The Grand Theatre in the 1916 article Tinseltoes linked to lasted barely four months. It opened on September 20, 1916, and was destroyed by a fire on January 8, 1917, according to a history of Emmet and Dickinson Counties published in 1917. The house was later rebuilt.
If the date of 1913 on the photo CharmaineZoe linked to is correct, there must have been four successive houses called the Grand Theatre in Estherville.
Other Voices, Other Towns: The Traveler’s Story, by Caleb Pirtle III, says that the La Rita Theatre closed as a movie house in 1957 and remained dark for nearly a third of a century, finally being renovated for use by the Dalhart Community Theatre in 1989.
This web page has an article about the Cathaum Theatre first published in The Collegian in 1996. It says that the theater opened on April 8, 1926.
The Baums must have had a hard time getting this project underway. The Cathaum is mentioned by name in construction trade journals as early as 1922, when it was in the planning stage, but at that time it was being designed by a different architect, Harry S. Bair of Pittsburgh. The firm of Hodgens & Hill was formed in 1923, so they had to have taken over the project after that.
I don’t know why I wrote 3137 as the bank’s address. The bank is at 5157 Butler, and the theater must have been at 5135. There is no 3100 block of Butler Street.
I probably saw the Mission Theatre a few times in the late 1950s, but I don’t remember it. After stumbling on the town around 1955, we used to visit once or twice a year to buy cookies and pastries at Birkholm’s Bakery. The town, then much less built up, had not yet become a big tourist destination, and many of its buildings had not yet been given the Danish style they now sport.
As near as I can figure, the site of Frederick (or Fredrick) Querner’s theater was either on the lot where there is now what looks like an annex to the Allegheny Valley Bank of Pittsburgh, or on the parking lot next to it. The theater was too narrow to have occupied the entire frontage of the bank building, which has a modern address of 3137 Butler Street.
Although the caption of the photo of the Frederick Theatre in the publication cited in my previous comment uses the long spelling of the name, there’s a possibility that the theater was actually called the Fredrick, without the second e. That’s the way Mr. Querner’s first name is spelled on this page, which cites the 1920 U.S. Census.
Unfortunately the photo doesn’t show the name on the building itself. An old advertisement for the theater would confirm the spelling one way or the other, if somebody could find one.
Linkrot repair: The twice previously-linked page with the 1930s photo of the Cathaum Theatre is now at this URL, but it’s anybody’s guess for how long. The photo is a bit less than halfway down the very long page.
Thanks, Ken. I wonder if the choice of the name New Salem Theatre indicates that there was also an earlier Salem Theatre in town, as well as the Lyric? I haven’t found any mention of one in old publications, but towns named Salem are difficult to research on the Internet. It’s a common name, with at least one place called Salem in each of more than half the States, and multiple Salems in several of them.
The July 1, 1929, issue of The Film Daily said that the Lyric Theatre in Salem, Missouri, had been sold to L. L. Lewis by W. A. Donaldson. The May 2, 1936, issue of the same publication said that St. Louis architect Bruce F. Barnes would soon be taking bids “…for the house to be erected by Lyric Theater Co., Salem, Mo.” I’m not sure if the theater Barnes designed in 1936 was a replacement for the old Lyric, or if it was a new theater that would operate along with the Lyric.
Given how little information about Salem’s theaters there is on the Internet, it’s possible that the Preston was the theater built in 1936, and the old Lyric might have either been closed when the new house opened, or might have continued to operate for a while. The Preston is mentioned in a community forum, but the only mentions I can find of the Lyric are the one in the 1929 journal and in the walking tour brochure. That suggests that the Lyric was closed a very long time ago.
A walking tour brochure of downtown Salem places the Lyric Theatre at 306 N. Washington Street, but doesn’t make clear if the current building on the site is the historic building or not. It might be new construction. Google Maps has no street view for the location, nor does Bing Maps have a bird’s-eye view, and it’s impossible to determine the age of the current building from the aerial shots they do have.
A walking tour of downtown Salem gives the address of the modern City Administration Building that replaced the Preston Theatre as 400 N. Iron Street, but it’s possible that the theater was actually around the corner on 4th Street.
Comments about the Preston Theatre on a community forum page say that it closed in the 1960s, but all the movies people mention having seen there date from no later than the late 1950s. I think it might have closed before that decade ended. It was apparently demolished in the 1980s.
A 350-seat movie house called the Rex Theatre opened at Minneapolis on January 19, 1920, according to the January 23 issue of The Film Daily. The street name was not mentioned. The owner of the Rex was H. I. Krohling, and the house opened with Daddy Long Legs, starring Mary Pickford.
