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.
A brief item about E. M. Loew’s Mohawk Theatre in North Adams appeared in the lower right corner of this page of the April 29, 1939, issue of Boxoffice. There is a photo showing one side wall of the auditorium as seen from the top of the balcony.
The item notes Mowll & Rand as architects, but attributes the decoration of the theater to William Riseman and someone named Alec Lercari (who I can’t find mentioned anywhere on the Itnernet, so perhaps it is a typo.)
I believe that the rendering of a proposed Vogue Theatre at Santa Rosa appearing in the upper right corner of this page of Boxoffice for April 29, 1939, depicts an early version of the house that eventually opened as the Tower Theatre.
Several of the comments on this theater’s page actually pertain to the later Rialto Theatre at 546 S. State Street, which took the name sometime after this house closed.
bigjoe59: The Chinese hosted some roadshow engagements other than West Side Story over the years, but the only ones I recall offhand were Hello Dolly and Windjammer. By the late 1950s, which is as far back as my personal experience of Hollywood Boulevard goes, roadshow engagements were much more likely to be booked at the Egyptian or the Pantages or even the Paramount (now El Capitan) than at the Chinese. The Warner Hollywood got all the Cinerama roadshows of course, until the Cinerama Dome opened.
Hard ticket engagements also took place at some theaters outside Hollywood, usually at houses on or near Wilshire Boulevard. The Carthay Circle was the most notable roadshow house outside Hollywood, but there were also quite a few hard ticket engagements at the Fox Wilshire and the Warner Beverly Hills, and even at a few smaller theaters.
According to David Welling’s Cinema Houston, The Prince Theatre was located at 320 Fannin Street, on the site of the Houston Theatre (originally Sweeney & Coombs Opera House), which had been destroyed by a fire. The Prince Theatre opened on September 24, 1908, with a play. It presented plays, vaudeville, and movies at various times, was briefly a Loew’s vaudeville house in the early 1920s, and in 1922 was leased to a stock company.
In the 1930s the theater was converted into a four-level parking garage. It was eventually demolished, but Welling doesn’t give the date. The building now on the site, the Harris County Administration Building, looks to date from the 1970s, but the theater might have been long gone by the time it was built.
None of the period sources I’ve found so far give the seating capacity, but it must have been a fairly large theater. Here is the announcement of the opening that was published in the October 10, 1908, issue of The Billboard:
“Most auspicious was the opening of the New Prince Theatre at Houston. Texas, on September 24. In the Land of Nod was the opening attraction, and pleased capacity business. The season of 1908-09 may be said to have commenced for Houston theatregoers.
“On entering the new auditorium, the first effect produced is a sense of clear spaciousness, and this impression deepens with further experience. The flooring of both balconies, and the steps of all the stairways throughout the building, are of concrete. The exits are numerous, wide and easy of access. The predominating colors in the auditorium’s furnishings are of dark green and cool gray, with a lavish use, as high lights, of brass bars and gold brush work. The paintings of figures and scenes, put in as ceiling and side wall frescoes, are all fittingly artistic.
“Mr. Dave Weis. formerly manager of the Grand. Galveston, Texas, is manager of the new theatre and Mr. Charles Brian is his assistant.
“The new theatre cost over $190,000, and is said to be one of the finest in the South.”
If this house was aka the Fox Merrill Theatre, the September 10, 1930, issue of The Film Daily reported that the circuit had closed it and that the building was to be used for a store.
The September 23, 1927, issue of The Film Daily said that George Mann expected his new State Theatre, under construction at Fort Bragg, to go into operation in November.
According to this item from the September 23, 1927, issue of The Film Daily, the Granada Theatre was built by the Skouras Borthers and Harry Koplar:
“New St. Louis House Named
“St. Louis — The Granada is the name selected for the theater at Gravois and Ellenwood Sts. which will be opened by the St. Louis Amusement Co. in a few weeks. The new house will seat about 2000 and will be among the largest of the outlying theaters operated by Skouras Bros, and Harry Koplar. It is planned to use this house for subsequent runs getting pictures immediately after the Missouri and Ambassador.”
Warner Bros. took over Skouras Brothers Enterprises in 1928. I don’t know when the Arthurs took over the Saint Louis Amusement Company.
American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, by Charlie Keil and Shelly Stamp, cites a 1913 advertisement for a Doan Theatre in Cleveland. A Doan Theatre was also mentioned in the July 1, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World, but no location was mentioned, and it might not have been this house.
