The following item about an addition to and major remodeling of the Strand Theatre and Burlington Arcade appeared in an issue of Engineering News-Record in July, 1921:
“Conn., Stamford—Theatre—Emmons & Abbott, archts., Washington Bldg., receiving bids remodeling and building 3 story, 35 x 52 ft. concrete, brick and steel addition, rein.-con. flooring, concrete foundation, to Strand Theatre, Burlington Arcade. About $75,000.”
This article from the March 19, 1923, issue of The Norwalk Hour tells of a fire that partly destroyed the Burlington Arcade building in Stamford and says that it was “…adjoining the Strand theater building.” The last paragraph says that the building had once been known as the Opera House block.
This New York Times article from January 5, 2003, is about the adjacent Palace Theatre but mentions the Strand. It says that Mary Vuono rented space for the Strand in the Burlington building in 1915, and bought the adjacent property where the Palace was later built in 1920. Putting this information together with the other sources I cited suggests that the Palace site, which had once been occupied by the Grand Opera House, which burned in 1904, was the site of the 1921 project, and that it was that 1921 addition which was destroyed in the 1923 fire. The Times article says that Mary Vuono hired Thomas Lamb to design the proposed Palace Theatre in 1924, which would fit the time frame of the 1923 fire.
According to Dave Kenney’s Twin Cities Picture Show: A Century of Moviegoing this house operated as the Alhambra Theatre from 1911 to 1932, but had opened as the Penny Parlor in 1909. It last operated as the Cameo Theatre from 1933 to 1936.
The Alhambra was an early Finkelstein & Rubin house, as was the Gem Theatre operating next door at 18 E. 7th from 1909 to 1923. A third theater, the first Blue Mouse, was adjacent to the Gem at 20 E. 7th from 1914 to 1922. With the Princess (1910-1931) and Majestic (1911-1921) Theatres across the street, this must have been a lively block during the period around 1920.
The theater in the article Tinseltoes linked to is the Liberty. It identifies two more AKA’s for the house. It opened as the Orpheum in November, 1914, then briefly became the Empress. In May, 1916, the house was leased to the T&D circuit and renamed again. Later that same year the house had become the Liberty, so it had four names in about two years.
All these changes were the result of the fact that this theater got caught up in the collapse of the Sullivan & Considine vaudeville circuit. The article in The Moving Picture World says that the house was originally leased to Sullivan & Considine. The company had its own vaudeville circuit, but in the northwest it also had a deal with the Orpheum circuit to present that company’s shows in another string of theaters under Sullivan & Considine control.
As the S&C operation began falling apart, Considine shifted the Orpheum shows to another house in Portland and shifted the Sullivan & Considine shows from the circuit’s Empress Theatre to this house, which was renamed Empress. The Sullivan & Considine circuit was gone by 1916, and many of its theaters were taken over either by Loew’s or by Alexander Pantages. As this house was only leased, the original owners were probably the ones who leased it to T&D.
Interestingly, the Empress Theatre, which Sullivan & Considine had opened in 1913, eventually became the last Orpheum Theatre in Portland and is listed at Cinema Treasures under that name. Thus Portland had two theaters that each used both names, Orpheum and Empress, at different times.
The article Tinseltoes linked to notes that the Majestic was equipped with “…a 14 by 18 foot gold fibre screen which can be seen from every seat in the house….” The article also says that the Majestic’s projection booth was equipped with two Powers 6-A machines.
Although the Majestic had full stage facilities, it was clearly intended to operate primarily as a movie theater from the day it opened. The Moving Picture World article doesn’t even mention vaudeville, saying only that the house was presenting three shows of V-L-S-E productions on weekdays and four shows on Saturdays and holidays (V-L-S-E was a short-lived distribution combine made up of the Vitagraph, Lubin, Selig, and Essanay film production companies.)
