Do we have the right address for this theater, or has Google Maps gone off the rails? I’m sure the Goodale Theatre was not a showboat moored in the Olentangy River, but that’s where Google Maps puts it. What’s left of Delaware Avenue almost intersects W. Goodale Street in the latter’s 300 block. To further confuse things, CinemaTour places the Goodale Theatre on High Street, but without an address. I’m puzzled.
The Hartman Theatre was designed by the noted Columbus architectural firm Richards, McCarty & Bulford.
Here is an early photo of the Hartman Theatre from the Knowlton School of Architecture web site. Thumbnail links to two additional photos of the theater and one of the adjacent office building appear at the bottom of the page.
The Hartman Theatre was built by Dr. Samuel Hartman, who had made a fortune from an alcohol-heavy elixir called Peruna, the formula for which was, he claimed, revealed to him in a dream about a long-dead American Indian chief of that name. The theater must have been one of the more impressive monuments financed by America’s legion of tipplers-in-denial. It’s too bad this impressive building didn’t last much longer than a heavy drinker’s liver.
The site of the Hartman Theatre and its adjacent office block, now occupied by a larger modern office building, is across the street from another Richards, McCarty & Bulford project, the Romanesque Revival style U.S. Post Office and Federal Courthouse, built in 1883-1887 and, happily, still standing.
Two Injured in San Antonio, TX Movie Theater Shooting. The Village Voice headline is a bit misleading. The gunman was shot in the theater, where an off-duty deputy who was moonlighting as mall security chased him, but the gunman shot his only victim in the parking lot before running into the theater. Nobody was killed (off-screen, at least. What the on-screen death toll was that night I don’t know.)
A number of shootings happen in the United States every day, so odds are that a theater will be the scene of one now and then. I doubt that this incident indicates that the Mayan Palace 14 is any more dangerous than the average public place in San Antonio. I’m sure that far more people are killed or injured in automobile accidents while driving to and from theaters than are killed or injured by being shot in theaters.
Here is Don Rittner’s 2010 weblog post about Proctor’s Theatre in Troy. In addition to several photos of Troy’s theater, it has considerable information about Fred Proctor’s career, and photos of several other Proctor theaters.
The partner of architect William D. Coates was Harrison B. Traver. Both studied in Philadelphia with the Beaux-Arts trained classicist Paul Cret around 1906-1907. They formed a partnership in San Francisco in 1911, and moved their office to Fresno in 1914. When the partnership was dissolved in 1925, Traver moved to Los Angeles and Coates continued to practice in Fresno. As far as I’ve been able to determine, the Liberty was the only theater they designed during their partnership.
An article about three Australian theaters in the October 5, 1929, issue of Motion Picture News was illustrated primarily with photos of the interior of the Plaza. Here is the first page. Images can be enlarged by clicking on the + sign in the toolbar at lower right of the web page.
Three pages about the State Theatre, with photos, appeared in an article about new Australian theaters in the October 5, 1929, issue of Motion Picture News.
For some reason, Google has put the Street View for this address on Watts Street, at the back of the building. If Street View is moved around to Broad Street, you can see the fairly well preserved Gothic upper facade of the Bluebird Theatre. The ground floor has been covered in what looks like a rusticated fake stone of the sort that was popular in the 1950s.
The “New Construction Work” column of the August 5, 1914, issue of Paint, Oil and Drug Review has an item about a new movie theater to be built at 2209-2211 N. Broad Street:
“Philadelphia, Pa.—Film theater, 2209-11 North Broad Street, to Harry Gill, Jr., 2515 Germantown Avenue, for Kahn & Greenberg; cost $18,000; Mahlon H. Dickinson, Architect; permit granted.”
Architect Mahlon Dickinson is also supposed to have designed a 499-seat theater called the Owl, which Irvin Glazer’s Philadelphia Theatres, A-Z says operated from August, 1913, to 1928. Web site Philadelphia Architects and Buildings gives the address of the Owl Theatre as 2300-2302 Grays Ferry Avenue, but as near as I can tell, that address was part of the grounds of the Naval Home, which was established in the 19th century and operated there until the 1970s.
It makes me wonder if the Owl’s reported address might be mistaken. There’s a building in the 2200 block of Grays Ferry Avenue that looks as though it might have been a theater at one time (Google Street View.) I wonder if that could have been the Owl? The Glazer collection is supposed to have a photo of the Owl, but it doesn’t appear to be available on the Internet.
