The Bijou Theatre was in operation by 1913, the year in which it was taken over by Frank Rainault, according to his biography in the Encyclopedia of Massachusetts published in 1916. Shortly before the Encyclopedia was published, Rainault had the Bijou remodeled and expanded. According to items in The American Contractor that year, plans for the project were drawn by Holyoke architect Oscar Beauchemin.
This web page says that the Empire Theatre opened on November 2, 1893. A Springfield Republican article about the event noted that the theater was designed by J. B. McElfatrick & Son, and that the Empire resembled the Court Square Theatre in Springfield, designed by the same firm and opened the previous year.
An 1893 Springfield Republican article about the opening of the Empire Theatre in Holyoke noted that the new house resembled the Court Square Theatre, which had been designed by the same architectural firm, J.B. McElfatrick & Son.
The Empire Theatre was one of two houses listed for Holyoke in the 1906-1907 Cahn guide. It was a ground floor house with 1,050 seats. T. F. Murray was the manager.
The Empire Theatre was listed (without an address) in the District Police Report for the year ending on October 31, 1913. It was one of eight theaters listed for Holyoke.
The January 22, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World carried this item:
“Thomas Murray, whose Empire theater at Holyoke, Mass., burned down several months ago, was in Boston last week and announced that he had secured additional land adjoining the site of the old theater upon which he intends to erect a new structure with a seating capacity of 1,800.”
The only mention of the Star Theatre I’ve found in the trade publications is in the March 18, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World, which says that the Star had just been purchased by Oliver Bernest. The seller’s name was not given.
No theater was listed for the address 147 High Street, or any nearby address, in the 1922 New England Business Directory, which had a total of ten theaters listed. If the Star was indeed the theater built on the site of the Empire, and it had 1,600 seats, I can’t imagine why it closed so soon. Maybe Murray’s rebuilding plans fell through and something more modest was built.
A 1982 Reconnaissance Survey Town Report from the Massachusetts Historical Commission gives the construction year of the Strand Theatre at Holyoke as 1915, and gives the name of the architect as G.P.B. Alderman (George Perkins Bissell Alderman.)
The February 26, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World ran an item saying that two new theaters had recently opened in Holyoke. The larger of them, with 900 seats, was the Strand, operated by Alexander Cameron. The Strand was showing Paramount and General Film releases.
The Strand is listed under Public Halls rather than Theatres in the District Police Report for the year ending October 31, 1916.
This weblog post has a 1922 photo of Maple Street with the Strand Theatre at far right.
The Lithia Theatre was operated by Robert Lippert from 1946 until 1951, when it closed as a movie house. It was then refurbished by Angus Bowmer and reopened as a home for his theater group, the Vining Repertory Company. In November, 1952, the Lithia Theatre was destroyed by a fire, prematurely ending the company’s second season.
Here is a 1914 photo of the Vining Theatre’s auditorium.
Here is a 1951 photo with the posters of the Vining Repertory Company’s four productions for that season.
The January 27, 1928, issue of Motion Picture News said that Robbins and Lumberg opened the Uptown Theatre in Utica on December 29, 1927. An issue of the same publication from early 1927 said that the Rolu (Robbins and Lumberg) Theatre Company’s new house on Genesee Street was being designed by the local architectural firm of Rushmer & Jennison.
Herbert D. Rushmer was the senior partner of the firm, and he and Albert H. Jennison had been partners in a firm with noted Utica architect Jacob Agne Jr. from 1900 until Agne’s death in 1918.
I believe that the Cinema I & II is the house listed by CinemaTour as the Sherwood Plaza Cinemas, at 5757 Pacific Avenue. The Cinema Theatre was listed at that address with “No. 17” appended in a directory of the period.
It was originally one of the Henry George Greene-designed single-screen houses built by ABC in the late 1960s-early 1970s. According to its entry on the Stockton Theatres page from Wright Realtors, it was twinned in the 1980s.
Both CinemaTour and Wright Realtors have this listed as a General Cinema Corporation house, but I believe they might have conflated it with the Sherwood Theatre, which was a General Cinema house, and which was located in a different shopping center nearby called Sherwood Mall. The confusion over the shopping center names may be why Sherwood Plaza was eventually renamed Stonecreek Village. The name Sherwood Plaza has since been taken over by a small strip mall nearby.
The finding aid to the Interstate Theatre Collection (Interstate was an ABC-Paramount affiliate) at the Dallas Public Library lists a box containing records of feature film receipts from ABC’s theaters from 1960-1969, and there is a listing for the “Sherwood (Stockton, Calif) Aug. 1968 – Nov. 1969.” That must have been this house, and I think we can take August, 1968, as the likely month the house opened.