I suspect that Google Maps is putting this theater on the wrong stretch of O Street because we’ve got the wrong zip code listed. The zip code for downtown Lincoln is 68508.
A comment by lthomas on the Lincoln Theatre page says that the Capitol closed in the early 1950s, another victim of the cost of converting some old theaters to CinemaScope.
A brief item from the July 1, 1916, issue of the entertainment industry journal The New York Clipper discussed two large new theaters proposed for the Washington Heights district, and added the editorial opinion that the neighborhood already had enough theaters to satisfy local demand. The final line said: “The Wadsworth, at One Hundred and Eighty-first Street and Wadsworth Avenue, could not pay with any policy, so a bit of advice, don’t be hasty and overdo it.”
As this house opened as the Heights Theatre in 1913, either there must have been another theater at or near this intersection, or the Heights used the name Wadsworth at some point in its early history. Advertisements or theater listings from the period 1913-1916 should reveal which of those was the case. If the Heights and the Wadsworth were the same house, it would have been closed for some time in the first half of 1916.
Here is the complete item (which I cited in a previous comment) about the opening of the Heights Theatre, as reported in the November 15, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“Heights Theater.
“The L. & B. Amusement Company opened a new picture theater at Wadsworth Avenue and 181st Street, New York City, on Saturday evening, October 11, to a large patronage and is enjoying a steady patronage of the most satisfactory character. W. A. Landau, formerly proprietor of the Audubon Theater, in 181st Street, is president of the company, and S. G. Bock, who was connected with the St. Nicholas Theater, in the same neighborhood, is secretary and treasurer. The new house is of regular theater construction, seats 600 persons and has twelve exits. The construction is fireproof throughout. Two Standard projecting machines and a mercury arc rectifier have been installed, providing a fine picture at a throw of no feet. The chairs are from the American Seating Company. An indirect lighting system and large exhaust fans for ventilating complete an up-to-date equipment. Retiring rooms for men and women insure the comfort of the patrons. A Hope-Jones unit orchestra provides music for the pictures.”
The Lyceum must have been in operation by 1915. A Lyceum Theatre Company is listed at 906 3rd Avenue in the 1915 edition of Polk’s New York Copartnership and Corporation Directory.
The article Tinseltoes linked to credits the design of the Willow Lawn Theatre to the firm of Budina & Freeman. The firm is still in operation as Freeman Morgan Architects. Their web site says that the firm was founded in 1955, and that A. O. Budina retired in 1972.
The architects names are currently mispelled in the Firm field. It should be Carneal & Johnston.
Although there is no doubt that this theater was designed and built in 1919-1921, a list of Richmond’s theaters in a souvenir booklet published in 1908 includes a Colonial Theatre located at Broad and 8th Streets. I’ve been unable to discover what became of that house, or whether or not it ever showed movies.
The Columbia Theatre was listed in the 1921 Flint City Directory, but not in the 1919-1920 edition. It could have opened after the edition went to press, but must have opened before the end of 1920.
I’ve been unable to find directories for Flint from before 1915 or after 1922. In addition to those two editions, Google Books has 1918, 1919-1920, and 1921. This house is called the Elite in all of them, so the aka’s must date from before 1915 or after 1922.
However, the 1919-1920 and 1921 directories have a listing for a Gem Theatre at 1361 Stever Avenue. There are no theaters listed on that street in the other three directories.
The Savoy Theatre is listed at 302 S. Saginaw in the 1915 and 1922 Flint city directories. I don’t know if the lot was later renumbered, or if a new theater was built on a nearby site.
Interestingly, the 1915 directory also lists 302 S. Saginaw as the office of George J. Bachmann, under the category Theatre Contractors. Bachmann, an architect, designed several theaters in Flint and other Michigan cities. Another page of the 1915 directory lists him a second time, as an architect, with offices in the P. Smith Building, which was across Saginaw Street from the Savoy. I don’t know just what to make of the dual offices and dual professions, but it suggests that Bachmann might have designed the Savoy and might even have been its owner, or part owner.
In the 1920 Flint city directory, the architects are listed as Ernest N. Butler and John MacKenzie. E. N. Butler was listed as the architect of the proposed theater for the Globe Theater Stock Company on Saginaw Road at the foot of Williams Street in the October 25, 1919, issue of The American Contractor. The theater was to be 57x134 feet, one story with balcony.
The Zelda Theatre was in operation before 1920. The May 8, 1914, issue of the Duluth Evening Herald mentions a theft of a plumber’s tools “… from a
chest in the new Zelda theater building, 309 West Superior street.” The item doesn’t say whether the theater was still under construction or the plumber was doing repairs. The house was surely open before the end of 1914, though.
