This article from the Schenectady Daily Gazette gives a brief history of the Van Curler Theatre. The theater opened as the Van Curler Opera House on March 1, 1893. In its later years it operated as a movie house as well as a vaudeville and burlesque theater. The Van Curler Theatre had been closed for several years when the auditorium was demolished in 1943. The entrance building was demolished eight years later.
The theater was not located on Van Curler Street, but in downtown Schenectady on Jay Street at the corner of Franklin Street. The article has two photos. The front of the theater was a typically Victorian assemblage of Moorish and Classical elements with a Queen Anne style tower of bay windows and belfry stuck onto one corner.
Sassyrey1: The Star Theatre is currently closed. As of November, 2012, it was owned by a bank which had foreclosed on it, according to posts on this weblog.
Scroll down to the second illustration on this web page to see the original appearance of the Music Hall, as it was called from its opening in 1887 until 1900. The massive Romanesque Revival pile was designed by Richard Alfred Waite.
This page has a photo of the auditorium as originally designed, strikingly different from the Streamline Modern interior created in its 1946 rebuilding as Shea’s Teck Theatre (which, according to this earlier comment by roberttoplin, was designed by architect B. Frank Kelly with interiors by Theodore P. Vandercoy.) The building fronting the auditorium was apparently also replaced at that time.
Judging from the interior photos linked earlier, I’d have guessed that the Star Theatre had at least 600 seats. The side section in this photo shows at least 28 rows with six seats per row, so the two side sections alone must have seated over 300, and the center section was probably about the size of the two side sections put together. Perhaps they removed every other row sometime late in the theater’s history.
The building in the photo Chuck linked to doesn’t look big enough to have held 332 seats, but it looks old enough to have been around in 1916. The March 18, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World said that a 250-seat movie house called the Meteor Theatre had opened at Sand Springs on January 8. Could the Meteor and the Harmony have been the same theater?
This web page has an article by Linda Kirkpatrick with considerable information about the Canyon Theatre, and a couple of photos. The Canyon Theatre was built in the early 1940s, but the article doesn’t give the date of closing.
Here is the Acme Theatre’s page at DocSouth’s Going to the Show collection. It operated from about 1914 to about 1928, and must have always been called the Acme.
vbridgers is correct. Now that we have a photo of the Wayne Theatre, it clearly was not in the old Acme building at all, but in the building that housed the Center Theatre and later the Variety Theatre.
A Three Stooges movie party hosted at the Circle Theatre by a local television personality rated an article with photo in the November 11, 1963, issue of Boxoffice.
Linkrot repair: A brief item about the opening of E.M. Loew’s West End Cinema appeared in Boxoffice of November 11, 1963 (lower right). The architect for the remodeling of the old Lancaster Theatre into the West End Cinema was William Riseman.
Williamson County, Illinois, Sesquicentennial History, edited by Stan J. Hale, says that the Plaza Theatre was originally a silent era movie house called the Family Theatre.
The Family Theatre was in operation by 1914, when the June 20 issue of The American Contractor ran this item about a remodeling job:
“Marion, O.—Motion Picture Theater (rem.): 2 sty. Archt. J. J. Sloan, 120 Jefferson St. Owner Family Theater, Hanley & Van Aspeck. Working drawings in progress.”
The Family Theatre was open only two nights a week when it was damaged by a fire in 1926. In 1928, Sunday services of a church burned in another fire were held at the Family Theatre for several months. I don’t know of the Family was closed for any length of time before being reborn as the Plaza, but I haven’t found any mention of it dating from later than 1928.
Vaudeville, Old and New by Frank Cullen lists the Orpheum Theatre at Marion as a Gus Sun House. Sun liked the name Orpheum and had several theaters of that name in his regional circuit, and was free to do so because nobody connected with the actual Orpheum circuit had ever trademarked the name.
I don’t think that the Marion Orpheum was ever part of Martin Beck’s Orpheum circuit. Most of that circuit’s houses were west of the Mississippi, and those that were east of it were in large cities such as Chicago and New York.
The 1909-1910 edition of Cahn’s guide lists the New Roland Theatre with 1,034 seats, but fails to mention if it is a ground floor house. It had a stage 65x25 feet with a 32x20 foot opening. C.F. Roland was the owner and manager.
bigjoe59: I don’t know of any other reserved seat engagements at the Wiltern, but it seems likely that there could have been a few. It is a big, palatial theater in a district that, until the late 1950s, still had a number of fairly posh neighborhoods nearby.
It’s likely that quite a few roadshows were hosted at theaters in downtown Los Angeles as well, but not in recent memory. The last hard ticket movie downtown that I know of was in the mid-1950s, when Todd-AO was installed in the United Artists Theatre and the house shared the reserved seat engagement of Oklahoma with the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. It ran five weeks exclusively at the Egyptian, then ran in both houses for 46 weeks, then an additional six weeks exclusively at the United Artists.
