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.
Here is an interesting bit of atmosphere from the heyday of the Palace Theatre. Williamson’s Beale Street Frolic Orchestra was the pit band at the Palace in the 1920s. The band made some recordings for Victor records, and two takes of each of four of their original songs, recorded in 1927, can be heard at Red Hot Jazz (requires RealPlayer.)
The list of theaters in the 1921 edition of the Chicago Daily News Almanac has two houses called the Ashland Theatre. This house on Madison Street was in operation by 1916, when it was mentioned in the July 8 issue of Motography. The house that is described in the January 4, 1914, article from the Chicago Tribune quoted in the earlier comment by AgelessTreasures was the other Ashland Theatre, located at 4856 S. Ashland Avenue.
It was the Ashland Avenue house that was designed by architect David Saul Klafter (though he designed many theaters during that period and I don’t know for sure that he didn’t design the Madison Street house as well, but I’ve found no period source saying that he did.)
The Ashland Avenue house did suffer construction delays for more than a year. It was under construction in 1912, when it was the subject of an article on page 14 of the September 28 issue of Construction News (Google Books scan.) It was originally to have been called the Home Theatre, but apparently changed owners during the delays and was renamed before finally opening.
The Estey organ installed in the Ashland Theatre in 1924 was probably in the Madison Street house. The Ashland Avenue house is listed in the moving picture supplement of the 1921 Cahn guide as the New Ashland Theatre (though it might have actually been older than the Madison Street house) with the note OB, meaning out of business. I’ve been unable to discover if it ever reopened after 1921. If it did, it might have been under another name.
The building, however, is still standing at the northwest corner of Ashland Avenue and 49th Street, and from the 49th Street side is easily recognizable as a former theater, though the facade is much plainer than that shown in the illustration that accompanies the 1912 Construction News article.
A nocturnal photo of the new front of the recently remodeled Gibson Theatre provided the cover illustration of Boxoffice magazine’s “The Modern Theatre” section for April 1, 1950.
This house was also known as the Strand Theatre. The Toledo City Journal for October 30, 1920, says that on October 18 the Toledo City Council adopted a resolution allowing the Strand Theatre Company to erect an electric sign atop the canopy over the entrance to the theater at 322 Summit Street.
The house operated as the Strand until 1950, when it was remodeled and renamed the Guild Theatre. An illustrated article about the Guild appeared in Boxoffice of April 1, 1950. The Guild Theatre operated as an art house.
Page 40 of Davenport, by Doug Smith (Google Books preview), features a 1920 photo of the Family Theatre at 215 West Third Street, so the name change from Family to State Theatre could have taken place no earlier than that year.
The Liberty Theatre placed an advertisement in the May 30, 1942, issue of The Billboard, seeking burlesque performers for the summer season. Another ad in the November 14 issue of The Billboard the same year touted the Liberty’s star attraction, Ina Lorraine, featured in a “…novelty dance characterization…” called The Virgin’s Dream.
I’ve been unable to find any earlier or later references to the Liberty Theatre, but in 1942 it was definitely operating as a burlesque house.
The Family Theatre was in operation at 215 Third Street by 1913, when it was mentioned in at least two issues of The Moving Picture World. A brief item in the August 21, 1915, issue of the same publication said that the Family Theatre was being remodeled into “…first class motion picture house….” at a cost of $10,000, and would be expanded to seat over 700 patrons. It was scheduled to reopen that month.
At some point, the American Theatre at 324 W. Third Street, which had been in operation since before 1910, was renamed the Family Theatre.
Volume 2 of The Papers of Will Rogers, edited by Steven K. Gragert and M. Jane Johansson, says that the Columbia Theatre was originally a two-a-day vaudeville house on the Orpheum circuit.
This page from Facebook user Davenport Iowa History has a photo of 3rd Street west from Harrison Street taken “about 1908” showing the American Theatre in the distance.
This page of Rudy’s web site lists the location at 326 Cedar Street, so it must still be there.
In satellite view and street view, the building has an odd shape, with one corner chopped off. I’m having a hard time figuring out how the auditorium was configured in that irregular space. Has the building been altered since it ceased to be a theater?
Also, I see that Google Maps has screwed up again, putting the pin icon about four blocks too far east. As Cedar Street is clearly labeled on their map, I can’t imagine why they missed it with their pin.
A photo of the front of the Westgate Theatre appears in the lower right corner of this page of the August 21, 1937, issue of Boxoffice. A photo of the auditorium appears on the subsequent page.
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.