Neither of my links to Historic Aerials is working. Go to their hom page and paste this address into the Search field:
4201 Shadow Lane, Santa Rosa, CA
Then pick “T1955” from the column in the upper left corner of the aerial view the site fetches, and you get the 1955 map. Zoom in using the row of circles at the lower right corner of the map. Selecting the fifth or sixth circle from the left gives a good scale.
Chuck: Historic Aerials has a 1959 view of both addresses. There was still a building at the southeast corner of Gaulbert and 4th then (which might have been 1603 S. 4th, but was more likely 1601 S.) but it looks too small to have been a theater. The building next door on 4th Street is still there, but it’s a late Victorian house and could never have held a theater.
In 1959 the southeast corner of Gaulbert and 2nd (Gaulbert still went through to Brook Street then) had a building that was the right size and shape for a theater, though it doesn’t appear to have had a marquee at that time. It had to have been at 1601 S. 2nd, though, and I think that must be the correct address.
The Tivoli Opera House, Eddy Street near Market, advertised in the December 27, 1913, issue of the San Francisco Call that it presented “Photo Plays De Luxe”. The offering for the coming week was Sold to Satan (“The Most Unique Motion Picture of the Day”) and a Keystone Comedy, The Champion Driver, starring Mabel Norman [sic]. Despite the fact that it billed itself as an opera house, the Tivoli appears to have been a movie theater from its early days.
jwmovies is correct. At this link you can see the drive-in outlined on the 1955 USGS map at Historic Aerials.
Because Google Maps isn’t fetching the right location for our page, here is a link to a corrected map. I used 4201 Shadow Lane to get Google to put an icon (a letter “A” in a circle rather than the usual pin icon) on top of the residential project that now occupies the site of the drive-in.
Here is Street View looking up Shadow Lane from Montgomery Drive, the former entrance to the drive-in.
Here is an item announcing the proposed College Theatre, from the Los Angeles Herald, September 11, 1910:
“MOVING PICTURE SHOW THEATER BUILDING BOOKED FOR SOUTH HILL STREET
“The moving picture enterprise has finally struck South Hill street. Soon an ornate theater building will be erected on the Dr. West Hughes lot, 40x120 feet, just north of the California club, corner of Hill and Fifth streets. Through the agency of William P. Ferris of 406 West Seventh street Dr. Hughes' lot has been leased for a period of ten years to A. S. Hyman and Charles Prochazko at rental aggregating $100,000. The lessees of the lot will begin the erection of a high class picture theater building at once. The lot leased is on the west side of Hill street, halfway between the Los Angeles-Pacific railway station and Fifth street.”
$10,000 a year was an impressive sum for Dr. Hughes to be earning from his small lot in the 1910s. You could buy a suburban lot and put up a nice, six room bungalow on it for half that then.
I found another source with a 1913 photo of the Diepenbrock Theatre. There is no permalink, so this one will probably vanish, too. The text below the photo says that the building was destroyed by a fire in August, 1927.
The same source has this photo showing the auditorium on opening night in (so the text says) 1911. The image file is shamefully defaced by a Sacramento Public Library digital watermark, even though it is a vintage postcard which is surely long out of copyright. Your tax dollars at work.
The August 25, 1913, issue of the San Francisco Call reported briefly on a major fire which had taken place at the Diepenbrock Theatre in Sacramento:
“FINE THEATER IS BURNED
“Gas Explosion Starts Complete Destruction of the Diepenbrock
“SACRAMENTO, Aug. 24—Fire which was started by an explosion of gas partially destroyed the magnificent Diepenbrock theater, one of the finest on the coast, at 2 o'clock this morning. For more than half an hour the flames threatened to completely raze the $100,000 structure and set fire to the block of dwellings in the immediate vicinity.”This fire must be why the theater’s name changed between 1912 and 1914. I wish the photos lostmemory linked to were still available, so we could see what changes were made in the rebuilding.
Once again, a public institution has removed photographs from public view, and the Bancroft Library (University of California, Berkeley) images that lostmemory linked to above are lost in the library’s chaotic, user-hostile web site. I’ve looked, but I can’t find them. Maybe somebody else will have better luck.
So far, the only early trade journal reference I’ve found to movie theaters in Towanda, Kansas, is this item from the January 5, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“Towanda, Kan. —Towanda is soon to have another picture show building. Joel Davis is planning a new brick theater building on Main street.”
As the Crystal was in a bank building, and Mr. Davis was planning what sounds like a dedicated theater building, his project probably wasn’t the Crystal, but as it also sound as though Towanda already had a t least one theater in operation, perhaps that one was the Crystal. The bank building does look as though it could date from before 1918, and Crystal was a very popular name for theaters in the 1910s.
