Although a timeline of Bellaire history at the Bellaire Public Library' web site says that the Miners' Temple was built in 1926, the web page lostmemory linked to earlier, which is also from the library’s web site, says that the building first appeared on Sanborn insurance maps in 1924.
I have found a reference to the Miners' Temple in the January 15, 1923, issue of the trade union publication Cigar Makers' Official Journal, the phrasing of which suggests that the building was already occupied at that time. It’s possible that the Miners' Temple was completed in late 1922, and this might have been too late for it to be included in the 1923 edition of the Sanborn maps.
The Capitol Theatre opened on January 3, 1925, according to the caption of a photo on page 53 of Bellaire, by Holly Bruno and Andrew Ehritz (Google Books preview).) An item in the December 1, 1928, issue of Motion Picture News ran this item about the house:
“The Capitol Theatre, Bellaire, Ohio, owned by A. G. Constant and associates, has reopened after being dark several months to permit extensive remodeling.”
Google Books also lists a small book titled The Capitol Movie Theatre, Bellaire, Ohio, which was published in 1930, but Google has no views of it available. The book has apparently been digitized by the State Library of Ohio and should be available as an e-book which can be checked out by card holders of many public libraries in the state (here’s a list.) Maybe a Cinema Treasures user with a card from one of those libraries can take a look at it and add more information here.
This house opened around 1915 as the Majestic Theatre, according to the caption of photos on page 51 of Bellaire, by Holly Bruno and Andrew Ehritz (Google Books Preview.)
A major remodeling of the Strand Theatre was carried out in 1951, according to Kendallville Heritage Association’s Historic Places tour (PDF file here.) The remodeling was designed by the A.M. Strauss architectural firm of Fort Wayne (Alvin M. Strauss, a Kendallville native.)
The July 22, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had this item datelined Fort Payne: “Miss Leona Thomason will expend $5,000 to remodel opera house for a moving picture theater.”
The side walls of the Urbana Cinema look much older than its 1941 build date. A number of sources indicate that the Gloria Theatre was on the site of an earlier house called the Clifford Theatre, which burned. A couple of sources say that the Gloria was rebuilt from the Clifford.
Judging from the apparent age of the side walls, at least parts of the Clifford must have survived the fire to be incorporated in the new structure, though the Clifford was a larger theater than the Gloria. The Cahn guide of 1910 said that the house seated 1,200, and its stage was 35 feet from footlights to back wall and 80 feet between its side walls. The proscenium was 40 feet wide and 30 feet high. The modern theater doesn’t appear to have a stage house at all.
This web page has a photo of the historical marker commemorating the Clifford Theatre. I’ve been unable to find any period photos of the outside of the Clifford Theatre, which opened in 1905, but a 1911 picture of the auditorium appears on page 2 of the May, 2008, issue of the Champaign County Historical Society’s newsletter, available in PDF format at this link.
The University of Vermont library has four photos of the Strong Theatre, most of them showing the street sides of the building, like this one dated 1950, but there is one photo showing the other side, where the auditorium and stage tower were visible.
Quite a few sources note that the Strong Theatre opened on October 24, 1904. Most Internet sources I’ve seen say that the fire that destroyed it took place in 1970, but the caption of a photo on this page of the book Burlington Firefighting, by Liisa Reimann and James M. Woodmanthe, says that the fire took place in the early morning hours of Saturday, October 9, 1971.
An item in a 1933 issue of Motion Picture Herald, which I’ve only seen in a snippet view from Google Books, says that the Strong Theatre was being remodeled at a cost of $20,000. The architect for the project was Frank Lyman Austin, of Burlington.
We currently have the wrong the initials for architect Holmboe. I’ve found many period references to an architect named E.C.S. Holmboe, but none to an R.C. Holmboe. Holmboe’s partner in the firm of Holmboe & Lafferty was Robert C. Lafferty, which is probably where the initials R.C. came from.
In addition to the Robinson Grand, Holmboe & Lafferty designed the Cottrill Opera House in Thomas, West Virginia and possibly the Elk’s Theatre in Bluefield, West Virginia (attributed to Lafferty but built in 1902, the year the partnership of Holmboe & Lafferty was formed.)
