Boxoffice of July 27, 1935, said that the Beverly Theatre was designed by architects Ronald F. Perry and Helmuth Bartsch. >This web page about Helmut [sic] Bartsch has seven photos of the Beverly Theatre (and also four apparently unrelated photos mistakenly labeled as depicting the Beverly Theatre.)
Helmuth Bartsch was an associate of Holabird & Root or its successor firms from 1928 through 1965. Ronald Perry was not mentioned in an exhaustive list of the Holabird & Root’s associates, so he must have been an independent architect.
I don’t know why I wrote Joe Goodman in my previous comment. The songwriter’s name was Joe Goodwin.
The Worcester Theatre isn’t listed at Cinema Treasures, and I’ve been unable to discover if it ever showed movies, other than a single exhibition of an early sound film process in 1913. Here’s a page with a photo of it anyway. It had a somewhat more ornate front than the Fine Arts, with some nice Romanesque detailing. Almost every comment on the page conflates it with either the Lothrop’s/Olympia/Fine Arts or the Poli/Hanover Theatre.
Volume two of History of Worcester and its People, by Charles Nutt, published in 1919, says that the Strand Theatre was opened in 1916. It was devoted primarily to movies, but sometimes presented vaudeville acts as well.
bbatty: The 1986 photo linked to by lostmemory in the comment of May 15, 2009, shows the same building that is in the Google Street View currently displayed at the top of this page. The Google view shows Pleasant Street, and is dated August, 2007. I believe that the Worcester Theatre on Exchange Street was long gone by that time. The theater in our photos has to be the Lathrop’s/Olympia/Fine Arts.
Here is a photo of this theater when it was the Olympia. The John Wayne movie Flame of the Barabary Coast is advertised on the marquee, which dates the photo to about 1945.
The photo comes from this weblog post about songwriter Joe Goodman, which is worth a visit in its own right, as are Chet Williamson’s other posts about Worcester’s songwriters.
The July 24, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World spells the name Dorris, with two r’s, as does an item in the August 26, 1916, issue of the same publication saying that the Dorris Theatre at Roseville had been sold to J. E. Edmonds, formerly of Los Gatos, and had been combined with the Rose Theatre (listed here as the Roxie.) Those are the only two references to this theater in publications of the period that I can find.
The December 6, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World said that a group of Williamsburg exhibitors had met at the Progress Theater, 116 Graham Avenue, on November 20 to establish a branch of the New York City Exhibitors' Association.
I don’t know if the addresses have been shifted since 1913, or if the entrance to the theater actually was once in the other store building that fronts the auditorium. It must have been the same house, in any case.
Cezar DelValle’s Brooklyn Theatre Index says that this house was in operation as the Progress Theatre in 1912-1913, became the Variety Theatre from 1914-1917, and returned to being the Progress Theatre from 1918 until 1933, when it became the Lindy Theatre, closing in 1954.
This house didn’t make it into Cezar Del Valle’s Brooklyn Theatre Index, but it did get mentioned in the December 6, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World. The Leonard Theatre was to host the second meeting of the recently-formed Williamsburg branch of the New York City Exhibitor’s League.
The first meeting, which had been held at the Progress Theatre, was attended by representatives of the Leonard Theatre and of the Broadway Lyceum, Graham Palace, Tompkins Amusement Company, Bushwick Casino, and the Progress, Metropolitan, Lewis, Williamsburg, Owl, Sutter, Bushwick, Old Postoffice, Greenpoint, and Kensington Theatres.
Rumors that Shubert might take over the old Warner Hollywood have been around for more than a decade. An August 31, 2001, item in the Los Angeles Times said that the idea had been floated by Leron Gubler, executive director of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. It’s been floating ever since.
Maybe the Shubert organization was just waiting for the church’s lease to end, but then with their deep pockets it seems they would have been able to buy out the church’s lease twelve years ago, before the Shubert Theatre in Century City was demolished, if they’d really wanted the place.
Because the Warner’s auditorium is set at a 45 degree angle, the stage is rather oddly shaped and small, being stuck into a corner of the building. That could be a deterrent to conversion. There is a parking lot next door, so there would be room to expand the stage (if the land is available), but it would be very costly.
It’s likely that the Dominion Theatres were part of the original group of houses operated by Famous Players when the company was chartered in 1920. This 1945 article from the Montreal Gazette lists among the 18 theaters the circuit began with two houses in Vancouver, one in Victoria, and one in Nanaimo.