There’s a photo of the auditorium of the Zoe Theatre on page 37 of David Welling’s Cinema Houston (Google Books preview.) Welling says that the Zoe opened on October 14, 1914, and was renamed the Capitol Theatre in March, 1922. He also says that a few architectural remnants of the theater have survived.
Page 41 of Steven Strom’s Houston Lost and Unbuilt (Google Books preview) has a ca.1920 photo of the entrance of the Zoe Theatre. Architect Alfred Finn’s office was at that time located directly above the theater entrance. The Foster Building was Finn’s first commission as an independent architect, according to the guide to his papers at the Houston Public Library.
Welling’s book gives the date of the last show at the Iris as July 26, 1965. The Iris and the Rivoli Theatre, around the corner on Capitol Street, were demolished on August 15, 1965.
This house opened as the Travis Theatre on April 13, 1913, according to Cinema Houston: From Nickelodeon to Megaplex, by David Welling. Welling says the name was changed to Iris Theatre in 1919, when Will Horowitz took over the failed vaudeville house and converted it to movies. The impression the 1956 Boxoffice article gives that the name change took place with the 1956 remodeling is the result of careless wording by the writer of the article’s headline.
Horowitz actually named the theater Iris after his daughter, but he was apparently also motivated by pecuniary concerns. Welling says that Horowitz had the T in Travis altered into an I, and removed the A and V. Grouping the remaining letters together changed the theater signage to read IRIS at minimal cost.
The finding aid for the papers of architect Alfred C. Finn (online here) lists multiple projects for this address. Finn designed the ten-story office building on this site for M. E. Foster in 1913. The project included a theater, though no name is given for it. An addition to the office building was made in 1915, and alterations in 1922. In 1927, alterations were made to the Capitol Theatre itself, but the finding aid does not specify their nature.
In 1930, the Foster Building, at 715-719 Main Street, and the adjacent Gulf Building, at 723-725 Main Street, which Finn had designed in 1915, were combined into single office block with a common lobby. The finding aid gives no indication of what happened to the Capitol Theatre, or when it was closed.
The buildings currently on the site might be the historic structures with modern skins applied to them, as they are ten stories in height. It wouldn’t make sense to knock down ten story steel-framed buildings just to build new ten story steel-framed building in their place.
Here are a couple of lines from a May 17, 2010, article in the Enumclaw Courier-Herald by Wally DuChateau:
“There were two movie theaters, the Avalon and the Liberty, owned by Gene Groesbeck. He showed films one or two months after they had opened in Seattle and had, more or less, exhausted their runs in the city.”
An E. W. Grossbeck [sic] of Enumclaw was listed as a recent visitor to Seattle’s film row in the January 6, 1917, issue of The Moving Picture World. This was probably Mr. Groesbeck, who is also mentioned in a reminiscence by Jim Merritt, who grew up in Enumclaw in the 1920s and 1930s:
“The Liberty Theatre was the showplace for all the Silent Movies. A large theater organ was played to accompany each feature in underscoring the mood of the movie. Later, after ‘Talkies’ arrived, Mr. Groesbeck, the local theatre owner, opened the Avalon Theatre. There was a change of shows about three times weekly unless, of course, a big hit came to town and would run five days instead of the usual two or three. Short subjects and newsreels were a part of every movie program in those days. Every Saturday there was a kids' matinee, which included ‘serials’ that ran from week to week.”
The 1913-1914 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide lists one theater at Enumclaw, the Opera House, a ground-floor theater of 600 seats, managed by E. W. Groesbeck.
Another Courier-Herald article by Wally DuChateau here clarifies the history of Enumclaw’s theaters. It says that Gene Groesbeck built the Liberty Theatre around 1920, built the Avalon Theatre in 1929, and that outside interests opened the Roxy Theatre in 1949. The Liberty was on the site now occupied by the Police Department, which is next door to the Chalet, and the Avalon near the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Cole Street (it was still in operation at least as late as 1955.) The Roxy is the house that became the Chalet.
A 1948 Motion Picture Herald item mentions the “…Roxy in Enumclaw, a 750-seat house, built this year.” The facade of the Chalet obviously dates from the 1920s, not the 1940s, so MPH was wrong to say that the Roxy was “built” in 1948. It must have been converted from the former American Legion Hall at that time, as our introduction says.