The Illinois section of the January 1, 1916, issue of the trade journal Motography had this item about the Garden Theatre:
“The new Garden theater, North Main street, Canton, had its formal opening December 8, which was attended by 1,200 people. The theater is spacious and fire-proof and presents a very beautiful and attractive appearance with its lattice window effects with overhanging flowers, while suspended from each beam a bird cage with songsters sing softly and sweet. Joe Ross is manager.”
Here is an item announcing the plans for this theater in the October 30, 1912, issue of The American Architect:
“Architects Rapp, Zettel & Rapp, Johnston Bldg., have completed plans and estimates for the erection of a brick and concrete amusement building at 18-20 E. McMicken Ave., between Vine and Walnut Sts., to be known as the Variety Theater, at a cost of $12,000.”
The November 20 issue of the same publication had an item about another projected theater designed by the same firm:
“Architects Rapp, Zettel 8: Rapp, Johnston Building, are preparing plans for a theater building for the Boston Theater Co., corner Vine and Elder Sts., to cost $10,000”
This theater would have been only a short distance from the Variety/Uptown. I don’t know if the second project was ever completed, but if it was it must have been at the northeast corner of the intersection. The other corners all have buildings on them that clearly date from the 19th century. The building on the northeast corner could have been a theater, though if so it would have been a very small one, probably not seating many more than 300 patrons.
This page from the Lane Libraries says that the Rialto Theatre returned to its original name during its last years. It closed as the Court Theatre in 1988, reopening as the Rialto once again in May, 1989. The page says: “It closed for several periods in its final years, when it was operated as a two-screen theater with 500 seats. It finally closed in October 1993, and sold to the City of Hamilton for $140,000 in 1996. It was razed by the city in October 1996.”
The page also notes that the St. Charles Hotel was partly demolished when the Rialto was built. The theater entrance was in the part of the hotel that was preserved, but the auditorium was apparently entirely new construction. The page attributes the design of the Rialto to Cincinnati architect L. W. Fahnestock. At the time the Rialto was built, he was a partner in the firm of Dittoe, Fahnestock & Ferber, architects of the Murphy Theatre at Wilmington, Ohio.
The surname of one of the partners in the architectural firm is currently misspelled. The correct spelling is Fahnestock. The firm of Dittoe, Fahnestock & Ferber was in operation from the late 1910s to the early 1920s. The partners were Louis G. Dittoe, L.W. Fahnestock, and Charles H. Ferber, Jr.
Although Dittoe appears to have been the senior architect in the firm, it is possible that Ferber brought some expertise to the Murphy Theatre project. According to his biography at the Architecture Foundation of Cincinnati, he had spent parts of the years 1913 and 1914 training in the office of noted San Francisco theater architects James and Merritt Reid. From 1909 to 1913 he had received training in the office of Rapp, Zettel & Rapp, a Cincinnati firm that designed a number of theaters.
The November, 1919, issue of The Western Architect featured five photos of this splendid theater (scan at Google Books.)
Tinseltoes: The Casino was at 624 Main Street and was opened before 1912 (in 1907, according to one source) and was operated by Walter C. Quimby. In 1912 it was renamed the Grand Theatre, which it remained until closing in 1950. During its last ten years it was operated by the Shea circuit. The Grand was dismantled in 1952, but I’m not sure what became of the building. It is not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.
Jimmo531: A history page for the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study, which is located in a building erected in 1948 as a radio and television studio for the Don Lee-Mutual Broadcasting Company, and which later became the home of KHJ-TV (CBS channel 2) lists The Joey Bishop Show, The Newlywed Game, and The Dating Game as shows that originated from that studio, which was at 1313 N. Vine Street.
I have no idea why IMDb has these shows, or the Steve Allen show, originating from the Montalban’s address. Though it had been owned by CBS for many years, and was used as a studio for live radio broadcasts, for about three decades beginning in 1954 the house at 1615 Vine was called the Huntington Hartford Theatre, and operated primarily as a legitimate house. I don’t think it was equipped for television broadcasts as the Hartford, though it did have a projection room and ran at least one movie during that period (Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which premiered there in 1962.)