Showtime in Cleveland: The Rise of a Regional Theater Center, by John Vacha, mentions the Doan Theatre in a paragraph about houses opened in the 1920s, saying that “…the Doan ushered moviegoers into a lobby rotunda modeled after an Aztec temple….” which certainly doesn’t sound like something that would have been built prior to the 1920s. The earlier Doan Theatre might have been remodeled, or replaced altogether.
As for the Doan ever having been a Loew’s house, a Loew’s Doan Theatre in Cleveland is mentioned on page 27 of a 1986 issue of Theatre Organ: Journal of the American Theatre Organ Society, Volume 28. It quotes a source dated July, 1926. So, while this house was certainly never Loew’s Euclid, it must have been Loew’s Doan.
This house re-opened as Loew’s Euclid in 1919. It had already been in operation as the Euclid Theatre for several years. Here is an item from a late 1913 issue of Variety:
“CLEVELAND’S NEXT BIG ONE.
“Cleveland, Dec. 26.
“The next big theatre to open here will be the Euclid. It will seat over 2,000 people. The date for English Grand Opera to start the house off is set for March 1.
“Max Faetkenhauer will manage the Euclid, built by Jas. Holcomb who has of late purchased considerable of the property on Euclid avenue near where the new theatre is located.
“Mr. Faetkenhauer promoted and built the Cleveland Hippodrome, now playing Keith vaudeville.
“Nothing is known of the future policy of the Euclid beyond that it will open with opera.”
It looks like the opening year of 1914 we originally gave was correct.
jlove: I’ve tried to discover when the Penn Square Theatre’s facade was remodeled, but no luck so far. The change in the front from the 1911 photo to the 1928 photo is indeed drastic, but I’ve found no evidence that the Penn Square ever changed locations so they must be the same building. There are clues in the adjacent buildings, especially the one to the right, which shows many of the same first and second floor details in both photos, though it appears to have lost its cornice before 1928.
Like a number of other architects of the period, George A. Grieble studied architecture through correspondence. This advertisement for International Correspondence Schools, featuring a biographical sketch of Grieble, appeared in various publications in the early 1920s, and it mentions both the Alhambra Theatre and the Penn Square Building as being Grieble’s designs. The Cleveland Landmarks Commission lists both the Gordon Square and the Olympia Theatre as Grieble’s designs.
I don’t know how Knox & Elliot got the commission for the Hippodrome project, but it is not unheard of for an architect to design only one or two theaters in a career. I do know that Max Faetkenhauer, who commissioned the theater, was experienced as a theatrical manager as well as being a composer and orchestra conductor, and it could be that he had ideas of his own about how a theater should be designed, and he didn’t want to bicker over them with an experienced theater architect, preferring an architect who would defer to him. Faetkenhauer’s partner in the project, former mayor Robert McKisson, would undoubtedly have been acquainted with Knox and Elliot, and likely would have considered them a good choice for the rest of the project, which included two large office buildings.
I’ve found this house listed as the New Orpheum Theatre as early as 1911 and as late as 1924. I don’t think it means that this Orpheum was rebuilt at any time. A list of Gus Sun’s theaters in Frank Cullen’s Vaudeville Old and New has six houses called the New Orpheum, and several other theaters in the circuit had the word “New” as part of their names. Apparently, Gus Sun was just partial to it.
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.
A brief item about E. M. Loew’s Mohawk Theatre in North Adams appeared in the lower right corner of this page of the April 29, 1939, issue of Boxoffice. There is a photo showing one side wall of the auditorium as seen from the top of the balcony.
The item notes Mowll & Rand as architects, but attributes the decoration of the theater to William Riseman and someone named Alec Lercari (who I can’t find mentioned anywhere on the Itnernet, so perhaps it is a typo.)
I believe that the rendering of a proposed Vogue Theatre at Santa Rosa appearing in the upper right corner of this page of Boxoffice for April 29, 1939, depicts an early version of the house that eventually opened as the Tower Theatre.
The Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to earlier says that the Cherokee Theatre was designed by Corgan & Moore.
Several of the comments on this theater’s page actually pertain to the later Rialto Theatre at 546 S. State Street, which took the name sometime after this house closed.
bigjoe59: The Chinese hosted some roadshow engagements other than West Side Story over the years, but the only ones I recall offhand were Hello Dolly and Windjammer. By the late 1950s, which is as far back as my personal experience of Hollywood Boulevard goes, roadshow engagements were much more likely to be booked at the Egyptian or the Pantages or even the Paramount (now El Capitan) than at the Chinese. The Warner Hollywood got all the Cinerama roadshows of course, until the Cinerama Dome opened.