As for the vanished Liberty, it’s possible that it was actually the old opera house, renamed around the time of WWI, as were quite a few theaters. We know that Eugene Groesbeck was managing a theater in Enumclaw at least as early as 1913, and involved in movie exhibition there at least as early as 1917, and that he operated the Liberty Theatre in the 1920s and 1930s, and possibly in the 1940s.
While it’s possible that the Roxy was renamed the Liberty Theatre at some point, it seems equally possible that we’ve garbled the local history, and there was only ever the one Liberty Theatre in Enumclaw. We need someone to fill in the gap in the history of the Roxy/Chalet between 1948 and 1977.
Google has chosen to break Street View for this location, skipping the entire 5400 block of Vermont Avenue. While Google chooses to let Street View remain broken, there is a bird’s-eye view available at Bing Maps.
Do we have the right address for this theater, or has Google Maps gone off the rails? I’m sure the Goodale Theatre was not a showboat moored in the Olentangy River, but that’s where Google Maps puts it. What’s left of Delaware Avenue almost intersects W. Goodale Street in the latter’s 300 block. To further confuse things, CinemaTour places the Goodale Theatre on High Street, but without an address. I’m puzzled.
The Hartman Theatre was designed by the noted Columbus architectural firm Richards, McCarty & Bulford.
Here is an early photo of the Hartman Theatre from the Knowlton School of Architecture web site. Thumbnail links to two additional photos of the theater and one of the adjacent office building appear at the bottom of the page.
Here is an additional photo from the Columbus Metropolitan Library.
The Hartman Theatre was built by Dr. Samuel Hartman, who had made a fortune from an alcohol-heavy elixir called Peruna, the formula for which was, he claimed, revealed to him in a dream about a long-dead American Indian chief of that name. The theater must have been one of the more impressive monuments financed by America’s legion of tipplers-in-denial. It’s too bad this impressive building didn’t last much longer than a heavy drinker’s liver.
The site of the Hartman Theatre and its adjacent office block, now occupied by a larger modern office building, is across the street from another Richards, McCarty & Bulford project, the Romanesque Revival style U.S. Post Office and Federal Courthouse, built in 1883-1887 and, happily, still standing.
Two Injured in San Antonio, TX Movie Theater Shooting. The Village Voice headline is a bit misleading. The gunman was shot in the theater, where an off-duty deputy who was moonlighting as mall security chased him, but the gunman shot his only victim in the parking lot before running into the theater. Nobody was killed (off-screen, at least. What the on-screen death toll was that night I don’t know.)
A number of shootings happen in the United States every day, so odds are that a theater will be the scene of one now and then. I doubt that this incident indicates that the Mayan Palace 14 is any more dangerous than the average public place in San Antonio. I’m sure that far more people are killed or injured in automobile accidents while driving to and from theaters than are killed or injured by being shot in theaters.
Here is Don Rittner’s 2010 weblog post about Proctor’s Theatre in Troy. In addition to several photos of Troy’s theater, it has considerable information about Fred Proctor’s career, and photos of several other Proctor theaters.
The partner of architect William D. Coates was Harrison B. Traver. Both studied in Philadelphia with the Beaux-Arts trained classicist Paul Cret around 1906-1907. They formed a partnership in San Francisco in 1911, and moved their office to Fresno in 1914. When the partnership was dissolved in 1925, Traver moved to Los Angeles and Coates continued to practice in Fresno. As far as I’ve been able to determine, the Liberty was the only theater they designed during their partnership.
An article about three Australian theaters in the October 5, 1929, issue of Motion Picture News was illustrated primarily with photos of the interior of the Plaza. Here is the first page. Images can be enlarged by clicking on the + sign in the toolbar at lower right of the web page.
Three pages about the State Theatre, with photos, appeared in an article about new Australian theaters in the October 5, 1929, issue of Motion Picture News.
First page
Second page
Third page.
For some reason, Google has put the Street View for this address on Watts Street, at the back of the building. If Street View is moved around to Broad Street, you can see the fairly well preserved Gothic upper facade of the Bluebird Theatre. The ground floor has been covered in what looks like a rusticated fake stone of the sort that was popular in the 1950s.