This web page has a 1963 photo of the marquee of the Steve Allen Playhouse, and even though it is a fairly tight shot, taken at night, it is definitely recognizable as the old Filmarte building, not the Huntington Hartford Theatre.
So, the logical explanation for the discrepancy is that IMDb got the address wrong not only for the Steve Allen show but for the other three shows you listed. Other Internet sources giving the same address are probably getting it from IMDb.
Colonial Revival in the style field should be Spanish Colonial Revival, which was the original style before Timothy Pflueger’s Deco remodeling job.
Also, I’ve noticed that the auditorium photo captioned “Interior of the New Mission Theater” in the Moving Picture World article I linked to in my previous comment depicts a different auditorium than the photo captioned “Interior of Theatre” in this article in The Music Trade Review published the same year. I don’t know for sure which magazine got the wrong photo, but I suspect it was The Moving Picture World. Its item on the New Mission was part of a section that featured two other new houses, which would be more likely to lead to error than the stand-alone item in Music Trade. The MPW photo might actually have depicted the Lorin Theatre in Berkeley.
Tinseltoes: The Regency was at 1600 Willow Avenue. CinemaTour says it closed in 2000. It also says the theater has been demolished, but I think the building is still there. Google Satellite View and (very distant) Street View show a building with a pent-roofed portico at the front and a lower portico along the sides, just like the theater in the photo in Boxoffice. 1600 Willow is now the address of the Judah First Church of God in Christ. The church probably adapted the theater for multiple uses and altered the interior, but I’m sure its the same building.
There’s a fairly long article about the New Mission Theatre on pages 1990-1991 of the September 23, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. Scan at Google Books.
Obituaries of San Francisco architect William H. Crim, Jr. list the El Capitan Theatre in San Francisco as one of his designs. I think that the current attribution of the house to G. Albert Lansburgh on this page might be the result of a conflation of the San Francisco El Capitan with the Hollywood El Capitan, which Lansburgh did design. I’ve been unable to find any sources showing any connection between Lansburgh and this San Francisco house, though I suppose it’s possible he was architect for a later remodeling job.
It looks like the NRHP document got the date of the Larkin’s conversion to movies wrong. An item in the March 18, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World said that the Larkin Theatre, which had been closed for some time, had been remodeled and would open as “…a first class moving picture house….” under the direction of Charles Goodwin, former operator of the Elite Theatre.
A document prepared for the NRHP says that this theater was designed by architect William Knowles. This was probably William F. Knowles, who practiced in San Francisco early in the 20th century, but as the document doesn’t specify, I suppose there is a slight possibility that it refers to the much younger William K. Knowles as the architect of a later remodeling.
The document, which is a bit ambiguous, appears to indicate that there was a theater at this location as early as 1914, that the Larkin Theatre operated as a movie house from 1920 to 1962, and that it began operating as the Century Theatre in 1980. It doesn’t offer any clues as to what went on between 1962 and 1980. A document about the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District prepared for the NRHP mentions the Larkin as a live theater that was in operation by 1915.
I’m trying to find more information about a house called the Ferris Harriman Theatre, which was located very near the Tivoli. It was built in 1911 in conjunction with a hotel of the same name. The hotel was renamed the Ambassador in 1922, and is still standing today at 55 Mason Street. The theater was converted into a garage in 1929. I’ve been unable to discover whether or not the theater ever operated as a movie house, or if its name was ever changed; neither do I know its address, or if the garage it became is still standing.
Jimmy Edwards' desire to build a theater in San Marino was the subject of an item in the February 12, 1937, issue of Southwest Builder & Contractor. Plans for a 750-seat reinforced concrete movie house with dimensions of 55x130 feet were being prepared by architect John Walker Smart.
Three years after being rebuffed by San Marino, Edwards was planning to build a theater on Huntington Drive in adjacent South Pasadena. A February 9, 1940, Southwest Builder item said that S. Charles Lee would be the architect for the South Pasadena house. This project was never carried out either, though I have no idea why.
