The Strand Theatre was mentioned in the January 1, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. Text below this photo says that the building, erected in 1891, was remodeled in 1915. That’s most likely when the theater was added. The building was demolished in 1972.
The Empire Theatre opened in 1900 as the first house in Cleveland built specifically for vaudeville. Within a few years it had been converted into a burlesque theater. I’ve found references to the Empire operating as a burlesque house as late as 1923, but the building was most likely demolished in 1925, the year construction began on the Ohio Bell Building (now the AT&T Huron Road Building) which now occupies the theater’s site.
I’ve been unable to discover if the Empire Theatre ever showed movies, but IMDb says that it was in one.
According to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, the Lyceum Theatre was demolished in 1913. The Lyceum is listed in the 1910-1911 Cahn guide as having 1,131 seats. So far I’ve been unable to find anything indicating that the house ever showed movies.
Driveintheatre2001: Cinema Treasures e-mail notifications used to be automatic if you commented on a page, but they are now an opt-in feature. If you want e-mail notifications of new comments on a particular theater’s page, you have to click the “Subscribe to this theater” link at the bottom of the page. After you subscribe, the page renews and the link converts to an “Unsubscribe” link, which you can later click if you no longer want the e-mail notifications from that page.
The Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to says that the Fox Garvey Theatre was designed by Platt & Associates. Sidney S. Platt designed the Garvey Center, in which this theater was located, and several other major projects in Wichita.
In this interview published in the April 29, 1911, issue of the St. Louis Business Journal, architect Don Rataj said that the late-1980s remodeling of the Halls Ferry Cine was his first project for the Wehrenberg Theatres circuit. His firm has been designing Wehrenberg’s theaters since 1987.
Kurt Krueger became a partner in 2000 and the firm was renamed Rataj-Krueger Architects, Inc. at that time. Rataj retired at the end of 2012. Geoffrey Crowley is now a principal of the firm, but I don’t know if there are any plans to rename it or not.
The Galaxy Cine 14 was designed by Rataj-Krueger Architects, Inc. There are a few photos on their web site. Don Rataj has been designing Wehrenberg’s theaters since 1987, when he drew the plans for a remodeling and expansion of the circuit’s Halls Ferry Cine in Ferguson, Missouri.
Now that we have photographs of both of them, I can see the remarkable similarity between the Mark Twain Theatre and the slightly earlier Valley Circle Theatre in San Diego, California, also designed by Harold W. Levitt.
I don’t know how many theaters Levitt designed for National General during the company’s rapid expansion of the 1960s, but the three houses in California that I know he designed for them (the Valley Circle, the National Theatre in the Westwood district of Los Angeles, and the South Coast Plaza Theatre in Costa Mesa) have all been demolished. I hope Missouri will decide to shame California by preserving the Mark Twain Theatre, thus demonstrating a greater appreciation for the theater designs of this talented Midcentury architect than his home state has shown.
It’s probably the fact that West State Street no longer exists between Orange Street and Eureka Street that has caused Google Maps to put its pin icon on East State Street. I’ve set Street View to look down the former alignment of the mostly-obliterated thoroughfare. The Loma Theatre was probably three to four hundred feet west of the intersection.
There was a Park Theatre operating in Philadelphia in 1922, when the October 22 issue of The Film Daily ran an ad for Warner Brothers with photos of several Warner houses in the city. The Park is at the right of this page.
This house appears to have been called the Dazzleland Theatre earlier in its history, rather than later. The October 22, 1922, issue of The Film Daily has an ad for Warner Brothers featuring inset photos of Philadelphia theaters running Warner pictures, and the theater pictured at lower left on this page has the name New Dazzleland above the entrance.
The Dazzleland Theatre is also mentioned in a 1916 issue of The Moving Picture World, as well as in the 1917 Cahn guide and the 1924 Film Daily Yearbook. Most likely it opened as the Dazzleland and was renamed the Cameo with the 1925 or the 1929 remodeling.
A letter from J. L. Derfus in the November 20, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World says that “[t]he Empress runs only once in a while, or twice in a long, long while.” The town’s other two movie houses, the Grand and the Majestic, were operating seven days a week.
Philadelphia Architects and Buildings says that the Strand Theatre in Doylestown was built in 1921. At least one other source makes the same claim, but other sources say it was built in 1925.
I have found the Strand Theatre mentioned as early as 1921, but The Gleaner, an annual publication of the National Farm School, located near Doylestown, has courtesy advertisements from a Doylestown house called the New Strand Theatre in its 1925, 1926, and 1927 editions. By 1928, the ads are simply from the Strand Theatre. My guess would be that there was an earlier Strand Theatre, perhaps opened in 1921, that was replaced by the New Strand Theatre in 1925.
When Google’s camera car went by in 2007, the Midtown Theatre building was sporting the signage of Atlantis, a night club that was closed in 2011. I’ve been unable to discover if the building has since been reoccupied, but it might be an establishment called the Sports Bar & Grill, unless the multiple search results are a bunch of old pages from before it became the Atlantis (somebody should come up with a way of cleaning the Internet.)