Blurry Google street view makes the signs unreadable, so I don’t know what is in the theater’s building now, but I don’t think the Ben Franklin store has been gone for too many years. This web page, probably outdated, still lists Clausen’s Ben Franklin Store at 411 E. La Salle Avenue. The Majestic’s address might have been a bit lower as it occupied only one of the two buildings that became the Ben Franklin store.
A newer postcard (link, probably unreliable) with cars from around 1960 shows that by then the Majestic and its neighboring building had been combined to house a Ben Franklin 5&10 Cent store. The theater must have closed in the 1950s.
A vintage postcard for sale on eBay (link, probably unreliable) shows the Majestic’s barely readable sign on the north side of La Salle Avenue just east of 4th Street.
Google’s Street View of the location shows a wide, single story building with a modern front, but satellite view shows that the facade covers two separate buildings. I suspect that the Majestic was in the left one, closer to 4th Street. From the postcard, it looks like this building once had a second floor and the building covered by the other half of the modern facade once had three floors. The entire space was probably gutted when the upper floors were removed.
This theater’s exact location on E. Main Street can never be known, as there is no Main Street in Barron. The town’s commercial district lies along E. La Salle Avenue. Google Maps, confused, has chosen to put the pin icon on East Main Street in Cameron, a town several miles east of Barron.
The photo on this web page shows damage suffered by the Jewel Theatre in The April 19. 1947, Texas City disaster.
The web site of the antique shop that now occupies the building says that it was built in 1948, but I’d guess that parts of the original structure were saved. I’m sure that the auditorium side wall and roof had to be rebuilt, but the front of the theater is pretty much the same as it was before.
Texas City, by Albert Mitchell, says that the Jewel was in operation by 1915.
vastor: the Hyde Park Theatre is listed in Eric Ledell Smith’s African American Theatre Buildings. It’s mentioned in a couple of books about African American music in Memphis, too, and apparently hosted frequent live performances.
Billboard Music Week of June 9, 1962, reported that the weekly KWAM country music show “Cotton Town Jubilee” had been moved from the Rosewood Theatre to the Hollywood Theatre.
This article from the Schenectady Daily Gazette gives a brief history of the Van Curler Theatre. The theater opened as the Van Curler Opera House on March 1, 1893. In its later years it operated as a movie house as well as a vaudeville and burlesque theater. The Van Curler Theatre had been closed for several years when the auditorium was demolished in 1943. The entrance building was demolished eight years later.
The theater was not located on Van Curler Street, but in downtown Schenectady on Jay Street at the corner of Franklin Street. The article has two photos. The front of the theater was a typically Victorian assemblage of Moorish and Classical elements with a Queen Anne style tower of bay windows and belfry stuck onto one corner.
Sassyrey1: The Star Theatre is currently closed. As of November, 2012, it was owned by a bank which had foreclosed on it, according to posts on this weblog.
The 1922 Hamilton City Directory listed the Princess Theatre at 108-10 James Street North.
Scroll down to the second illustration on this web page to see the original appearance of the Music Hall, as it was called from its opening in 1887 until 1900. The massive Romanesque Revival pile was designed by Richard Alfred Waite.
This page has a photo of the auditorium as originally designed, strikingly different from the Streamline Modern interior created in its 1946 rebuilding as Shea’s Teck Theatre (which, according to this earlier comment by roberttoplin, was designed by architect B. Frank Kelly with interiors by Theodore P. Vandercoy.) The building fronting the auditorium was apparently also replaced at that time.
Judging from the interior photos linked earlier, I’d have guessed that the Star Theatre had at least 600 seats. The side section in this photo shows at least 28 rows with six seats per row, so the two side sections alone must have seated over 300, and the center section was probably about the size of the two side sections put together. Perhaps they removed every other row sometime late in the theater’s history.
The building in the photo Chuck linked to doesn’t look big enough to have held 332 seats, but it looks old enough to have been around in 1916. The March 18, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World said that a 250-seat movie house called the Meteor Theatre had opened at Sand Springs on January 8. Could the Meteor and the Harmony have been the same theater?
This web page has an article by Linda Kirkpatrick with considerable information about the Canyon Theatre, and a couple of photos. The Canyon Theatre was built in the early 1940s, but the article doesn’t give the date of closing.
One error in the introduction- Lyndon Golin’s brother is named Andrew, not Michael.
A ShowTime Magazine profile of Lyndon Golin is online here.
This house was called the Wayne Theatre by 1939, the year Ralph Harold Ward became its manager, according to his obituary, published in 2008.