Here is an interesting bit of atmosphere from the heyday of the Palace Theatre. Williamson’s Beale Street Frolic Orchestra was the pit band at the Palace in the 1920s. The band made some recordings for Victor records, and two takes of each of four of their original songs, recorded in 1927, can be heard at Red Hot Jazz (requires RealPlayer.)
The list of theaters in the 1921 edition of the Chicago Daily News Almanac has two houses called the Ashland Theatre. This house on Madison Street was in operation by 1916, when it was mentioned in the July 8 issue of Motography. The house that is described in the January 4, 1914, article from the Chicago Tribune quoted in the earlier comment by AgelessTreasures was the other Ashland Theatre, located at 4856 S. Ashland Avenue.
It was the Ashland Avenue house that was designed by architect David Saul Klafter (though he designed many theaters during that period and I don’t know for sure that he didn’t design the Madison Street house as well, but I’ve found no period source saying that he did.)
The Ashland Avenue house did suffer construction delays for more than a year. It was under construction in 1912, when it was the subject of an article on page 14 of the September 28 issue of Construction News (Google Books scan.) It was originally to have been called the Home Theatre, but apparently changed owners during the delays and was renamed before finally opening.
The Estey organ installed in the Ashland Theatre in 1924 was probably in the Madison Street house. The Ashland Avenue house is listed in the moving picture supplement of the 1921 Cahn guide as the New Ashland Theatre (though it might have actually been older than the Madison Street house) with the note OB, meaning out of business. I’ve been unable to discover if it ever reopened after 1921. If it did, it might have been under another name.
The building, however, is still standing at the northwest corner of Ashland Avenue and 49th Street, and from the 49th Street side is easily recognizable as a former theater, though the facade is much plainer than that shown in the illustration that accompanies the 1912 Construction News article.
A nocturnal photo of the new front of the recently remodeled Gibson Theatre provided the cover illustration of Boxoffice magazine’s “The Modern Theatre” section for April 1, 1950.
Here are links to a couple of items about the Randolph Theatre in Boxoffice that were mentioned in previous comments but not linked:
Article about the remodeling from April 1, 1950.
Photo of the lobby from October 7, 1950.
This house was also known as the Strand Theatre. The Toledo City Journal for October 30, 1920, says that on October 18 the Toledo City Council adopted a resolution allowing the Strand Theatre Company to erect an electric sign atop the canopy over the entrance to the theater at 322 Summit Street.
The house operated as the Strand until 1950, when it was remodeled and renamed the Guild Theatre. An illustrated article about the Guild appeared in Boxoffice of April 1, 1950. The Guild Theatre operated as an art house.
Page 40 of Davenport, by Doug Smith (Google Books preview), features a 1920 photo of the Family Theatre at 215 West Third Street, so the name change from Family to State Theatre could have taken place no earlier than that year.
The Liberty Theatre placed an advertisement in the May 30, 1942, issue of The Billboard, seeking burlesque performers for the summer season. Another ad in the November 14 issue of The Billboard the same year touted the Liberty’s star attraction, Ina Lorraine, featured in a “…novelty dance characterization…” called The Virgin’s Dream.
I’ve been unable to find any earlier or later references to the Liberty Theatre, but in 1942 it was definitely operating as a burlesque house.
The Family Theatre was in operation at 215 Third Street by 1913, when it was mentioned in at least two issues of The Moving Picture World. A brief item in the August 21, 1915, issue of the same publication said that the Family Theatre was being remodeled into “…first class motion picture house….” at a cost of $10,000, and would be expanded to seat over 700 patrons. It was scheduled to reopen that month.
At some point, the American Theatre at 324 W. Third Street, which had been in operation since before 1910, was renamed the Family Theatre.
Volume 2 of The Papers of Will Rogers, edited by Steven K. Gragert and M. Jane Johansson, says that the Columbia Theatre was originally a two-a-day vaudeville house on the Orpheum circuit.
The Davenport Iowa History web site has two photos of the Davenport Theatre under construction in 1912:
View 1
View 2
This page from Facebook user Davenport Iowa History has a photo of 3rd Street west from Harrison Street taken “about 1908” showing the American Theatre in the distance.
This page of Rudy’s web site lists the location at 326 Cedar Street, so it must still be there.
In satellite view and street view, the building has an odd shape, with one corner chopped off. I’m having a hard time figuring out how the auditorium was configured in that irregular space. Has the building been altered since it ceased to be a theater?
Also, I see that Google Maps has screwed up again, putting the pin icon about four blocks too far east. As Cedar Street is clearly labeled on their map, I can’t imagine why they missed it with their pin.
A photo of the front of the Westgate Theatre appears in the lower right corner of this page of the August 21, 1937, issue of Boxoffice. A photo of the auditorium appears on the subsequent page.