A complication arises from a plan of Sherwood Plaza from its leasing corporation (PDF here) which shows the theater space and labels it as “General Cinema Theater.” Unfortunately, the plan has no date on it. Perhaps General Cinema did take over the house eventually, but it was still being operated by ABC successor Plitt Theatres in the early 1980s. In fact I’ve come across one reference calling it the Plitt Sherwood Theatre in 1983.
There is a lot of conflation of these two houses on the Internet, but the photos show that they were indeed two different theaters. I wish their operators (and the developers of Stockton’s shopping centers) had shown more imagination in naming their various projects.
The New Empire was apparently an “old” Empire itself. Bygone Binghamton, by Jack Edward Shay, mentions a later Empire Theatre located at 120 Washington Street, but doesn’t give its years of operation.
The Susquehanna Heritage Area Management Plan of 2009 lists Herbert R. Brewster as the architect of the Binghamton Theatre. Brewster also designed the Empire Theatre in Brooklyn and the Jamaica Theatre in Jamaica, as well as two theater projects in Stapleton, Staten Island, and one in New London, Connecticut, none of which I’ve been able to identify. He also designed the Casino Theatre on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, but it appears to have operated only as a burlesque house.
The Arcade Theatre’s auditorium can be seen behind the entrance building, on S. Fifth Street. It has been listed on LoopNet, though it is currently off the market. The auditorium has been entirely gutted.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but the brick auditorium is attached to the back of the Arcade Theatre’s entrance building, and satellite view shows that the Arcade’s entrance ran back a long way. The entrance had shop entrances along both sides, in the manner of an Italian galleria. It looks like LoopNet was right, and the red brick building is the Arcade’s auditorium. It’s just about the right size for 700 seats.
I’ve come across several references that place the Kentucky Theatre on North Fifth Street, between Broadway and Jefferson. One is page 112 of Paducah: Frontier to the Atomic Age, by John E. L. Robertson. Another is the advertising of the Williams Bicycle Co. in various issues of the Paducah Evening Sun in the 1900s, which give the shop’s address as “126-128 North Fifth St., Next to Kentucky Theater.” That would put the Kentucky Theatre on the east side of Fifth Street in the block north of Broadway.
If the Kentucky was on N. Fifth, that would leave the question of the brick theater at 111 S. Fifth, which this LoopNet listing insists is the Arcade Theatre. As the Arcade was on Broadway, this was clearly not it, but what theater was it?
For a while I thought it might be the missing Orpheum Theatre, which Leo Keiler was operating in the 1920s, but that turns out to have been the Kentucky Theatre itself. The Orpheum is mentioned as the former Old Opera House in Keiler’s 1958 obituary, and as the former Kentucky Theatre in John Keiler’s 1929 obituary. It was operating as the Orpheum in 1929, but I haven’t discovered when it returned to the name Kentucky Theatre.
The building at 111 S. Fifth doesn’t look large enough to have held the Kentucky’s original 1,600 seats, over 600 of which were in the gallery, according to the Cahn guide’s listings of the Kentucky Theatre. From the side view this theater doesn’t look as though it even had a gallery. It just isn’t tall enough.
The Star Theatre is mentioned in the October 24, 1908 issue of The Billboard, along with the Kozy Theatre (also a movie house) and a vaudeville house called the Paducah Theatre.
The Kozy Theatre is mentioned in the October 24, 1908 issue of The Billboard, along with the Star Theatre (also a movie house) and a vaudeville house called the Paducah Theatre.
Chuck, Leo Keiler (the more frequent spelling I’ve found for his surname) was a partner in the Strand Amusement Company, at least as of 1921 and in 1929. Here’s an article about a partnership formed with the Switlow interests of Louisville, which appeared in The Film Daily of January 21, 1921:
“Levy Closes Louisville Deal
“(Special to WID’S DAILY)
“Louisville — Col. Fred Levy, holder of the Associated First National Franchise for Kentucky, and Leo Keiler of Paducah, who control a chain of 19 theaters in Kentucky through the Strand Amusement Co., have completed negotiations for an affiliation with M. Switow in the ownership of three theaters here. Included in the deal is the new $200,000 theater erected by Switow on 4th St., directly across the street from the new Rialto. The Parkland and another neighborhood house are the others.
“The other theaters owned by Switow — two in Jeffersonville, three in New Albany, one in Bedford, Ind., and one in Salem, Ind., are not included in the deal.