I’ve come across several references to proposed Edwards theaters that never got built. Among them were two proposals for theaters on Garvey Avenue in Monterey Park— a 1,000-seat house in 1939 and a 1,200 seat house in 1945— that failed to materialize.
Incidentally, John Walker Smart was the architect of Sylvester Dupuy’s Pyrenees Castle, the hilltop mansion in Alhambra which became infamous a few years ago as the site of record producer Phil Spector’s murder of Lana Clarkson.
Smart was also the architect of an unbuilt Moorish-style theater proposed for Alhambra in late 1923. It’s possible that it was intended for the site of the Alhambra Theatre itself. Even if Smart’s project was intended for some other site, if it had been built the Alhambra, dating to late 1924, might not have been.
Architect/contractor Colonel J. W. Wood designed the Metropole Hotel and Broadway Theatre with an exterior in a rather austere version of the Romanesque Revival style, but the auditorium, seen in this photo from the Denver Public Library’s L. C. McClure collection, was a lavishly Oriental space, encrusted with decoration.
As the photo is black and white, we can only imagine what riot of color the room must have displayed. William G. M. Stone’s 1892 guide The Colorado Handbook describes the Broadway Theatre as having one of “…the prettiest interiors in The Great West, in luxurious appointments equal to the best.” The description of the Broadway’s auditorium in Andrew Craig Morrison’s Theaters is positively effusive:
“No theater anywhere could surpass the exotic visual display that veteran theater architect J.M. Wood incorporated into its vast auditorium, and few could equal it. ‘A Glimpse of India,’ the scene painted on the asbestos safety curtain, was extended into the third tier for the Broadway’s audiences, who found themselves engulfed in an Indo—Moorish fantasy that surpassed even New York’s extravagant Casino.”
Here is a photo of the Isis Theatre, with a photo of the sprawling Holiday Inn that now occupies the sites of both the Isis and the Paramount Theatre. The caption notes that the Isis was a reverse theater, with the screen at the entrance end of the auditorium.
The August 12, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World said that Jake Wells had secured Fred Karch to play the Seeburg organ at the Isis Theatre. Wells was one of the leading vaudeville impresarios and movie exhibitors in the south before selling his holdings in 1919.
I was a bit surprised to see the mention of a Seeburg organ. J. P. Seeburg Co., later known for its jukeboxes, was then known for making coin-operated player pianos and orchestrions, and I had no idea they had ever made theater organs. Apparently they were quite popular around 1916, when The Music Trade Review ran an article about the expansion of the Seeburg plant to accommodate the demand for theater pipe organs.
An item in the July 1, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World said that the Signal Amusement Company, operators of six movie theaters in Chattanooga, intended to built a new theater with 1,500 seats in that city. The item also said that Signal Amusement would remodel their Alcazar Theatre and expand its seating capacity from 675 to 1,100.
The papers of Rock Island architect George P. Stauduhar include plans for the Spencer Square Theatre, dated 1915-16. The only other theater project in the papers is a house called Shield’s Movie Theatre, also in Rock Island, dated 1917. I’ve been unable to find any other references to it on the Internet.
The Badger Hotel and its associated theater were built in 1907 by August H. Stange, a local lumber magnate, banker, and sash and door manufacturer. The theater was originally called the Badger Opera House, and I’ve found references to it under that name published as late as 1924.
The Badger Opera House was listed in the 1913-1914 Cahn guide as a ground floor house with 988 seats, 402 of which were in the second balcony and gallery. These two sections were probably closed when the house converted to movies.
A ca.1915 photo of the auditorium of the Badger Opera House can bee seen on this web page.