Manjunath Pendakur’s Canadian Dreams and American Control: The Political Economy of the Canadian Film Industry mentions J. R. Muir twice, once as managing director of Famous Players subsidiary B.C. Paramount Theatres in 1926, and once as district manager of Famous Players in British Columbia in 1929. Muir might well have been one of N. L. Nathanson’s original associates in the circuit.
John Ritchie Muir was the original operator of the Dominion Theatre. He joined the Dominion Theatre Company of Vancouver in 1906, and later became its president, managing director, and principal stockholder. He built the Dominion Theatre in Victoria several years later. Later, he opened a third house of the same name at Nanaimo, B.C.
A brief notice in the October, 1912 issue of The Pacific Coast Architect said that Edwin W. Houghton had prepared plans for a theater at Victoria for a company promoted by J. A.[sic] Muir. A recent article in the Victoria Times Colonist about events in the city in 1913 has a few paragraphs about entertainment, and one says that the Dominion Theatre opened in May, 1913.
According to this page at ArchitectDB, the Majestic was designed by Seattle architect Edwin W. Houghton. The house only remained a theater until 1930, when it was gutted and converted into a parking garage. The building was demolished in 1981. The 43-floor office building now on the theater’s site was completed in 1987.
ArchitectDB says that Sullivan & Considine renamed the Majestic the Empress in 1911. The various Empress Theatres were included in the sale of Sullivan & Considine’s holdings to Marcus Loew in 1914, as reported in The New York Times of March 27. However, the Majestic/Empress ended up being operated for several years by the Ackerman & Harris circuit as the Palace Hippodrome before finally becoming Loew’s Palace Hip by 1921.
The acquisition of Sullivan & Considine’s holdings made Loew’s the largest vaudeville circuit in the United States, even though a number of S&C’s houses were parceled out to other chains, including the Orpheum and Pantages circuits.
The Regent hosted at least one live event in its last year. The March 24, 1973, issue of Billboard said that B.B. King would perform at the house on April 1.
The Regent was being operated by Paramount in 1946, when the July 2 issue of The Daily Record, a Rochester business and legal publication, reported that the chain would remodel the Center Theatre and rename it the Paramount, and build a new lounge at the Regent. The architect for remodeling the Center was Michael J. DeAngelis, and though the article didn’t specify him as the architect of the Regent project, it’s likely that it was a package deal and he designed both.
Apparently the photo in Boxoffice only captured about one third of the Park Theatre’s auditorium. Looking at the Williams Avenue side of the theater’s building in Street View, it can be seen that it was quite long, so it certainly could have held over 1000 seats.
Houma’s blocks must have been renumbered at some point (and it’s not just Google, as Bing Maps can’t find the address 610 Main Street either.) I believe that this Street View shows the approximate site of the Bijou, but it is now the 7900 block instead of the 600 block (the Bijou was probably at about 7910.)
Google’s program has made its best guess from the old address we gave it, and has placed the Street View and pin icon for our page in the 6200 block of Main Street, as apparently there is no longer a 610 Main Street for it to find. We need to update the address and reset the Google Map.
Our page for the Grand Theatre also has the old address, but the Fox Theatre page shows the correct address, and I moved the Street View to the proper location. However, the map’s pin icon is still in the wrong spot.
Oddly, even using a three-digit address, Google’s pin icon is only about four blocks off for the Park Theatre.
The June 29, 1945, issue of the Webster Herald reported that the War Production Board had granted permission to Crawford Enterprises to build a movie theater at Webster. The new house, as yet unnamed, was designed by architect Michael J. DeAngelis.
The Ashland Avenue house also shows up on the theater list in the 1925 Daily News yearbook, so it probably did reopen. I have no idea how long it operated after that, though.
The less elaborate facade than originally planned on the Ashland Avenue house was probably due to cost overruns resulting from the delays, and from work that had to be redone (the building permit was revoked during construction due to code violations.)
I have no idea what the original interior of this late 19th century theater looked like, but whatever style it was, the transformation of the auditorium with a severely streamlined design by architect Eugene Fuhrer in 1930 must have been a shock to anyone familiar with the house. Here is a photo illustrating an ad for the American Seating Company in the November 1, 1930, issue of Motion Picture News.