The architectural firm of Buechner & Orth designed the Empress Theatre. It is listed as a 1910 project in the finding aid to the firms papers in the Northwest Architectural Archives at the University of Minnesota, built for owner George Benz & Sons. Sullivan & Considine must have leased the house, so it would not have been designed by Lee DeCamp.
The Capitol is one of the theaters listed in the finding aid to the Buechner & Orth archives at the University of Minnesota. As the Capitol was built in 1926, it seems unlikely that Charles Buechner, who died in 1924, would have had anything to do with the project.
The current owner of the Ute Theatre has a bit of information about its operation on this web page. The building dates from 1916 and was originally a livery stable.
A few years of the Saguache Crescent have been digitized and can be searched from this web page (you’ll have to answer a couple of brief consumer survey-type questions to view the scans.) In 1925 and 1931, a movie house called the Saguache Theatre advertised in the paper, and in 1937 there was a Rialto Theatre. I don’t know if these were AKA’s for the Ute Theatre or not. The earliest available year of the newspaper with ads for the Ute is 1943.
Tinseltoes linked to the wrong page in an earlier comment. Here is the article about the Cinema Grossmont.
The Boxoffice article fails to mention the architect of this theater. Fred Stein’s Statewide Theatres was usually fairly adventurous in its choice of architects, and between 1963 and 1967, during which period the Cinema Grossmont was also built, the chain hired the San Diego modernists Tucker, Sadler, & Bennett to design four large 70mm theaters for them, including the Cinema 21 in San Diego (the other three were in Anaheim, Bakersfield, and San Bernardino). It is possible that the same firm designed the Cinema Grossmont as well, but I’ve been unable to find any confirmation of this.
The caption of the photo CSWalczak linked to also says that the architect of the City Hall and Opera House/Liberty Theatre was Frank P. Milburn.
Frank Pierce Milburn also designed a City Hall-Opera House building for Columbia, South Carolina (demolished in 1936) and, as part of the firm of Milburn, Heister & Co., the still-operating Durham Auditorium/Carolina Theatre in Durham, North Carolina.
The Isis Theatre at Wichita Falls is listed in Eric Ledell Smith’s book African American theater buildings: an illustrated historical directory, 1900-1955.
btkrefft is right. The Youth Center is in a corner building, and the theater was in mid-block. As the address is right for the Youth Center, it must be wrong for the Grand Theatre.
The Cambria Theatre was in operation prior to 1894. In that year it was purchased by Isaac Mishler, who rebuilt it and reopened it in 1895 as the New Cambria Theatre.
The State Street Theatre was built by Altoona, Pennsylvania theater magnate Isaac Mishler. The Historic American Buildings Survey report on the Mishler Theatre in Altoona (Google Documents quick view) mentions the State Street Theatre as a 1904 project designed by architect Albert E. Westover, who would later design the Mishler Theatre.
This twin might have been the house opened in 1968 as the Trans-Lux Inflight Cine. The 350-seat, single screen theater at Bartow, designed by architect John McNamara, was the first opened by the partnership formed the previous year by Trans-Lux and Inflight Motion Pictures, Inc. These theaters used a 16mm projection system originally developed for showing movies aboard airliners, but had all been converted to 35mm by the end of 1972. A number of the small, single-screen houses were later twinned.
The list of theaters opened the previous year that was published in the January 20, 1969, issue of Boxoffice included the Cine, Bartow, Florida, opened by Trans-Lux. Many sources on the Internet say that the Bartow Trans-Lux house opened in 1966, but the partnership was not even formed until 1967, as told in this article from Boxoffice of November 13, 1967, so the Internet sources must be wrong. I think I might have quoted this misinformation in one or more comments on other pages at Cinema Treasures myself before discovering that it was wrong.
A former Trans-Lux executive, Bob Maar, writing at Film-Tech Forum, says in the second reply on this forum page that the Trans-Lux Inflight Cine in Charlotte opened in June, 1968 (he also gives opening years for the other four Inflight operations in North Carolina, all of which were single-screeners.) Like the other early Inflight twins, the house had two auditoriums of 350 seats each.
