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.
The photo of the Adler Theatre that Lou Rugani uploaded here a few days ago actually depicts not this house, but the 1937 New Adler Theatre on Central Avenue, which is listed here under its current name, Rogers Cinema 8. Maybe the photo can be moved to the correct page, and this comment can then be deleted.
Also, there are three instances of the misspelling “Alder” in place of Adler in the introductory description of this theater. Five instances of the same error appear in the introduction to the Relda Theatre.
A 1914 issue of Variety carried a brief announcement that the Princess Theatre in Corning had just opened as a picture house with 800 seats. The manager was Harry P. Kress of Wellsville. I can’t find the date of the publication, but it was probably from around mid-October.
I’ve also found two references in Evening Leader items in 1930 and 1931 to a theater called the Little Palace. This was before the first ads for the Palace Theatre at 35 Market had appeared. I wonder if the name Little Palace has been accidentally mingled with the name Princess, and that’s how the modern Palace’s web site came up with Little Princess as the early name of the theater in their building? It’s even possible that the Princess was the Little Palace for a year or so, and then the name Palace was moved to the other theater down the street.
According to the official web site of the Palace Theatre, this twin cinema occupies a space that was was once an upstairs theater called the Little Princess. The web site says that the Little Princess opened in the late 1800s, but to me the building looks more like something from the early 20th century. There’s no Victorian style to the facade, though it is possible that it was a Victorian building that was remodeled with a more modern facade in the 1910s.
The Corning Evening Leader carries many ads for a theater called simply the Princess during the late 1910s and mid 1920s. The Princess is mentioned as a theater as late as 1929, but this is in an item about an amateur theatrical performance being held there. The last ad for movies at the Princess Theatre that I’ve found is from 1927.
It’s very likely that the Princess Theatre of the 1920s was in the same building as the modern Palace, as a clothing store at 21 Market Street advertised itself as being next to the Princess Theatre.
Google Maps has no Street View for this location, but they have a decent Bird’s Eye View at Bing Maps. The gabled roof of the upstairs hall the theaters occupy is easily recognizable, especially if you rotate the view to the sides.
I’ve found that the original Palace Theatre was just down the block from this theater, probably at 35 W. Market Street. It advertised in the Evening Leader from as early as 1931 and into the early 1950s.
The November 15, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World had this item, which is probably about the Day Square Theatre:
“Mr. Louis D. Cohen is having erected at 282 Bennington street, East Boston, a photoplay theater, to cost $40,000. The plans were made by architect Nathan Douglas, and the theater is to be a first-class affair.”
finestkind: The house listed at Cinema Treasures as the Paramount Theatre opened in 1915 as the Olympia Theatre. I don’t know exactly when it was renamed the Paramount, but it’s quite likely that it was still called the Olympia in 1927. It was certainly still the Olympia in 1924, when Anthony Dumas made this drawing of it.
The Paramount also had an organ that was still operational into the middle years of the 20th century. Most likely, the MC on the record conflated the two theaters in his mind and misspoke.
FrankW: Thanks for confirming that the Corning Cinema was the former Fox Theatre. The old Corning Opera House was a different theater, located on Pine Street, and is listed at Cinema Treasures under its later name, the State Theatre.
Given its location, I think that the Fox must have been either the 1921 or the 1928 project for the Liberty Theatre company that I mentioned in my previous comment. The 1928 project by Victor Rigaumont might have been either a new theater on an adjacent site, or a remodeling of the 1921 house that was to be built at at 14 E. Erie. Either way, I think it’s safe to assume that the Fox was at 16-18 E. Denison Parkway, and was designed by Victor A. Rigaumont.
The earliest mention of the Fox Theatre I’ve found so far is from a 1934 issue of the Corning Evening Leader.
An item in the February 3, 1923, issue of the Corning Evening Leader said that the former Corning Opera House would reopen as the State Theatre on Monday night, February 5.
A 1911 newspaper report confirms that the Alhambra Theatre built in 1915 was either a replacement for or an enlargement of an existing theater. The 1911 item said that the Alhambra Theatre on the south side of Bleeker Street near Genesee Street was being enlarged to accommodate 900 patrons.
In the 1940s, the Lux Building housed the Utica branch of W. T. Grant’s. The first two photos in the “Shops and Stores” section of the photo gallery at Utica Remember When show Grants, probably around 1940.
Sketchup has a 3-D model of the Lux Building’s exterior here. I’m not sure the auditorium was demolished. More likely the space was gutted and had a couple of floors built into it.
An item in a 1958 issue of Motion Picture Herald reported that Michael F. Cory, operator of the Strand Theatre in Canajoharie, New York, had purchased the Fort Plain Theatre from a subsidiary of Smalley Theatres.
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.