The Barcli (not Barcil) and the Strand were not the same theater. Both the Barcli and the Strand are advertised in issues of the Schenectady Gazette between 1922 and 1929. A September 3, 1995, Daily Gazette column by Larry Hart says that the Strand Theatre opened as the Orpheum Theatre and was later renamed the Palace before becoming the Strand. Hart gives the address of the Strand as 409-411 State Street. I’ve found the Orpheum mentioned in The Billboard as early as 1908.
There are also photos of State Street showing a vertical Orpheum sign on the building that has the Strand marquee in the postcard currently displayed above.
The Barcli Theatre building fronted on Barrett Street north of State Street, and ran through the block west to Clinton Street, but the Strand was on State Street between Broadway and Jay Street, in the second block west of Clinton Street.
The Strand Theatre’s building still exists, but it has been drastically altered and is now a trendy residential project called the Metropolitan Lofts, completed in 2012. Despite the changes, the auditorium roof can still be recognized in Google’s current satellite view.
On this page of the same book begins a brief history of Pekin’s theaters. It says that the first Empire Theatre was built in the 1850s on the same site as the later Empire theater. The original was a second-floor house above a dry goods store. After the Turner Opera House was built in 1890, the Empire declined and was eventually converted into a movie house.
The book indicates that the Empire Theatre that was operating in 1949 had replaced the original building, but doesn’t say when that happened.
According to a souvenir book published for Pekin’s centenary in 1949, the Rialto opened at 302 Court Street in 1906 as a nickelodeon called the Dreamland Theatre. The Rialto was still in operation in 1949, while two other movie houses that had opened the same year, the Vaudette at 24 S. Fourth Street and the Unique Theatre at 9 S. Capitol Street, were long gone. Two other vanished Pekin nickelodeons were the Court Theatre at 431 Court Street, and the Idlehour, no address given, but in 1949 its site was occupied by the telephone company’s building.
Comments on this theater from before August 2, 2007, seem to have gone missing. I think that this 1949 photo must have been the one Chuck linked to.
Boxoffice of July 27, 1935, said that the Beverly Theatre was designed by architects Ronald F. Perry and Helmuth Bartsch. >This web page about Helmut [sic] Bartsch has seven photos of the Beverly Theatre (and also four apparently unrelated photos mistakenly labeled as depicting the Beverly Theatre.)
Helmuth Bartsch was an associate of Holabird & Root or its successor firms from 1928 through 1965. Ronald Perry was not mentioned in an exhaustive list of the Holabird & Root’s associates, so he must have been an independent architect.
I don’t know why I wrote Joe Goodman in my previous comment. The songwriter’s name was Joe Goodwin.
The Worcester Theatre isn’t listed at Cinema Treasures, and I’ve been unable to discover if it ever showed movies, other than a single exhibition of an early sound film process in 1913. Here’s a page with a photo of it anyway. It had a somewhat more ornate front than the Fine Arts, with some nice Romanesque detailing. Almost every comment on the page conflates it with either the Lothrop’s/Olympia/Fine Arts or the Poli/Hanover Theatre.
Volume two of History of Worcester and its People, by Charles Nutt, published in 1919, says that the Strand Theatre was opened in 1916. It was devoted primarily to movies, but sometimes presented vaudeville acts as well.
bbatty: The 1986 photo linked to by lostmemory in the comment of May 15, 2009, shows the same building that is in the Google Street View currently displayed at the top of this page. The Google view shows Pleasant Street, and is dated August, 2007. I believe that the Worcester Theatre on Exchange Street was long gone by that time. The theater in our photos has to be the Lathrop’s/Olympia/Fine Arts.
Here is a photo of this theater when it was the Olympia. The John Wayne movie Flame of the Barabary Coast is advertised on the marquee, which dates the photo to about 1945.
The photo comes from this weblog post about songwriter Joe Goodman, which is worth a visit in its own right, as are Chet Williamson’s other posts about Worcester’s songwriters.
The July 24, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World spells the name Dorris, with two r’s, as does an item in the August 26, 1916, issue of the same publication saying that the Dorris Theatre at Roseville had been sold to J. E. Edmonds, formerly of Los Gatos, and had been combined with the Rose Theatre (listed here as the Roxie.) Those are the only two references to this theater in publications of the period that I can find.
Ah, there it is. I must have overlooked it.