The following item about an addition to and major remodeling of the Strand Theatre and Burlington Arcade appeared in an issue of Engineering News-Record in July, 1921:
This article from the March 19, 1923, issue of The Norwalk Hour tells of a fire that partly destroyed the Burlington Arcade building in Stamford and says that it was “…adjoining the Strand theater building.” The last paragraph says that the building had once been known as the Opera House block.This New York Times article from January 5, 2003, is about the adjacent Palace Theatre but mentions the Strand. It says that Mary Vuono rented space for the Strand in the Burlington building in 1915, and bought the adjacent property where the Palace was later built in 1920. Putting this information together with the other sources I cited suggests that the Palace site, which had once been occupied by the Grand Opera House, which burned in 1904, was the site of the 1921 project, and that it was that 1921 addition which was destroyed in the 1923 fire. The Times article says that Mary Vuono hired Thomas Lamb to design the proposed Palace Theatre in 1924, which would fit the time frame of the 1923 fire.
According to Dave Kenney’s Twin Cities Picture Show: A Century of Moviegoing this house operated as the Alhambra Theatre from 1911 to 1932, but had opened as the Penny Parlor in 1909. It last operated as the Cameo Theatre from 1933 to 1936.
The Alhambra was an early Finkelstein & Rubin house, as was the Gem Theatre operating next door at 18 E. 7th from 1909 to 1923. A third theater, the first Blue Mouse, was adjacent to the Gem at 20 E. 7th from 1914 to 1922. With the Princess (1910-1931) and Majestic (1911-1921) Theatres across the street, this must have been a lively block during the period around 1920.
The theater in the article Tinseltoes linked to is the Liberty. It identifies two more AKA’s for the house. It opened as the Orpheum in November, 1914, then briefly became the Empress. In May, 1916, the house was leased to the T&D circuit and renamed again. Later that same year the house had become the Liberty, so it had four names in about two years.
All these changes were the result of the fact that this theater got caught up in the collapse of the Sullivan & Considine vaudeville circuit. The article in The Moving Picture World says that the house was originally leased to Sullivan & Considine. The company had its own vaudeville circuit, but in the northwest it also had a deal with the Orpheum circuit to present that company’s shows in another string of theaters under Sullivan & Considine control.
As the S&C operation began falling apart, Considine shifted the Orpheum shows to another house in Portland and shifted the Sullivan & Considine shows from the circuit’s Empress Theatre to this house, which was renamed Empress. The Sullivan & Considine circuit was gone by 1916, and many of its theaters were taken over either by Loew’s or by Alexander Pantages. As this house was only leased, the original owners were probably the ones who leased it to T&D.
Interestingly, the Empress Theatre, which Sullivan & Considine had opened in 1913, eventually became the last Orpheum Theatre in Portland and is listed at Cinema Treasures under that name. Thus Portland had two theaters that each used both names, Orpheum and Empress, at different times.
The article Tinseltoes linked to notes that the Majestic was equipped with “…a 14 by 18 foot gold fibre screen which can be seen from every seat in the house….” The article also says that the Majestic’s projection booth was equipped with two Powers 6-A machines.
Although the Majestic had full stage facilities, it was clearly intended to operate primarily as a movie theater from the day it opened. The Moving Picture World article doesn’t even mention vaudeville, saying only that the house was presenting three shows of V-L-S-E productions on weekdays and four shows on Saturdays and holidays (V-L-S-E was a short-lived distribution combine made up of the Vitagraph, Lubin, Selig, and Essanay film production companies.)
The Rex was not at the corner of Ray Street. The building can be seen in Street View if you shift several doors north.
The Illinois section of the January 1, 1916, issue of the trade journal Motography had this item about the Garden Theatre:
Here is an item announcing the plans for this theater in the October 30, 1912, issue of The American Architect:
The November 20 issue of the same publication had an item about another projected theater designed by the same firm:This theater would have been only a short distance from the Variety/Uptown. I don’t know if the second project was ever completed, but if it was it must have been at the northeast corner of the intersection. The other corners all have buildings on them that clearly date from the 19th century. The building on the northeast corner could have been a theater, though if so it would have been a very small one, probably not seating many more than 300 patrons.This page from the Lane Libraries says that the Rialto Theatre returned to its original name during its last years. It closed as the Court Theatre in 1988, reopening as the Rialto once again in May, 1989. The page says: “It closed for several periods in its final years, when it was operated as a two-screen theater with 500 seats. It finally closed in October 1993, and sold to the City of Hamilton for $140,000 in 1996. It was razed by the city in October 1996.”