The “New Construction Work” column of the August 5, 1914, issue of Paint, Oil and Drug Review has an item about a new movie theater to be built at 2209-2211 N. Broad Street:
Architect Mahlon Dickinson is also supposed to have designed a 499-seat theater called the Owl, which Irvin Glazer’s Philadelphia Theatres, A-Z says operated from August, 1913, to 1928. Web site Philadelphia Architects and Buildings gives the address of the Owl Theatre as 2300-2302 Grays Ferry Avenue, but as near as I can tell, that address was part of the grounds of the Naval Home, which was established in the 19th century and operated there until the 1970s.It makes me wonder if the Owl’s reported address might be mistaken. There’s a building in the 2200 block of Grays Ferry Avenue that looks as though it might have been a theater at one time (Google Street View.) I wonder if that could have been the Owl? The Glazer collection is supposed to have a photo of the Owl, but it doesn’t appear to be available on the Internet.
Neither of my links to Historic Aerials is working. Go to their hom page and paste this address into the Search field:
4201 Shadow Lane, Santa Rosa, CA
Then pick “T1955” from the column in the upper left corner of the aerial view the site fetches, and you get the 1955 map. Zoom in using the row of circles at the lower right corner of the map. Selecting the fifth or sixth circle from the left gives a good scale.
Chuck: Historic Aerials has a 1959 view of both addresses. There was still a building at the southeast corner of Gaulbert and 4th then (which might have been 1603 S. 4th, but was more likely 1601 S.) but it looks too small to have been a theater. The building next door on 4th Street is still there, but it’s a late Victorian house and could never have held a theater.
In 1959 the southeast corner of Gaulbert and 2nd (Gaulbert still went through to Brook Street then) had a building that was the right size and shape for a theater, though it doesn’t appear to have had a marquee at that time. It had to have been at 1601 S. 2nd, though, and I think that must be the correct address.
The Tivoli Opera House, Eddy Street near Market, advertised in the December 27, 1913, issue of the San Francisco Call that it presented “Photo Plays De Luxe”. The offering for the coming week was Sold to Satan (“The Most Unique Motion Picture of the Day”) and a Keystone Comedy, The Champion Driver, starring Mabel Norman [sic]. Despite the fact that it billed itself as an opera house, the Tivoli appears to have been a movie theater from its early days.
The Historic Aerials link in my previous comment isn’t working. Try this one.
jwmovies is correct. At this link you can see the drive-in outlined on the 1955 USGS map at Historic Aerials.
Because Google Maps isn’t fetching the right location for our page, here is a link to a corrected map. I used 4201 Shadow Lane to get Google to put an icon (a letter “A” in a circle rather than the usual pin icon) on top of the residential project that now occupies the site of the drive-in.
Here is Street View looking up Shadow Lane from Montgomery Drive, the former entrance to the drive-in.
Here is an item announcing the proposed College Theatre, from the Los Angeles Herald, September 11, 1910:
$10,000 a year was an impressive sum for Dr. Hughes to be earning from his small lot in the 1910s. You could buy a suburban lot and put up a nice, six room bungalow on it for half that then.I found another source with a 1913 photo of the Diepenbrock Theatre. There is no permalink, so this one will probably vanish, too. The text below the photo says that the building was destroyed by a fire in August, 1927.
The same source has this photo showing the auditorium on opening night in (so the text says) 1911. The image file is shamefully defaced by a Sacramento Public Library digital watermark, even though it is a vintage postcard which is surely long out of copyright. Your tax dollars at work.
The August 25, 1913, issue of theSan Francisco Call reported briefly on a major fire which had taken place at the Diepenbrock Theatre in Sacramento:
“Gas Explosion Starts Complete Destruction of the Diepenbrock
“SACRAMENTO, Aug. 24—Fire which was started by an explosion of gas partially destroyed the magnificent Diepenbrock theater, one of the finest on the coast, at 2 o'clock this morning. For more than half an hour the flames threatened to completely raze the $100,000 structure and set fire to the block of dwellings in the immediate vicinity.”This fire must be why the theater’s name changed between 1912 and 1914. I wish the photos lostmemory linked to were still available, so we could see what changes were made in the rebuilding.
Once again, a public institution has removed photographs from public view, and the Bancroft Library (University of California, Berkeley) images that lostmemory linked to above are lost in the library’s chaotic, user-hostile web site. I’ve looked, but I can’t find them. Maybe somebody else will have better luck.
So far, the only early trade journal reference I’ve found to movie theaters in Towanda, Kansas, is this item from the January 5, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World:
As the Crystal was in a bank building, and Mr. Davis was planning what sounds like a dedicated theater building, his project probably wasn’t the Crystal, but as it also sound as though Towanda already had a t least one theater in operation, perhaps that one was the Crystal. The bank building does look as though it could date from before 1918, and Crystal was a very popular name for theaters in the 1910s.There’s a photo of the auditorium of the Zoe Theatre on page 37 of David Welling’s Cinema Houston (Google Books preview.) Welling says that the Zoe opened on October 14, 1914, and was renamed the Capitol Theatre in March, 1922. He also says that a few architectural remnants of the theater have survived.