The December 6, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World said that a group of Williamsburg exhibitors had met at the Progress Theater, 116 Graham Avenue, on November 20 to establish a branch of the New York City Exhibitors' Association.
I don’t know if the addresses have been shifted since 1913, or if the entrance to the theater actually was once in the other store building that fronts the auditorium. It must have been the same house, in any case.
Cezar DelValle’s Brooklyn Theatre Index says that this house was in operation as the Progress Theatre in 1912-1913, became the Variety Theatre from 1914-1917, and returned to being the Progress Theatre from 1918 until 1933, when it became the Lindy Theatre, closing in 1954.
This house didn’t make it into Cezar Del Valle’s Brooklyn Theatre Index, but it did get mentioned in the December 6, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World. The Leonard Theatre was to host the second meeting of the recently-formed Williamsburg branch of the New York City Exhibitor’s League.
The first meeting, which had been held at the Progress Theatre, was attended by representatives of the Leonard Theatre and of the Broadway Lyceum, Graham Palace, Tompkins Amusement Company, Bushwick Casino, and the Progress, Metropolitan, Lewis, Williamsburg, Owl, Sutter, Bushwick, Old Postoffice, Greenpoint, and Kensington Theatres.
Rumors that Shubert might take over the old Warner Hollywood have been around for more than a decade. An August 31, 2001, item in the Los Angeles Times said that the idea had been floated by Leron Gubler, executive director of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. It’s been floating ever since.
Maybe the Shubert organization was just waiting for the church’s lease to end, but then with their deep pockets it seems they would have been able to buy out the church’s lease twelve years ago, before the Shubert Theatre in Century City was demolished, if they’d really wanted the place.
Because the Warner’s auditorium is set at a 45 degree angle, the stage is rather oddly shaped and small, being stuck into a corner of the building. That could be a deterrent to conversion. There is a parking lot next door, so there would be room to expand the stage (if the land is available), but it would be very costly.
It’s likely that the Dominion Theatres were part of the original group of houses operated by Famous Players when the company was chartered in 1920. This 1945 article from the Montreal Gazette lists among the 18 theaters the circuit began with two houses in Vancouver, one in Victoria, and one in Nanaimo.
Manjunath Pendakur’s Canadian Dreams and American Control: The Political Economy of the Canadian Film Industry mentions J. R. Muir twice, once as managing director of Famous Players subsidiary B.C. Paramount Theatres in 1926, and once as district manager of Famous Players in British Columbia in 1929. Muir might well have been one of N. L. Nathanson’s original associates in the circuit.
John Ritchie Muir was the original operator of the Dominion Theatre. He joined the Dominion Theatre Company of Vancouver in 1906, and later became its president, managing director, and principal stockholder. He built the Dominion Theatre in Victoria several years later. Later, he opened a third house of the same name at Nanaimo, B.C.
A brief notice in the October, 1912 issue of The Pacific Coast Architect said that Edwin W. Houghton had prepared plans for a theater at Victoria for a company promoted by J. A.[sic] Muir. A recent article in the Victoria Times Colonist about events in the city in 1913 has a few paragraphs about entertainment, and one says that the Dominion Theatre opened in May, 1913.
The Pacific Coast Architecture Database says that the Spokane Theatre was designed by Seattle architect Edwin W. Houghton.
The Pacific Coast Architecture Database says that Beck’s Theatre in Bellingham was designed by architect Edwin W. Houghton.
According to this page at ArchitectDB, the Majestic was designed by Seattle architect Edwin W. Houghton. The house only remained a theater until 1930, when it was gutted and converted into a parking garage. The building was demolished in 1981. The 43-floor office building now on the theater’s site was completed in 1987.
ArchitectDB says that Sullivan & Considine renamed the Majestic the Empress in 1911. The various Empress Theatres were included in the sale of Sullivan & Considine’s holdings to Marcus Loew in 1914, as reported in The New York Times of March 27. However, the Majestic/Empress ended up being operated for several years by the Ackerman & Harris circuit as the Palace Hippodrome before finally becoming Loew’s Palace Hip by 1921.
The acquisition of Sullivan & Considine’s holdings made Loew’s the largest vaudeville circuit in the United States, even though a number of S&C’s houses were parceled out to other chains, including the Orpheum and Pantages circuits.
The Regent hosted at least one live event in its last year. The March 24, 1973, issue of Billboard said that B.B. King would perform at the house on April 1.