This web page has an article from the November, 1961, issue of Modern Mechanix which describes the automated, 16mm projection system developed by Inflight Motion Pictures, Inc, for showing movies on airliners. A version of this system was used in the earthbound theaters which Inflight opened in partnership with Trans-Lux beginning in 1968. The first house, a 350-seat single-screener, was opened at Bartow, Florida, that year.
This article (upper left) in Boxoffice of November 13, 1967, tells about Trans-Lux’s plans for the Inflight chain. It notes that the theaters were being designed by architect John McNamara.
The John and Drew Eberson Archives at the Wolfsonian Institute lists the Trans-Lux Sunshine Theatre as a 1968 project by Drew Eberson. He was also the architect for the theater’s twinning, which the Mall site says took place in 1977.
John and Drew Eberson were designing projects for Trans-Lux during the 1950s, and Drew Eberson continued to design theaters for the chain, both new houses and remodeling and twinning jobs, through the 1970s. He also designed offices for Trans-Lux at Norwalk, Connecticut in 1968.
In the Independent Theatres listings of the Los Angeles Times for February 10, 1971, the Vista was showing a double feature of Cindy and Donna (IMDb) and Girly (IMDB).
These were more low-budget sexploitation movies than full-on porn, but they were the sort of thing the Vista was running regularly around that time. The theater went to gay porn for a while later in the ‘70s, and then in 1980 it became a revival house, first operated by Thomas Theatres out of San Francisco and then by Landmark, which operated it more as a revival/art house combination.
Landmark abandoned the revival format at the Vista in 1985. The August 24, 1986 Los Angeles Times has the house listed as the New Vista, showing a double feature of Top Gun and Real Genius. I don’t think the Vista ever went back to porn after its time as a revival house. It did show some gay-themed movies during those years, aimed at the large gay audience in Silver Lake and East Hollywood, but I don’t think any of them were porn.
Although a timeline of Bellaire history at the Bellaire Public Library' web site says that the Miners' Temple was built in 1926, the web page lostmemory linked to earlier, which is also from the library’s web site, says that the building first appeared on Sanborn insurance maps in 1924.
I have found a reference to the Miners' Temple in the January 15, 1923, issue of the trade union publication Cigar Makers' Official Journal, the phrasing of which suggests that the building was already occupied at that time. It’s possible that the Miners' Temple was completed in late 1922, and this might have been too late for it to be included in the 1923 edition of the Sanborn maps.
The Capitol Theatre opened on January 3, 1925, according to the caption of a photo on page 53 of Bellaire, by Holly Bruno and Andrew Ehritz (Google Books preview).) An item in the December 1, 1928, issue of Motion Picture News ran this item about the house:
Google Books also lists a small book titled The Capitol Movie Theatre, Bellaire, Ohio, which was published in 1930, but Google has no views of it available. The book has apparently been digitized by the State Library of Ohio and should be available as an e-book which can be checked out by card holders of many public libraries in the state (here’s a list.) Maybe a Cinema Treasures user with a card from one of those libraries can take a look at it and add more information here.This house opened around 1915 as the Majestic Theatre, according to the caption of photos on page 51 of Bellaire, by Holly Bruno and Andrew Ehritz (Google Books Preview.)
A major remodeling of the Strand Theatre was carried out in 1951, according to Kendallville Heritage Association’s Historic Places tour (PDF file here.) The remodeling was designed by the A.M. Strauss architectural firm of Fort Wayne (Alvin M. Strauss, a Kendallville native.)
Error in the architect field: There should be no “s” in the architect’s first name. It’s Edward Bates Franzheim.
The Temple Theatre had a Wurlitzer type D organ, opus 592.
The July 22, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had this item datelined Fort Payne: “Miss Leona Thomason will expend $5,000 to remodel opera house for a moving picture theater.”
The side walls of the Urbana Cinema look much older than its 1941 build date. A number of sources indicate that the Gloria Theatre was on the site of an earlier house called the Clifford Theatre, which burned. A couple of sources say that the Gloria was rebuilt from the Clifford.