Here is the Acme Theatre’s page at DocSouth’s Going to the Show collection. It operated from about 1914 to about 1928, and must have always been called the Acme.
vbridgers is correct. Now that we have a photo of the Wayne Theatre, it clearly was not in the old Acme building at all, but in the building that housed the Center Theatre and later the Variety Theatre.
A Three Stooges movie party hosted at the Circle Theatre by a local television personality rated an article with photo in the November 11, 1963, issue of Boxoffice.
Linkrot repair: A brief item about the opening of E.M. Loew’s West End Cinema appeared in Boxoffice of November 11, 1963 (lower right). The architect for the remodeling of the old Lancaster Theatre into the West End Cinema was William Riseman.
Williamson County, Illinois, Sesquicentennial History, edited by Stan J. Hale, says that the Plaza Theatre was originally a silent era movie house called the Family Theatre.
The Family Theatre was in operation by 1914, when the June 20 issue of The American Contractor ran this item about a remodeling job:
The Family Theatre was open only two nights a week when it was damaged by a fire in 1926. In 1928, Sunday services of a church burned in another fire were held at the Family Theatre for several months. I don’t know of the Family was closed for any length of time before being reborn as the Plaza, but I haven’t found any mention of it dating from later than 1928.Vaudeville, Old and New by Frank Cullen lists the Orpheum Theatre at Marion as a Gus Sun House. Sun liked the name Orpheum and had several theaters of that name in his regional circuit, and was free to do so because nobody connected with the actual Orpheum circuit had ever trademarked the name.
I don’t think that the Marion Orpheum was ever part of Martin Beck’s Orpheum circuit. Most of that circuit’s houses were west of the Mississippi, and those that were east of it were in large cities such as Chicago and New York.
This web page has several photos of the original Orpheum Theatre.
The 1909-1910 edition of Cahn’s guide lists the New Roland Theatre with 1,034 seats, but fails to mention if it is a ground floor house. It had a stage 65x25 feet with a 32x20 foot opening. C.F. Roland was the owner and manager.
bigjoe59: I don’t know of any other reserved seat engagements at the Wiltern, but it seems likely that there could have been a few. It is a big, palatial theater in a district that, until the late 1950s, still had a number of fairly posh neighborhoods nearby.
It’s likely that quite a few roadshows were hosted at theaters in downtown Los Angeles as well, but not in recent memory. The last hard ticket movie downtown that I know of was in the mid-1950s, when Todd-AO was installed in the United Artists Theatre and the house shared the reserved seat engagement of Oklahoma with the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. It ran five weeks exclusively at the Egyptian, then ran in both houses for 46 weeks, then an additional six weeks exclusively at the United Artists.
Blurry Google street view makes the signs unreadable, so I don’t know what is in the theater’s building now, but I don’t think the Ben Franklin store has been gone for too many years. This web page, probably outdated, still lists Clausen’s Ben Franklin Store at 411 E. La Salle Avenue. The Majestic’s address might have been a bit lower as it occupied only one of the two buildings that became the Ben Franklin store.
A newer postcard (link, probably unreliable) with cars from around 1960 shows that by then the Majestic and its neighboring building had been combined to house a Ben Franklin 5&10 Cent store. The theater must have closed in the 1950s.
A vintage postcard for sale on eBay (link, probably unreliable) shows the Majestic’s barely readable sign on the north side of La Salle Avenue just east of 4th Street.
Google’s Street View of the location shows a wide, single story building with a modern front, but satellite view shows that the facade covers two separate buildings. I suspect that the Majestic was in the left one, closer to 4th Street. From the postcard, it looks like this building once had a second floor and the building covered by the other half of the modern facade once had three floors. The entire space was probably gutted when the upper floors were removed.
This theater’s exact location on E. Main Street can never be known, as there is no Main Street in Barron. The town’s commercial district lies along E. La Salle Avenue. Google Maps, confused, has chosen to put the pin icon on East Main Street in Cameron, a town several miles east of Barron.
The photo on this web page shows damage suffered by the Jewel Theatre in The April 19. 1947, Texas City disaster.
The web site of the antique shop that now occupies the building says that it was built in 1948, but I’d guess that parts of the original structure were saved. I’m sure that the auditorium side wall and roof had to be rebuilt, but the front of the theater is pretty much the same as it was before.
Texas City, by Albert Mitchell, says that the Jewel was in operation by 1915.
vastor: the Hyde Park Theatre is listed in Eric Ledell Smith’s African American Theatre Buildings. It’s mentioned in a couple of books about African American music in Memphis, too, and apparently hosted frequent live performances.
Billboard Music Week of June 9, 1962, reported that the weekly KWAM country music show “Cotton Town Jubilee” had been moved from the Rosewood Theatre to the Hollywood Theatre.