The ornate facade of the building is largely unchanged from the way it looked in this 1920 photo of the Crown Theatre from the Erik Overbey collection at the University of South Alabama.
The FOE lodge hall is at 1167 Parsons, so the site of the Capitol Theatre must have been the lot that is now occupied by a drive-up ATM for National City Bank (unless addresses have shifted and the lodge hall is the theater building.)
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History actually says that the Miles Theatre opened on October 26, 1913. Items in trade journals from the period indicate that the house was under construction for over a year.
The Cleveland Landmarks Commission identifies Lewis W. Thomas as the architect of the Miles Theatre.
If the State Theatre was indeed built post-war, then it must have been a replacement for an earlier theater. There is a reference from July 24, 1945, indicating that Frank Panero was then operating theaters in Delano, Wasco, McFarland, Sanger, and Shafter.
A list of new theaters in California from the September 21, 1936, issue of The Film Daily includes a Shafter Theatre at Shafter. I now suspect that the 1937 theater project that I cited in an earlier comment was never carried out, and Panero waited until after the war to build a new house there. But it’s possible that the Shafter Theatre was the house he was operating in July, 1945.
The September 18, 1936, issue of The Film Daily said that the Hartman Theatre, which had been closed all summer, would reopen with a stage production on the 29th of that month, and would follow its policy of the previous season, alternating stage productions with movies.
In the mid-1930s, the Thurmania Theatre was being operated by Clarence A. MacDonald, who also operated the Southland and Arlington Theatres. The September 9, 1936, issue of The Film Daily had an item about Mr. MacDonald’s rather peculiar new policy regarding newsreels:
“Cut Politics from Reels
“Columbus, O. — Holding that most political sequences are merely propaganda, Clarence MacDonald, owner of the Arlington, Southland and Thurmania theaters, has ordered all political scenes deleted from the newsreels shown in his houses. MacDonald follows the action of J. Real Neth, prominent local theater owner, who recently eliminated politics from his newsreels.”
The six-screen Citadel Mall Cinemas was demolished in September, 2008. It was replaced by the Citadel Mall Stadium 16, which opened on October 2, 2009.
Architect J. Arthur Drielsma designed the renovation of the Music Hall for Herbert Rosener that is featured in the 1960 Boxoffice article that Tinseltoes linked to earlier. The project involved completely rebuilding the gutted interior as well as redesigning the front.
So far, Laemmle has managed to keep this house open a year beyond its reported closing date. The slack real estate market probably has something to do with that.
The Strand Theatre was mentioned in the January 1, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. Text below this photo says that the building, erected in 1891, was remodeled in 1915. That’s most likely when the theater was added. The building was demolished in 1972.
The Empire Theatre opened in 1900 as the first house in Cleveland built specifically for vaudeville. Within a few years it had been converted into a burlesque theater. I’ve found references to the Empire operating as a burlesque house as late as 1923, but the building was most likely demolished in 1925, the year construction began on the Ohio Bell Building (now the AT&T Huron Road Building) which now occupies the theater’s site.
I’ve been unable to discover if the Empire Theatre ever showed movies, but IMDb says that it was in one.
According to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, the Lyceum Theatre was demolished in 1913. The Lyceum is listed in the 1910-1911 Cahn guide as having 1,131 seats. So far I’ve been unable to find anything indicating that the house ever showed movies.
Linkrot repair:
The June 19, 1967 Boxoffice article about the M&R drive-in is now here.
The second article, from October 30, 1967, starts here and is continued here.
Driveintheatre2001: Cinema Treasures e-mail notifications used to be automatic if you commented on a page, but they are now an opt-in feature. If you want e-mail notifications of new comments on a particular theater’s page, you have to click the “Subscribe to this theater” link at the bottom of the page. After you subscribe, the page renews and the link converts to an “Unsubscribe” link, which you can later click if you no longer want the e-mail notifications from that page.
The Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to says that the Fox Garvey Theatre was designed by Platt & Associates. Sidney S. Platt designed the Garvey Center, in which this theater was located, and several other major projects in Wichita.
In this interview published in the April 29, 1911, issue of the St. Louis Business Journal, architect Don Rataj said that the late-1980s remodeling of the Halls Ferry Cine was his first project for the Wehrenberg Theatres circuit. His firm has been designing Wehrenberg’s theaters since 1987.
Kurt Krueger became a partner in 2000 and the firm was renamed Rataj-Krueger Architects, Inc. at that time. Rataj retired at the end of 2012. Geoffrey Crowley is now a principal of the firm, but I don’t know if there are any plans to rename it or not.
The Galaxy Cine 14 was designed by Rataj-Krueger Architects, Inc. There are a few photos on their web site. Don Rataj has been designing Wehrenberg’s theaters since 1987, when he drew the plans for a remodeling and expansion of the circuit’s Halls Ferry Cine in Ferguson, Missouri.
Now that we have photographs of both of them, I can see the remarkable similarity between the Mark Twain Theatre and the slightly earlier Valley Circle Theatre in San Diego, California, also designed by Harold W. Levitt.