Judging from the apparent age of the side walls, at least parts of the Clifford must have survived the fire to be incorporated in the new structure, though the Clifford was a larger theater than the Gloria. The Cahn guide of 1910 said that the house seated 1,200, and its stage was 35 feet from footlights to back wall and 80 feet between its side walls. The proscenium was 40 feet wide and 30 feet high. The modern theater doesn’t appear to have a stage house at all.
This web page has a photo of the historical marker commemorating the Clifford Theatre. I’ve been unable to find any period photos of the outside of the Clifford Theatre, which opened in 1905, but a 1911 picture of the auditorium appears on page 2 of the May, 2008, issue of the Champaign County Historical Society’s newsletter, available in PDF format at this link.
The University of Vermont library has four photos of the Strong Theatre, most of them showing the street sides of the building, like this one dated 1950, but there is one photo showing the other side, where the auditorium and stage tower were visible.
Quite a few sources note that the Strong Theatre opened on October 24, 1904. Most Internet sources I’ve seen say that the fire that destroyed it took place in 1970, but the caption of a photo on this page of the book Burlington Firefighting, by Liisa Reimann and James M. Woodmanthe, says that the fire took place in the early morning hours of Saturday, October 9, 1971.
An item in a 1933 issue of Motion Picture Herald, which I’ve only seen in a snippet view from Google Books, says that the Strong Theatre was being remodeled at a cost of $20,000. The architect for the project was Frank Lyman Austin, of Burlington.
E.C.S. Holmboe and Robert C. Lafferty of the Clarksburg architectural firm Holmboe & Rafferty designed the Cottrill Opera House.
We currently have the wrong the initials for architect Holmboe. I’ve found many period references to an architect named E.C.S. Holmboe, but none to an R.C. Holmboe. Holmboe’s partner in the firm of Holmboe & Lafferty was Robert C. Lafferty, which is probably where the initials R.C. came from.
In addition to the Robinson Grand, Holmboe & Lafferty designed the Cottrill Opera House in Thomas, West Virginia and possibly the Elk’s Theatre in Bluefield, West Virginia (attributed to Lafferty but built in 1902, the year the partnership of Holmboe & Lafferty was formed.)
The architectural firm of Buechner & Orth designed the Empress Theatre. It is listed as a 1910 project in the finding aid to the firms papers in the Northwest Architectural Archives at the University of Minnesota, built for owner George Benz & Sons. Sullivan & Considine must have leased the house, so it would not have been designed by Lee DeCamp.
The Capitol is one of the theaters listed in the finding aid to the Buechner & Orth archives at the University of Minnesota. As the Capitol was built in 1926, it seems unlikely that Charles Buechner, who died in 1924, would have had anything to do with the project.
The current owner of the Ute Theatre has a bit of information about its operation on this web page. The building dates from 1916 and was originally a livery stable.
A few years of the Saguache Crescent have been digitized and can be searched from this web page (you’ll have to answer a couple of brief consumer survey-type questions to view the scans.) In 1925 and 1931, a movie house called the Saguache Theatre advertised in the paper, and in 1937 there was a Rialto Theatre. I don’t know if these were AKA’s for the Ute Theatre or not. The earliest available year of the newspaper with ads for the Ute is 1943.
A rendering of the Cinema Theatre appeared on this page of Boxoffice, October 11, 1965. The groundbreaking for the project had just taken place.
Tinseltoes linked to the wrong page in an earlier comment. Here is the article about the Cinema Grossmont.
The Boxoffice article fails to mention the architect of this theater. Fred Stein’s Statewide Theatres was usually fairly adventurous in its choice of architects, and between 1963 and 1967, during which period the Cinema Grossmont was also built, the chain hired the San Diego modernists Tucker, Sadler, & Bennett to design four large 70mm theaters for them, including the Cinema 21 in San Diego (the other three were in Anaheim, Bakersfield, and San Bernardino). It is possible that the same firm designed the Cinema Grossmont as well, but I’ve been unable to find any confirmation of this.
The caption of the photo CSWalczak linked to also says that the architect of the City Hall and Opera House/Liberty Theatre was Frank P. Milburn.
Frank Pierce Milburn also designed a City Hall-Opera House building for Columbia, South Carolina (demolished in 1936) and, as part of the firm of Milburn, Heister & Co., the still-operating Durham Auditorium/Carolina Theatre in Durham, North Carolina.