The Regent was being operated by Paramount in 1946, when the July 2 issue of The Daily Record, a Rochester business and legal publication, reported that the chain would remodel the Center Theatre and rename it the Paramount, and build a new lounge at the Regent. The architect for remodeling the Center was Michael J. DeAngelis, and though the article didn’t specify him as the architect of the Regent project, it’s likely that it was a package deal and he designed both.
Apparently the photo in Boxoffice only captured about one third of the Park Theatre’s auditorium. Looking at the Williams Avenue side of the theater’s building in Street View, it can be seen that it was quite long, so it certainly could have held over 1000 seats.
Houma’s blocks must have been renumbered at some point (and it’s not just Google, as Bing Maps can’t find the address 610 Main Street either.) I believe that this Street View shows the approximate site of the Bijou, but it is now the 7900 block instead of the 600 block (the Bijou was probably at about 7910.)
Google’s program has made its best guess from the old address we gave it, and has placed the Street View and pin icon for our page in the 6200 block of Main Street, as apparently there is no longer a 610 Main Street for it to find. We need to update the address and reset the Google Map.
Our page for the Grand Theatre also has the old address, but the Fox Theatre page shows the correct address, and I moved the Street View to the proper location. However, the map’s pin icon is still in the wrong spot.
Oddly, even using a three-digit address, Google’s pin icon is only about four blocks off for the Park Theatre.
The June 29, 1945, issue of the Webster Herald reported that the War Production Board had granted permission to Crawford Enterprises to build a movie theater at Webster. The new house, as yet unnamed, was designed by architect Michael J. DeAngelis.
This web page has a photo of Bisbee’s Brewery Gulch with the Orpheum Theatre in the 1920s.
The Ashland Avenue house also shows up on the theater list in the 1925 Daily News yearbook, so it probably did reopen. I have no idea how long it operated after that, though.
The less elaborate facade than originally planned on the Ashland Avenue house was probably due to cost overruns resulting from the delays, and from work that had to be redone (the building permit was revoked during construction due to code violations.)
I have no idea what the original interior of this late 19th century theater looked like, but whatever style it was, the transformation of the auditorium with a severely streamlined design by architect Eugene Fuhrer in 1930 must have been a shock to anyone familiar with the house. Here is a photo illustrating an ad for the American Seating Company in the November 1, 1930, issue of Motion Picture News.
The Barcli (not Barcil) and the Strand were not the same theater. Both the Barcli and the Strand are advertised in issues of the Schenectady Gazette between 1922 and 1929. A September 3, 1995, Daily Gazette column by Larry Hart says that the Strand Theatre opened as the Orpheum Theatre and was later renamed the Palace before becoming the Strand. Hart gives the address of the Strand as 409-411 State Street. I’ve found the Orpheum mentioned in The Billboard as early as 1908.
There are also photos of State Street showing a vertical Orpheum sign on the building that has the Strand marquee in the postcard currently displayed above.
The Barcli Theatre building fronted on Barrett Street north of State Street, and ran through the block west to Clinton Street, but the Strand was on State Street between Broadway and Jay Street, in the second block west of Clinton Street.
The Strand Theatre’s building still exists, but it has been drastically altered and is now a trendy residential project called the Metropolitan Lofts, completed in 2012. Despite the changes, the auditorium roof can still be recognized in Google’s current satellite view.
I believe that this is the theater ad that Paladin referred to.
On this page of the same book begins a brief history of Pekin’s theaters. It says that the first Empire Theatre was built in the 1850s on the same site as the later Empire theater. The original was a second-floor house above a dry goods store. After the Turner Opera House was built in 1890, the Empire declined and was eventually converted into a movie house.
The book indicates that the Empire Theatre that was operating in 1949 had replaced the original building, but doesn’t say when that happened.
According to a souvenir book published for Pekin’s centenary in 1949, the Rialto opened at 302 Court Street in 1906 as a nickelodeon called the Dreamland Theatre. The Rialto was still in operation in 1949, while two other movie houses that had opened the same year, the Vaudette at 24 S. Fourth Street and the Unique Theatre at 9 S. Capitol Street, were long gone. Two other vanished Pekin nickelodeons were the Court Theatre at 431 Court Street, and the Idlehour, no address given, but in 1949 its site was occupied by the telephone company’s building.