The Grand Theatre in the 1916 article Tinseltoes linked to lasted barely four months. It opened on September 20, 1916, and was destroyed by a fire on January 8, 1917, according to a history of Emmet and Dickinson Counties published in 1917. The house was later rebuilt.
If the date of 1913 on the photo CharmaineZoe linked to is correct, there must have been four successive houses called the Grand Theatre in Estherville.
Other Voices, Other Towns: The Traveler’s Story, by Caleb Pirtle III, says that the La Rita Theatre closed as a movie house in 1957 and remained dark for nearly a third of a century, finally being renovated for use by the Dalhart Community Theatre in 1989.
This web page has an article about the Cathaum Theatre first published in The Collegian in 1996. It says that the theater opened on April 8, 1926.
The Baums must have had a hard time getting this project underway. The Cathaum is mentioned by name in construction trade journals as early as 1922, when it was in the planning stage, but at that time it was being designed by a different architect, Harry S. Bair of Pittsburgh. The firm of Hodgens & Hill was formed in 1923, so they had to have taken over the project after that.
I don’t know why I wrote 3137 as the bank’s address. The bank is at 5157 Butler, and the theater must have been at 5135. There is no 3100 block of Butler Street.
An article about the Nielsen family, long-time operators of the Mission Theatre, says that the house closed in 1961.
This card from the California Index cites an undated Santa Ynez Valley News article saying that the Mission Theatre was built in 1927.
Here is a photo of the Mission Theatre dated 1939 by the Danish Royal Library.
I probably saw the Mission Theatre a few times in the late 1950s, but I don’t remember it. After stumbling on the town around 1955, we used to visit once or twice a year to buy cookies and pastries at Birkholm’s Bakery. The town, then much less built up, had not yet become a big tourist destination, and many of its buildings had not yet been given the Danish style they now sport.
As near as I can figure, the site of Frederick (or Fredrick) Querner’s theater was either on the lot where there is now what looks like an annex to the Allegheny Valley Bank of Pittsburgh, or on the parking lot next to it. The theater was too narrow to have occupied the entire frontage of the bank building, which has a modern address of 3137 Butler Street.
Although the caption of the photo of the Frederick Theatre in the publication cited in my previous comment uses the long spelling of the name, there’s a possibility that the theater was actually called the Fredrick, without the second e. That’s the way Mr. Querner’s first name is spelled on this page, which cites the 1920 U.S. Census.
Unfortunately the photo doesn’t show the name on the building itself. An old advertisement for the theater would confirm the spelling one way or the other, if somebody could find one.
Linkrot repair: The twice previously-linked page with the 1930s photo of the Cathaum Theatre is now at this URL, but it’s anybody’s guess for how long. The photo is a bit less than halfway down the very long page.
Thanks, Ken. I wonder if the choice of the name New Salem Theatre indicates that there was also an earlier Salem Theatre in town, as well as the Lyric? I haven’t found any mention of one in old publications, but towns named Salem are difficult to research on the Internet. It’s a common name, with at least one place called Salem in each of more than half the States, and multiple Salems in several of them.
The July 1, 1929, issue of The Film Daily said that the Lyric Theatre in Salem, Missouri, had been sold to L. L. Lewis by W. A. Donaldson. The May 2, 1936, issue of the same publication said that St. Louis architect Bruce F. Barnes would soon be taking bids “…for the house to be erected by Lyric Theater Co., Salem, Mo.” I’m not sure if the theater Barnes designed in 1936 was a replacement for the old Lyric, or if it was a new theater that would operate along with the Lyric.
Given how little information about Salem’s theaters there is on the Internet, it’s possible that the Preston was the theater built in 1936, and the old Lyric might have either been closed when the new house opened, or might have continued to operate for a while. The Preston is mentioned in a community forum, but the only mentions I can find of the Lyric are the one in the 1929 journal and in the walking tour brochure. That suggests that the Lyric was closed a very long time ago.
A walking tour brochure of downtown Salem places the Lyric Theatre at 306 N. Washington Street, but doesn’t make clear if the current building on the site is the historic building or not. It might be new construction. Google Maps has no street view for the location, nor does Bing Maps have a bird’s-eye view, and it’s impossible to determine the age of the current building from the aerial shots they do have.
A walking tour of downtown Salem gives the address of the modern City Administration Building that replaced the Preston Theatre as 400 N. Iron Street, but it’s possible that the theater was actually around the corner on 4th Street.