The Isis Theatre at Wichita Falls is listed in Eric Ledell Smith’s book African American theater buildings: an illustrated historical directory, 1900-1955.
btkrefft is right. The Youth Center is in a corner building, and the theater was in mid-block. As the address is right for the Youth Center, it must be wrong for the Grand Theatre.
The Cambria Theatre was in operation prior to 1894. In that year it was purchased by Isaac Mishler, who rebuilt it and reopened it in 1895 as the New Cambria Theatre.
The State Street Theatre was built by Altoona, Pennsylvania theater magnate Isaac Mishler. The Historic American Buildings Survey report on the Mishler Theatre in Altoona (Google Documents quick view) mentions the State Street Theatre as a 1904 project designed by architect Albert E. Westover, who would later design the Mishler Theatre.
This twin might have been the house opened in 1968 as the Trans-Lux Inflight Cine. The 350-seat, single screen theater at Bartow, designed by architect John McNamara, was the first opened by the partnership formed the previous year by Trans-Lux and Inflight Motion Pictures, Inc. These theaters used a 16mm projection system originally developed for showing movies aboard airliners, but had all been converted to 35mm by the end of 1972. A number of the small, single-screen houses were later twinned.
The list of theaters opened the previous year that was published in the January 20, 1969, issue of Boxoffice included the Cine, Bartow, Florida, opened by Trans-Lux. Many sources on the Internet say that the Bartow Trans-Lux house opened in 1966, but the partnership was not even formed until 1967, as told in this article from Boxoffice of November 13, 1967, so the Internet sources must be wrong. I think I might have quoted this misinformation in one or more comments on other pages at Cinema Treasures myself before discovering that it was wrong.
A former Trans-Lux executive, Bob Maar, writing at Film-Tech Forum, says in the second reply on this forum page that the Trans-Lux Inflight Cine in Charlotte opened in June, 1968 (he also gives opening years for the other four Inflight operations in North Carolina, all of which were single-screeners.) Like the other early Inflight twins, the house had two auditoriums of 350 seats each.
This web page has an article from the November, 1961, issue of Modern Mechanix which describes the automated, 16mm projection system developed by Inflight Motion Pictures, Inc, for showing movies on airliners. A version of this system was used in the earthbound theaters which Inflight opened in partnership with Trans-Lux beginning in 1968. The first house, a 350-seat single-screener, was opened at Bartow, Florida, that year.
This article (upper left) in Boxoffice of November 13, 1967, tells about Trans-Lux’s plans for the Inflight chain. It notes that the theaters were being designed by architect John McNamara.
This capsule history of Clearwater’s Sunshine Mall at Mall Hall of Fame says that the “…single-screen, Trans-Lux Theatre showed its first feature in mid-October 1968.”
The John and Drew Eberson Archives at the Wolfsonian Institute lists the Trans-Lux Sunshine Theatre as a 1968 project by Drew Eberson. He was also the architect for the theater’s twinning, which the Mall site says took place in 1977.
John and Drew Eberson were designing projects for Trans-Lux during the 1950s, and Drew Eberson continued to design theaters for the chain, both new houses and remodeling and twinning jobs, through the 1970s. He also designed offices for Trans-Lux at Norwalk, Connecticut in 1968.
In the Independent Theatres listings of the Los Angeles Times for February 10, 1971, the Vista was showing a double feature of Cindy and Donna (IMDb) and Girly (IMDB).
These were more low-budget sexploitation movies than full-on porn, but they were the sort of thing the Vista was running regularly around that time. The theater went to gay porn for a while later in the ‘70s, and then in 1980 it became a revival house, first operated by Thomas Theatres out of San Francisco and then by Landmark, which operated it more as a revival/art house combination.
Landmark abandoned the revival format at the Vista in 1985. The August 24, 1986 Los Angeles Times has the house listed as the New Vista, showing a double feature of Top Gun and Real Genius. I don’t think the Vista ever went back to porn after its time as a revival house. It did show some gay-themed movies during those years, aimed at the large gay audience in Silver Lake and East Hollywood, but I don’t think any of them were porn.