I don’t know how many theaters Levitt designed for National General during the company’s rapid expansion of the 1960s, but the three houses in California that I know he designed for them (the Valley Circle, the National Theatre in the Westwood district of Los Angeles, and the South Coast Plaza Theatre in Costa Mesa) have all been demolished. I hope Missouri will decide to shame California by preserving the Mark Twain Theatre, thus demonstrating a greater appreciation for the theater designs of this talented Midcentury architect than his home state has shown.
It’s probably the fact that West State Street no longer exists between Orange Street and Eureka Street that has caused Google Maps to put its pin icon on East State Street. I’ve set Street View to look down the former alignment of the mostly-obliterated thoroughfare. The Loma Theatre was probably three to four hundred feet west of the intersection.
There was a Park Theatre operating in Philadelphia in 1922, when the October 22 issue of The Film Daily ran an ad for Warner Brothers with photos of several Warner houses in the city. The Park is at the right of this page.
This house appears to have been called the Dazzleland Theatre earlier in its history, rather than later. The October 22, 1922, issue of The Film Daily has an ad for Warner Brothers featuring inset photos of Philadelphia theaters running Warner pictures, and the theater pictured at lower left on this page has the name New Dazzleland above the entrance.
The Dazzleland Theatre is also mentioned in a 1916 issue of The Moving Picture World, as well as in the 1917 Cahn guide and the 1924 Film Daily Yearbook. Most likely it opened as the Dazzleland and was renamed the Cameo with the 1925 or the 1929 remodeling.
A letter from J. L. Derfus in the November 20, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World says that “[t]he Empress runs only once in a while, or twice in a long, long while.” The town’s other two movie houses, the Grand and the Majestic, were operating seven days a week.
An eBay seller had a program from the Park Theatre in Lehighton dated 1924 (no longer available.)
Philadelphia Architects and Buildings says that the Strand Theatre in Doylestown was built in 1921. At least one other source makes the same claim, but other sources say it was built in 1925.
I have found the Strand Theatre mentioned as early as 1921, but The Gleaner, an annual publication of the National Farm School, located near Doylestown, has courtesy advertisements from a Doylestown house called the New Strand Theatre in its 1925, 1926, and 1927 editions. By 1928, the ads are simply from the Strand Theatre. My guess would be that there was an earlier Strand Theatre, perhaps opened in 1921, that was replaced by the New Strand Theatre in 1925.
When Google’s camera car went by in 2007, the Midtown Theatre building was sporting the signage of Atlantis, a night club that was closed in 2011. I’ve been unable to discover if the building has since been reoccupied, but it might be an establishment called the Sports Bar & Grill, unless the multiple search results are a bunch of old pages from before it became the Atlantis (somebody should come up with a way of cleaning the Internet.)
The ornate facade of the building is largely unchanged from the way it looked in this 1920 photo of the Crown Theatre from the Erik Overbey collection at the University of South Alabama.
The FOE lodge hall is at 1167 Parsons, so the site of the Capitol Theatre must have been the lot that is now occupied by a drive-up ATM for National City Bank (unless addresses have shifted and the lodge hall is the theater building.)
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History actually says that the Miles Theatre opened on October 26, 1913. Items in trade journals from the period indicate that the house was under construction for over a year.
The Cleveland Landmarks Commission identifies Lewis W. Thomas as the architect of the Miles Theatre.
If the State Theatre was indeed built post-war, then it must have been a replacement for an earlier theater. There is a reference from July 24, 1945, indicating that Frank Panero was then operating theaters in Delano, Wasco, McFarland, Sanger, and Shafter.
A list of new theaters in California from the September 21, 1936, issue of The Film Daily includes a Shafter Theatre at Shafter. I now suspect that the 1937 theater project that I cited in an earlier comment was never carried out, and Panero waited until after the war to build a new house there. But it’s possible that the Shafter Theatre was the house he was operating in July, 1945.
The September 18, 1936, issue of The Film Daily said that the Hartman Theatre, which had been closed all summer, would reopen with a stage production on the 29th of that month, and would follow its policy of the previous season, alternating stage productions with movies.
In the mid-1930s, the Thurmania Theatre was being operated by Clarence A. MacDonald, who also operated the Southland and Arlington Theatres. The September 9, 1936, issue of The Film Daily had an item about Mr. MacDonald’s rather peculiar new policy regarding newsreels:
The Former Southland Theatre building at 1570 S. High Street now houses the Restoration Christian Center, a non-denominational church.
The six-screen Citadel Mall Cinemas was demolished in September, 2008. It was replaced by the Citadel Mall Stadium 16, which opened on October 2, 2009.
The Northwoods Stadium Cinemas has been operating with 13 screens for over a year now.
Architect J. Arthur Drielsma designed the renovation of the Music Hall for Herbert Rosener that is featured in the 1960 Boxoffice article that Tinseltoes linked to earlier. The project involved completely rebuilding the gutted interior as well as redesigning the front.
So far, Laemmle has managed to keep this house open a year beyond its reported closing date. The slack real estate market probably has something to do with that.