“Among the properties operated by the Strand Co. are four in Louisville, in addition to the three secured through the Switow alliance, four in Paducah, three in Mayfield, three in Owensboro, one in Irvine and one in Princeton.”
An article in the same publication the following year noted that Leo Keiler and Harry Switow jointly oversaw construction of the new Columbia Theatre in Paducah.
The Sunday, June 15, 1930, issue of The Film Daily had an article about a pending deal between the Strand Amusement Co. and Warner Bros.:
“Kentucky Chain of 16 in Warner Theater Deal
“Louisville, Ky. — Deal for acquisition of the 16 houses in the Strand Amusement Co. by Warners is understood to be near stages of completion. Leo Keiler and Fred Levy, officers of the company, are said to be ready to turn over the houses as soon as terms are agreed upon. Keiler has three houses in Paducah which will most likely be included in the deal.”
Find a Grave has Leo Keiler’s obituary, and it confirms that Keiler and Levy sold their theater buisness to Warners. The Keiler family apparently retained at least part ownership of at least some the the theater buildings, though, through the Columbia Amusement and Realty Company, which had been formed in 1923. Strand Amusements must have leased the buildings from Columbia, which owned the Arcade, the Orpheum (formerly the Opera House) and the Columbia itself.
The NRHP registration form for the Mayfield Downtown Commercial District says that the Legion Theatre was built in 1930. The lower level contained meeting rooms, the second level had a basketball court with audience gallery, and the theater, which had a balcony, was on the top level. The theater was converted into a bowling alley in the 1960s.
American Legion Post 26 has a Restoration Committee that has a web site. There is a photo gallery, but I couldn’t get it to work with any of my browsers.
Milwaukee Movie Theaters, by Larry Widen, says that pioneer Milwaukee exhibitor Edward J. Wagner built the Garden Theatre in 1919 after selling his other theaters. He operated the Garden until his death in 1930.
Milwaukee Movie Theaters, by Larry Widen, says that the Happy Hour Theatre was one of the early houses operated by Edward J. Wagner. He sold his theaters in 1919 to concentrate his efforts on his new Garden Theatre, which he operated until his death in 1930.
Milwaukee Movie Theaters, by Larry Widen, says that the Park Theatre was one of the early houses operated by Edward J. Wagner. He sold his theaters in 1919 to concentrate his efforts on his new Garden Theatre, which he operated until his death in 1930.
Larry Widen’s Vintage Milwaukee Postcards has an advertising card made for Edward J. Wagner with a small photo of Wagner’s Theatre. The text of the card says that the theater opened on July 19th, 1913 (Google Books preview.)
The Princess Theatre opened sometime after the Star Theatre opened (around 1917) and before the Capitol Theatre opened in 1922. It was located near Sheridan Avenue, and must have had an address in the 1400 block of 119th Street.
The Bijou Theatre was in operation by 1913, the year in which it was taken over by Frank Rainault, according to his biography in the Encyclopedia of Massachusetts published in 1916. Shortly before the Encyclopedia was published, Rainault had the Bijou remodeled and expanded. According to items in The American Contractor that year, plans for the project were drawn by Holyoke architect Oscar Beauchemin.
This web page says that the Empire Theatre opened on November 2, 1893. A Springfield Republican article about the event noted that the theater was designed by J. B. McElfatrick & Son, and that the Empire resembled the Court Square Theatre in Springfield, designed by the same firm and opened the previous year.
An 1893 Springfield Republican article about the opening of the Empire Theatre in Holyoke noted that the new house resembled the Court Square Theatre, which had been designed by the same architectural firm, J.B. McElfatrick & Son.
The Empire Theatre was one of two houses listed for Holyoke in the 1906-1907 Cahn guide. It was a ground floor house with 1,050 seats. T. F. Murray was the manager.
The Empire Theatre was listed (without an address) in the District Police Report for the year ending on October 31, 1913. It was one of eight theaters listed for Holyoke.
The January 22, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World carried this item:
The only mention of the Star Theatre I’ve found in the trade publications is in the March 18, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World, which says that the Star had just been purchased by Oliver Bernest. The seller’s name was not given.No theater was listed for the address 147 High Street, or any nearby address, in the 1922 New England Business Directory, which had a total of ten theaters listed. If the Star was indeed the theater built on the site of the Empire, and it had 1,600 seats, I can’t imagine why it closed so soon. Maybe Murray’s rebuilding plans fell through and something more modest was built.
