, with far more than the 600 seats we have listed for the Strand. The 1913-1914 Cahn-Leighton guide lists the Shrine Theatre with 1,400 seats, 900 on the main floor and 500 in the balcony. In the 1937 city directory, the Strand’s listing caries the notation “road shows”, an indication that it must have been a large house with stage facilities.
The carved “Ray Beane” over the food co-op entrance was added quite some time after the building was built, when Mr. Beane operated a tire store in the space. The theater entrance was where there is now a blank wall with some bulletin boards on it. The auditorium is now the winter home of the Rutland farmers market.
The Grand was the smaller of two theaters listed for Rutland in the 1913-1914 edition of the Cahn-Leighton guide. It was a ground-floor house with 1,221 seats; 519 on the main floor, 402 in the balcony, and 300 in the gallery. Roger Flint was the resident manager of the Grand and of the 1,400-seat Shrine Theatre.
The Grand was not listed in the 1909-1910 Cahn guide, so it must have been built between 1910 and 1913. I think the top of the auditorium has been removed, though. The building as it is now isn’t tall enough to have housed a 400-seat balcony, let alone a gallery above that. There’s no stage house, either, though the Cahn guide described the Grand as having a large stage. In short, the front of the theater is still there, and the lower walls of the auditorium might still exist, but everything else is gone.
Usually, when a duplicate shows up the older page gets to stay, but I think that’s because whoever submitted the first one might be miffed if theirs was the one eliminated. As Chuck submitted both of these pages that won’t be a problem here.
According to Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi, by Jerry Dallas, the Amite Theatre was in the same building which had earlier housed the second Alamo Theatre. Like its predecessor, the Amite was an African American house.
The second Alamo had opened as the New Alamo Theatre around 1927, and occupied the building on Amite Street for more than twenty years. Arthur Lehman leased the building from the Orkin family, and when his lease ran out Ad and Andrew Orkin renovated the house and reopened it as the Amite Theatre in January, 1949, a few weeks before the Alamo reopened in its new location on Farish Street.
The Amite Theater survived for less than a decade, closing in 1958. The new Alamo outlasted it by more than twenty years.
The well-researched paper Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi, by Jerry Dallas (PDF here), says that the third Alamo Theatre opened on February 26, 1949. Arthur Lehman’s new, 750-seat Alamo had been designed to present live performances as well as movies, and for many years brought big-name African American entertainers to Jackson audiences.
The Alamo actually outlived all of downtown Jackson’s white theaters, lasting into the early 1980s, but it had closed by 1983.
Jerry Dallas’s Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi gives the sequence of names this theater had as follows: Opened by the summer of 1941 as the Ray Theatre; renamed the Joy Theatre by 1943; renamed the Park Theatre from July 18, 1948, until closing in 1950.
The New Joy was a different theater, at 215 West Capitol Street, which had previously been called the Buck and the Gay. The operations of the Joy and the New Joy actually overlapped for about two and a half years.
Jerry Dallas’s Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi says that the Booker-T Theatre was in a new brick building erected on the site of the first Alamo Theatre.
My apologies to Jerry Dallas. He did say that the Paramount was originally intended to have 1,800 seats but opened with 1,668. It was not his error, but the fact that I was reading the Google cache of a PDF which failed to render the numbers correctly.
Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi, by Jerry Dallas (PDF here– see page 4) says that there were two adjacent houses Capitol Street called the New Majestic Theatre. The first house opened on September 14, 1913, at 126 E. Capitol Street, and the second, soon built on the adjacent lot at 124 E. Capitol, opened on October 22, 1915. The first New Majestic was then remodeled for use as a Woolworth 5&10 cent store.
The second New Majestic opened with 1,250 seats, and was designed in the Spanish Renaissance style. At some time after the Paramount Theatre opened across the street (both houses were under the same ownership), the Majestic was relegated to second runs, and it closed in July, 1951.