Comments about the Preston Theatre on a community forum page say that it closed in the 1960s, but all the movies people mention having seen there date from no later than the late 1950s. I think it might have closed before that decade ended. It was apparently demolished in the 1980s.
A 350-seat movie house called the Rex Theatre opened at Minneapolis on January 19, 1920, according to the January 23 issue of The Film Daily. The street name was not mentioned. The owner of the Rex was H. I. Krohling, and the house opened with Daddy Long Legs, starring Mary Pickford.
I suspect that Google Maps is putting this theater on the wrong stretch of O Street because we’ve got the wrong zip code listed. The zip code for downtown Lincoln is 68508.
A comment by lthomas on the Lincoln Theatre page says that the Capitol closed in the early 1950s, another victim of the cost of converting some old theaters to CinemaScope.
Here is an an updated link to the 1941 Boxoffice article with three photos of the Pine Theatre’s original interior.
A brief item from the July 1, 1916, issue of the entertainment industry journal The New York Clipper discussed two large new theaters proposed for the Washington Heights district, and added the editorial opinion that the neighborhood already had enough theaters to satisfy local demand. The final line said: “The Wadsworth, at One Hundred and Eighty-first Street and Wadsworth Avenue, could not pay with any policy, so a bit of advice, don’t be hasty and overdo it.”
As this house opened as the Heights Theatre in 1913, either there must have been another theater at or near this intersection, or the Heights used the name Wadsworth at some point in its early history. Advertisements or theater listings from the period 1913-1916 should reveal which of those was the case. If the Heights and the Wadsworth were the same house, it would have been closed for some time in the first half of 1916.
Here is the complete item (which I cited in a previous comment) about the opening of the Heights Theatre, as reported in the November 15, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World:
The Lyceum must have been in operation by 1915. A Lyceum Theatre Company is listed at 906 3rd Avenue in the 1915 edition of Polk’s New York Copartnership and Corporation Directory.
The article Tinseltoes linked to credits the design of the Willow Lawn Theatre to the firm of Budina & Freeman. The firm is still in operation as Freeman Morgan Architects. Their web site says that the firm was founded in 1955, and that A. O. Budina retired in 1972.
The architects names are currently mispelled in the Firm field. It should be Carneal & Johnston.
Although there is no doubt that this theater was designed and built in 1919-1921, a list of Richmond’s theaters in a souvenir booklet published in 1908 includes a Colonial Theatre located at Broad and 8th Streets. I’ve been unable to discover what became of that house, or whether or not it ever showed movies.
Kilduffs Baltimore has a page for the Rialto with a vintage photo and scans of ads.
The Columbia Theatre was listed in the 1921 Flint City Directory, but not in the 1919-1920 edition. It could have opened after the edition went to press, but must have opened before the end of 1920.
I’ve been unable to find directories for Flint from before 1915 or after 1922. In addition to those two editions, Google Books has 1918, 1919-1920, and 1921. This house is called the Elite in all of them, so the aka’s must date from before 1915 or after 1922.
However, the 1919-1920 and 1921 directories have a listing for a Gem Theatre at 1361 Stever Avenue. There are no theaters listed on that street in the other three directories.
Pinconning once had a movie theater called the Dreamland, mentioned in the April 16, 1918, issue of Michigan Film Review.
The Savoy Theatre is listed at 302 S. Saginaw in the 1915 and 1922 Flint city directories. I don’t know if the lot was later renumbered, or if a new theater was built on a nearby site.
Interestingly, the 1915 directory also lists 302 S. Saginaw as the office of George J. Bachmann, under the category Theatre Contractors. Bachmann, an architect, designed several theaters in Flint and other Michigan cities. Another page of the 1915 directory lists him a second time, as an architect, with offices in the P. Smith Building, which was across Saginaw Street from the Savoy. I don’t know just what to make of the dual offices and dual professions, but it suggests that Bachmann might have designed the Savoy and might even have been its owner, or part owner.
In the 1920 Flint city directory, the architects are listed as Ernest N. Butler and John MacKenzie. E. N. Butler was listed as the architect of the proposed theater for the Globe Theater Stock Company on Saginaw Road at the foot of Williams Street in the October 25, 1919, issue of The American Contractor. The theater was to be 57x134 feet, one story with balcony.
Also, the Zelda Theatre has not been demolished. Since 1985, the much-altered building has been the location of the Peterson Anderson flower shop.
The Zelda Theatre was in operation before 1920. The May 8, 1914, issue of the Duluth Evening Herald mentions a theft of a plumber’s tools “… from a chest in the new Zelda theater building, 309 West Superior street.” The item doesn’t say whether the theater was still under construction or the plumber was doing repairs. The house was surely open before the end of 1914, though.