A 1982 Reconnaissance Survey Town Report from the Massachusetts Historical Commission gives the construction year of the Strand Theatre at Holyoke as 1915, and gives the name of the architect as G.P.B. Alderman (George Perkins Bissell Alderman.)
The February 26, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World ran an item saying that two new theaters had recently opened in Holyoke. The larger of them, with 900 seats, was the Strand, operated by Alexander Cameron. The Strand was showing Paramount and General Film releases.
The Strand is listed under Public Halls rather than Theatres in the District Police Report for the year ending October 31, 1916.
This weblog post has a 1922 photo of Maple Street with the Strand Theatre at far right.
The Lithia Theatre was operated by Robert Lippert from 1946 until 1951, when it closed as a movie house. It was then refurbished by Angus Bowmer and reopened as a home for his theater group, the Vining Repertory Company. In November, 1952, the Lithia Theatre was destroyed by a fire, prematurely ending the company’s second season.
Here is a 1914 photo of the Vining Theatre’s auditorium.
Here is a 1951 photo with the posters of the Vining Repertory Company’s four productions for that season.
A one-page article about the Ohio Theatre in Lima appeared in the January 7, 1928, issue of Motion Picture News. There is an interior photo.
The January 27, 1928, issue of Motion Picture News said that Robbins and Lumberg opened the Uptown Theatre in Utica on December 29, 1927. An issue of the same publication from early 1927 said that the Rolu (Robbins and Lumberg) Theatre Company’s new house on Genesee Street was being designed by the local architectural firm of Rushmer & Jennison.
Herbert D. Rushmer was the senior partner of the firm, and he and Albert H. Jennison had been partners in a firm with noted Utica architect Jacob Agne Jr. from 1900 until Agne’s death in 1918.
I believe that the Cinema I & II is the house listed by CinemaTour as the Sherwood Plaza Cinemas, at 5757 Pacific Avenue. The Cinema Theatre was listed at that address with “No. 17” appended in a directory of the period.
It was originally one of the Henry George Greene-designed single-screen houses built by ABC in the late 1960s-early 1970s. According to its entry on the Stockton Theatres page from Wright Realtors, it was twinned in the 1980s.
Both CinemaTour and Wright Realtors have this listed as a General Cinema Corporation house, but I believe they might have conflated it with the Sherwood Theatre, which was a General Cinema house, and which was located in a different shopping center nearby called Sherwood Mall. The confusion over the shopping center names may be why Sherwood Plaza was eventually renamed Stonecreek Village. The name Sherwood Plaza has since been taken over by a small strip mall nearby.
The finding aid to the Interstate Theatre Collection (Interstate was an ABC-Paramount affiliate) at the Dallas Public Library lists a box containing records of feature film receipts from ABC’s theaters from 1960-1969, and there is a listing for the “Sherwood (Stockton, Calif) Aug. 1968 – Nov. 1969.” That must have been this house, and I think we can take August, 1968, as the likely month the house opened.
A complication arises from a plan of Sherwood Plaza from its leasing corporation (PDF here) which shows the theater space and labels it as “General Cinema Theater.” Unfortunately, the plan has no date on it. Perhaps General Cinema did take over the house eventually, but it was still being operated by ABC successor Plitt Theatres in the early 1980s. In fact I’ve come across one reference calling it the Plitt Sherwood Theatre in 1983.
There is a lot of conflation of these two houses on the Internet, but the photos show that they were indeed two different theaters. I wish their operators (and the developers of Stockton’s shopping centers) had shown more imagination in naming their various projects.
The intersection of Wadsworth and Bank Streets has been swallowed by the Geneseo campus of the State University of New York.
The New Empire was apparently an “old” Empire itself. Bygone Binghamton, by Jack Edward Shay, mentions a later Empire Theatre located at 120 Washington Street, but doesn’t give its years of operation.
The Susquehanna Heritage Area Management Plan of 2009 lists Herbert R. Brewster as the architect of the Binghamton Theatre. Brewster also designed the Empire Theatre in Brooklyn and the Jamaica Theatre in Jamaica, as well as two theater projects in Stapleton, Staten Island, and one in New London, Connecticut, none of which I’ve been able to identify. He also designed the Casino Theatre on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, but it appears to have operated only as a burlesque house.