There was also the original Majestic Theatre, located in the 100 block of West Capitol Street. After the first New Majestic opened, the Old Majestic continued to operate until the fall of 1914. A footnote says that by the time it closed it was known as the Little Majestic Theatre.
This photo of the Majestic shows a bit of the first New Majestic Theatre building in the background, after it had been converted into a Woolworth store (right click on this photo to select larger sizes.)
My previous comments are irrelevant. This theater was already listed at Cinema Treasures under its later name, the Royal Music Hall.
Ken Roe: mecooper77 has uploaded a nice collection of photos for this theater. Is it possible to move them to the Royal page before this page is removed, or at least notify mecooper that they will have to be re-uploaded there?
(Or you could break from precedent and just eliminate the Royal page and rename this one- though we would then lose CSWalczak’s photo link on that page.)
This theater has been entirely demolished, as long ago as 1961 according to Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi, by Jerry Dallas (PDF here.)
The Century Theatre can be seen in this vintage postcard. It was in the third building from the corner of President Street. The corner building is still standing, but the next two buildings have been replaced by a parking lot.
Also, Jerry Dallas’s paper Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi (PDF here) gives the address of the Century as 510 E. Capitol Street.
mecooper77 is correct that the Century Theatre building has been entirely demolished. The Century Theatre was in the five-story building with the shed-like entrance canopy seen in this early postcard. The three-story building on the corner of President Street is still standing, but the next two buildings in the photo have been replaced by a parking lot.
The October 4, 1937, issue of The Film Daily said that the Bijou Theatre in Xenia, Ohio, had been renamed the Xenia Theatre. The October 21 issue had this item:
One of the other two theaters then operating in Xenia was called the Ohio, but I haven’t yet found the name of the third house.I think there were two narrow aisles flanking the continental seats. There are two doors, one to each side, at the back of the auditorium. The Beverly Theatre might have already been fairly old in 1938, as the seats appear to have wooden backs. The owners probably couldn’t afford more than a new coat of paint to spruce the place up.
The Grand Theatre was built for African-American audiences. Boxoffice of June 25, 1938, said the house had opened on May 11. It was designed by Raymond F. Smith for the Community Amusement Company.
Bids were received for construction of a another new African American theater, seating 500, for the Bijou Amusement Company, on June 7. The magazine didn’t give the name of this second Fort Worth project.
Interstate’s Yale Theatre opened on May 30, 1938. A drawing of it appeared at lower right on this page of the June 25 issue of Boxoffice. The Yale was designed by Raymond F. Smith of the Dallas firm Houston & Smith.
A photo of the auditorium of the Roxy Theatre at Kalispell appears at lower left on this page of Boxoffice, June 25, 1938. The caption does not reveal if the Roxy was a new theater or an old house that had lately been redecorated.
An architect’s rendering of the 1938 facade of the Palace Theatre, demolished after the 1946 explosion, can be seen at upper right on this page of the June 25, 1938, issue of Boxoffice the caption of the drawing says that the Palace was designed by the San Antonio architectural firm of Spillman & Spillman.
The caption says nothing about whether the Palace was entirely new construction or a remodeling, but if there was a theater on the site in the silent era it must have been one or the other.
The Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to says that the Paramount Theatre was designed by Jackson architect R. W. Naef.
An article called Movie Theaters in Twentieth-Century Jackson, Mississippi, by Jerry Dallas, says that the Paramount was initially planned to have 800 seats, but the capacity was cut to 668 by the time it opened. The Boxoffice article claims a seating capacity of 1,800, and says that the auditorium was 76x125 feet. A 1960 view at Historic Aerials confirms that this was a very large theater, and I suspect that Boxoffice was closer to the truth than Dallas was. Perhaps the house was intended to have 1,800 seats and opened with 1,668, and Dallas lost a digit from each number.
An AIA survey form filled out by R. W. Naef’s office lists the cost of the Paramount Theatre project as $200,000, and in Mississippi, in still-depressed 1938, that would certainly have bought far more than a 700-seat theater. Also, the Boxoffice photo shows a foyer and lounge much too spacious for a small house.