The photo of the Adler Theatre that Lou Rugani uploaded here a few days ago actually depicts not this house, but the 1937 New Adler Theatre on Central Avenue, which is listed here under its current name, Rogers Cinema 8. Maybe the photo can be moved to the correct page, and this comment can then be deleted.
Also, there are three instances of the misspelling “Alder” in place of Adler in the introductory description of this theater. Five instances of the same error appear in the introduction to the Relda Theatre.
A 1914 issue of Variety carried a brief announcement that the Princess Theatre in Corning had just opened as a picture house with 800 seats. The manager was Harry P. Kress of Wellsville. I can’t find the date of the publication, but it was probably from around mid-October.
I’ve also found two references in Evening Leader items in 1930 and 1931 to a theater called the Little Palace. This was before the first ads for the Palace Theatre at 35 Market had appeared. I wonder if the name Little Palace has been accidentally mingled with the name Princess, and that’s how the modern Palace’s web site came up with Little Princess as the early name of the theater in their building? It’s even possible that the Princess was the Little Palace for a year or so, and then the name Palace was moved to the other theater down the street.
According to the official web site of the Palace Theatre, this twin cinema occupies a space that was was once an upstairs theater called the Little Princess. The web site says that the Little Princess opened in the late 1800s, but to me the building looks more like something from the early 20th century. There’s no Victorian style to the facade, though it is possible that it was a Victorian building that was remodeled with a more modern facade in the 1910s.
The Corning Evening Leader carries many ads for a theater called simply the Princess during the late 1910s and mid 1920s. The Princess is mentioned as a theater as late as 1929, but this is in an item about an amateur theatrical performance being held there. The last ad for movies at the Princess Theatre that I’ve found is from 1927.
It’s very likely that the Princess Theatre of the 1920s was in the same building as the modern Palace, as a clothing store at 21 Market Street advertised itself as being next to the Princess Theatre.
Google Maps has no Street View for this location, but they have a decent Bird’s Eye View at Bing Maps. The gabled roof of the upstairs hall the theaters occupy is easily recognizable, especially if you rotate the view to the sides.
I’ve found that the original Palace Theatre was just down the block from this theater, probably at 35 W. Market Street. It advertised in the Evening Leader from as early as 1931 and into the early 1950s.
An ad for the New Plaza Theatre appears in the March 18, 1919, issue of the Corning Evening Leader.
Here is a 1924 drawing by Anthony Dumas depicting the Paramount as the Olympia Theatre. This web page has a small photo of the Olympia around 1915.
The November 15, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World had this item, which is probably about the Day Square Theatre:
finestkind: The house listed at Cinema Treasures as the Paramount Theatre opened in 1915 as the Olympia Theatre. I don’t know exactly when it was renamed the Paramount, but it’s quite likely that it was still called the Olympia in 1927. It was certainly still the Olympia in 1924, when Anthony Dumas made this drawing of it.
The Paramount also had an organ that was still operational into the middle years of the 20th century. Most likely, the MC on the record conflated the two theaters in his mind and misspoke.
FrankW: Thanks for confirming that the Corning Cinema was the former Fox Theatre. The old Corning Opera House was a different theater, located on Pine Street, and is listed at Cinema Treasures under its later name, the State Theatre.
Given its location, I think that the Fox must have been either the 1921 or the 1928 project for the Liberty Theatre company that I mentioned in my previous comment. The 1928 project by Victor Rigaumont might have been either a new theater on an adjacent site, or a remodeling of the 1921 house that was to be built at at 14 E. Erie. Either way, I think it’s safe to assume that the Fox was at 16-18 E. Denison Parkway, and was designed by Victor A. Rigaumont.
The earliest mention of the Fox Theatre I’ve found so far is from a 1934 issue of the Corning Evening Leader.
An item in the February 3, 1923, issue of the Corning Evening Leader said that the former Corning Opera House would reopen as the State Theatre on Monday night, February 5.
Here is a photo of the Lyric Theatre dated 1917.
The Colonial Theatre was in operation prior to 1916, and was the subject of this article in the January 19 issue of the Rutland Herald that year.
A 1911 newspaper report confirms that the Alhambra Theatre built in 1915 was either a replacement for or an enlargement of an existing theater. The 1911 item said that the Alhambra Theatre on the south side of Bleeker Street near Genesee Street was being enlarged to accommodate 900 patrons.
In the 1940s, the Lux Building housed the Utica branch of W. T. Grant’s. The first two photos in the “Shops and Stores” section of the photo gallery at Utica Remember When show Grants, probably around 1940.
Sketchup has a 3-D model of the Lux Building’s exterior here. I’m not sure the auditorium was demolished. More likely the space was gutted and had a couple of floors built into it.
An item in a 1958 issue of Motion Picture Herald reported that Michael F. Cory, operator of the Strand Theatre in Canajoharie, New York, had purchased the Fort Plain Theatre from a subsidiary of Smalley Theatres.