The Arcade Theatre’s auditorium can be seen behind the entrance building, on S. Fifth Street. It has been listed on LoopNet, though it is currently off the market. The auditorium has been entirely gutted.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but the brick auditorium is attached to the back of the Arcade Theatre’s entrance building, and satellite view shows that the Arcade’s entrance ran back a long way. The entrance had shop entrances along both sides, in the manner of an Italian galleria. It looks like LoopNet was right, and the red brick building is the Arcade’s auditorium. It’s just about the right size for 700 seats.
I’ve come across several references that place the Kentucky Theatre on North Fifth Street, between Broadway and Jefferson. One is page 112 of Paducah: Frontier to the Atomic Age, by John E. L. Robertson. Another is the advertising of the Williams Bicycle Co. in various issues of the Paducah Evening Sun in the 1900s, which give the shop’s address as “126-128 North Fifth St., Next to Kentucky Theater.” That would put the Kentucky Theatre on the east side of Fifth Street in the block north of Broadway.
If the Kentucky was on N. Fifth, that would leave the question of the brick theater at 111 S. Fifth, which this LoopNet listing insists is the Arcade Theatre. As the Arcade was on Broadway, this was clearly not it, but what theater was it?
For a while I thought it might be the missing Orpheum Theatre, which Leo Keiler was operating in the 1920s, but that turns out to have been the Kentucky Theatre itself. The Orpheum is mentioned as the former Old Opera House in Keiler’s 1958 obituary, and as the former Kentucky Theatre in John Keiler’s 1929 obituary. It was operating as the Orpheum in 1929, but I haven’t discovered when it returned to the name Kentucky Theatre.
The building at 111 S. Fifth doesn’t look large enough to have held the Kentucky’s original 1,600 seats, over 600 of which were in the gallery, according to the Cahn guide’s listings of the Kentucky Theatre. From the side view this theater doesn’t look as though it even had a gallery. It just isn’t tall enough.
The Star Theatre is mentioned in the October 24, 1908 issue of The Billboard, along with the Kozy Theatre (also a movie house) and a vaudeville house called the Paducah Theatre.
The Kozy Theatre is mentioned in the October 24, 1908 issue of The Billboard, along with the Star Theatre (also a movie house) and a vaudeville house called the Paducah Theatre.
Chuck, Leo Keiler (the more frequent spelling I’ve found for his surname) was a partner in the Strand Amusement Company, at least as of 1921 and in 1929. Here’s an article about a partnership formed with the Switlow interests of Louisville, which appeared in The Film Daily of January 21, 1921:
An article in the same publication the following year noted that Leo Keiler and Harry Switow jointly oversaw construction of the new Columbia Theatre in Paducah.The Sunday, June 15, 1930, issue of The Film Daily had an article about a pending deal between the Strand Amusement Co. and Warner Bros.:
Find a Grave has Leo Keiler’s obituary, and it confirms that Keiler and Levy sold their theater buisness to Warners. The Keiler family apparently retained at least part ownership of at least some the the theater buildings, though, through the Columbia Amusement and Realty Company, which had been formed in 1923. Strand Amusements must have leased the buildings from Columbia, which owned the Arcade, the Orpheum (formerly the Opera House) and the Columbia itself.The NRHP registration form for the Mayfield Downtown Commercial District says that the Legion Theatre was built in 1930. The lower level contained meeting rooms, the second level had a basketball court with audience gallery, and the theater, which had a balcony, was on the top level. The theater was converted into a bowling alley in the 1960s.
American Legion Post 26 has a Restoration Committee that has a web site. There is a photo gallery, but I couldn’t get it to work with any of my browsers.
Milwaukee Movie Theaters, by Larry Widen, says that pioneer Milwaukee exhibitor Edward J. Wagner built the Garden Theatre in 1919 after selling his other theaters. He operated the Garden until his death in 1930.
Milwaukee Movie Theaters, by Larry Widen, says that the Happy Hour Theatre was one of the early houses operated by Edward J. Wagner. He sold his theaters in 1919 to concentrate his efforts on his new Garden Theatre, which he operated until his death in 1930.
Milwaukee Movie Theaters, by Larry Widen, says that the Park Theatre was one of the early houses operated by Edward J. Wagner. He sold his theaters in 1919 to concentrate his efforts on his new Garden Theatre, which he operated until his death in 1930.
Larry Widen’s Vintage Milwaukee Postcards has an advertising card made for Edward J. Wagner with a small photo of Wagner’s Theatre. The text of the card says that the theater opened on July 19th, 1913 (Google Books preview.)
The Princess Theatre opened sometime after the Star Theatre opened (around 1917) and before the Capitol Theatre opened in 1922. It was located near Sheridan Avenue, and must have had an address in the 1400 block of 119th Street.