Hard ticket engagements also took place at some theaters outside Hollywood, usually at houses on or near Wilshire Boulevard. The Carthay Circle was the most notable roadshow house outside Hollywood, but there were also quite a few hard ticket engagements at the Fox Wilshire and the Warner Beverly Hills, and even at a few smaller theaters.
According to David Welling’s Cinema Houston, The Prince Theatre was located at 320 Fannin Street, on the site of the Houston Theatre (originally Sweeney & Coombs Opera House), which had been destroyed by a fire. The Prince Theatre opened on September 24, 1908, with a play. It presented plays, vaudeville, and movies at various times, was briefly a Loew’s vaudeville house in the early 1920s, and in 1922 was leased to a stock company.
In the 1930s the theater was converted into a four-level parking garage. It was eventually demolished, but Welling doesn’t give the date. The building now on the site, the Harris County Administration Building, looks to date from the 1970s, but the theater might have been long gone by the time it was built.
None of the period sources I’ve found so far give the seating capacity, but it must have been a fairly large theater. Here is the announcement of the opening that was published in the October 10, 1908, issue of The Billboard:
If this house was aka the Fox Merrill Theatre, the September 10, 1930, issue of The Film Daily reported that the circuit had closed it and that the building was to be used for a store.
The September 23, 1927, issue of The Film Daily said that George Mann expected his new State Theatre, under construction at Fort Bragg, to go into operation in November.
According to this item from the September 23, 1927, issue of The Film Daily, the Granada Theatre was built by the Skouras Borthers and Harry Koplar:
Warner Bros. took over Skouras Brothers Enterprises in 1928. I don’t know when the Arthurs took over the Saint Louis Amusement Company.American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, by Charlie Keil and Shelly Stamp, cites a 1913 advertisement for a Doan Theatre in Cleveland. A Doan Theatre was also mentioned in the July 1, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World, but no location was mentioned, and it might not have been this house.
Showtime in Cleveland: The Rise of a Regional Theater Center, by John Vacha, mentions the Doan Theatre in a paragraph about houses opened in the 1920s, saying that “…the Doan ushered moviegoers into a lobby rotunda modeled after an Aztec temple….” which certainly doesn’t sound like something that would have been built prior to the 1920s. The earlier Doan Theatre might have been remodeled, or replaced altogether.
As for the Doan ever having been a Loew’s house, a Loew’s Doan Theatre in Cleveland is mentioned on page 27 of a 1986 issue of Theatre Organ: Journal of the American Theatre Organ Society, Volume 28. It quotes a source dated July, 1926. So, while this house was certainly never Loew’s Euclid, it must have been Loew’s Doan.
This house re-opened as Loew’s Euclid in 1919. It had already been in operation as the Euclid Theatre for several years. Here is an item from a late 1913 issue of Variety:
It looks like the opening year of 1914 we originally gave was correct.jlove: I’ve tried to discover when the Penn Square Theatre’s facade was remodeled, but no luck so far. The change in the front from the 1911 photo to the 1928 photo is indeed drastic, but I’ve found no evidence that the Penn Square ever changed locations so they must be the same building. There are clues in the adjacent buildings, especially the one to the right, which shows many of the same first and second floor details in both photos, though it appears to have lost its cornice before 1928.
Like a number of other architects of the period, George A. Grieble studied architecture through correspondence. This advertisement for International Correspondence Schools, featuring a biographical sketch of Grieble, appeared in various publications in the early 1920s, and it mentions both the Alhambra Theatre and the Penn Square Building as being Grieble’s designs. The Cleveland Landmarks Commission lists both the Gordon Square and the Olympia Theatre as Grieble’s designs.
I don’t know how Knox & Elliot got the commission for the Hippodrome project, but it is not unheard of for an architect to design only one or two theaters in a career. I do know that Max Faetkenhauer, who commissioned the theater, was experienced as a theatrical manager as well as being a composer and orchestra conductor, and it could be that he had ideas of his own about how a theater should be designed, and he didn’t want to bicker over them with an experienced theater architect, preferring an architect who would defer to him. Faetkenhauer’s partner in the project, former mayor Robert McKisson, would undoubtedly have been acquainted with Knox and Elliot, and likely would have considered them a good choice for the rest of the project, which included two large office buildings.
I’ve found this house listed as the New Orpheum Theatre as early as 1911 and as late as 1924. I don’t think it means that this Orpheum was rebuilt at any time. A list of Gus Sun’s theaters in Frank Cullen’s Vaudeville Old and New has six houses called the New Orpheum, and several other theaters in the circuit had the word “New” as part of their names. Apparently, Gus Sun was just partial to it.