Page 41 of Steven Strom’s Houston Lost and Unbuilt (Google Books preview) has a ca.1920 photo of the entrance of the Zoe Theatre. Architect Alfred Finn’s office was at that time located directly above the theater entrance. The Foster Building was Finn’s first commission as an independent architect, according to the guide to his papers at the Houston Public Library.
Welling’s book gives the date of the last show at the Iris as July 26, 1965. The Iris and the Rivoli Theatre, around the corner on Capitol Street, were demolished on August 15, 1965.
This house opened as the Travis Theatre on April 13, 1913, according to Cinema Houston: From Nickelodeon to Megaplex, by David Welling. Welling says the name was changed to Iris Theatre in 1919, when Will Horowitz took over the failed vaudeville house and converted it to movies. The impression the 1956 Boxoffice article gives that the name change took place with the 1956 remodeling is the result of careless wording by the writer of the article’s headline.
Horowitz actually named the theater Iris after his daughter, but he was apparently also motivated by pecuniary concerns. Welling says that Horowitz had the T in Travis altered into an I, and removed the A and V. Grouping the remaining letters together changed the theater signage to read IRIS at minimal cost.
The finding aid for the papers of architect Alfred C. Finn (online here) lists multiple projects for this address. Finn designed the ten-story office building on this site for M. E. Foster in 1913. The project included a theater, though no name is given for it. An addition to the office building was made in 1915, and alterations in 1922. In 1927, alterations were made to the Capitol Theatre itself, but the finding aid does not specify their nature.
In 1930, the Foster Building, at 715-719 Main Street, and the adjacent Gulf Building, at 723-725 Main Street, which Finn had designed in 1915, were combined into single office block with a common lobby. The finding aid gives no indication of what happened to the Capitol Theatre, or when it was closed.
The buildings currently on the site might be the historic structures with modern skins applied to them, as they are ten stories in height. It wouldn’t make sense to knock down ten story steel-framed buildings just to build new ten story steel-framed building in their place.
Linkrot repair: The 1957 Boxoffice article about the closing of the Bijou can now be found at this link.
Here are a couple of lines from a May 17, 2010, article in the Enumclaw Courier-Herald by Wally DuChateau:
An E. W. Grossbeck [sic] of Enumclaw was listed as a recent visitor to Seattle’s film row in the January 6, 1917, issue of The Moving Picture World. This was probably Mr. Groesbeck, who is also mentioned in a reminiscence by Jim Merritt, who grew up in Enumclaw in the 1920s and 1930s: The 1913-1914 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide lists one theater at Enumclaw, the Opera House, a ground-floor theater of 600 seats, managed by E. W. Groesbeck.Another Courier-Herald article by Wally DuChateau here clarifies the history of Enumclaw’s theaters. It says that Gene Groesbeck built the Liberty Theatre around 1920, built the Avalon Theatre in 1929, and that outside interests opened the Roxy Theatre in 1949. The Liberty was on the site now occupied by the Police Department, which is next door to the Chalet, and the Avalon near the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Cole Street (it was still in operation at least as late as 1955.) The Roxy is the house that became the Chalet.
A 1948 Motion Picture Herald item mentions the “…Roxy in Enumclaw, a 750-seat house, built this year.” The facade of the Chalet obviously dates from the 1920s, not the 1940s, so MPH was wrong to say that the Roxy was “built” in 1948. It must have been converted from the former American Legion Hall at that time, as our introduction says.
As for the vanished Liberty, it’s possible that it was actually the old opera house, renamed around the time of WWI, as were quite a few theaters. We know that Eugene Groesbeck was managing a theater in Enumclaw at least as early as 1913, and involved in movie exhibition there at least as early as 1917, and that he operated the Liberty Theatre in the 1920s and 1930s, and possibly in the 1940s.
While it’s possible that the Roxy was renamed the Liberty Theatre at some point, it seems equally possible that we’ve garbled the local history, and there was only ever the one Liberty Theatre in Enumclaw. We need someone to fill in the gap in the history of the Roxy/Chalet between 1948 and 1977.
Google has chosen to break Street View for this location, skipping the entire 5400 block of Vermont Avenue. While Google chooses to let Street View remain broken, there is a bird’s-eye view available at Bing Maps.