The page also notes that the St. Charles Hotel was partly demolished when the Rialto was built. The theater entrance was in the part of the hotel that was preserved, but the auditorium was apparently entirely new construction. The page attributes the design of the Rialto to Cincinnati architect L. W. Fahnestock. At the time the Rialto was built, he was a partner in the firm of Dittoe, Fahnestock & Ferber, architects of the Murphy Theatre at Wilmington, Ohio.
The surname of one of the partners in the architectural firm is currently misspelled. The correct spelling is Fahnestock. The firm of Dittoe, Fahnestock & Ferber was in operation from the late 1910s to the early 1920s. The partners were Louis G. Dittoe, L.W. Fahnestock, and Charles H. Ferber, Jr.
Although Dittoe appears to have been the senior architect in the firm, it is possible that Ferber brought some expertise to the Murphy Theatre project. According to his biography at the Architecture Foundation of Cincinnati, he had spent parts of the years 1913 and 1914 training in the office of noted San Francisco theater architects James and Merritt Reid. From 1909 to 1913 he had received training in the office of Rapp, Zettel & Rapp, a Cincinnati firm that designed a number of theaters.
The November, 1919, issue of The Western Architect featured five photos of this splendid theater (scan at Google Books.)
Tinseltoes: The Casino was at 624 Main Street and was opened before 1912 (in 1907, according to one source) and was operated by Walter C. Quimby. In 1912 it was renamed the Grand Theatre, which it remained until closing in 1950. During its last ten years it was operated by the Shea circuit. The Grand was dismantled in 1952, but I’m not sure what became of the building. It is not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.
The fire that destroyed the Filmarte building took place in July, 1990. Here is an article about it from the Los Angeles Times.
Jimmo531: A history page for the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study, which is located in a building erected in 1948 as a radio and television studio for the Don Lee-Mutual Broadcasting Company, and which later became the home of KHJ-TV (CBS channel 2) lists The Joey Bishop Show, The Newlywed Game, and The Dating Game as shows that originated from that studio, which was at 1313 N. Vine Street.
I have no idea why IMDb has these shows, or the Steve Allen show, originating from the Montalban’s address. Though it had been owned by CBS for many years, and was used as a studio for live radio broadcasts, for about three decades beginning in 1954 the house at 1615 Vine was called the Huntington Hartford Theatre, and operated primarily as a legitimate house. I don’t think it was equipped for television broadcasts as the Hartford, though it did have a projection room and ran at least one movie during that period (Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which premiered there in 1962.)
This web page has a 1963 photo of the marquee of the Steve Allen Playhouse, and even though it is a fairly tight shot, taken at night, it is definitely recognizable as the old Filmarte building, not the Huntington Hartford Theatre.
So, the logical explanation for the discrepancy is that IMDb got the address wrong not only for the Steve Allen show but for the other three shows you listed. Other Internet sources giving the same address are probably getting it from IMDb.
Colonial Revival in the style field should be Spanish Colonial Revival, which was the original style before Timothy Pflueger’s Deco remodeling job.
Also, I’ve noticed that the auditorium photo captioned “Interior of the New Mission Theater” in the Moving Picture World article I linked to in my previous comment depicts a different auditorium than the photo captioned “Interior of Theatre” in this article in The Music Trade Review published the same year. I don’t know for sure which magazine got the wrong photo, but I suspect it was The Moving Picture World. Its item on the New Mission was part of a section that featured two other new houses, which would be more likely to lead to error than the stand-alone item in Music Trade. The MPW photo might actually have depicted the Lorin Theatre in Berkeley.
Tinseltoes: The Regency was at 1600 Willow Avenue. CinemaTour says it closed in 2000. It also says the theater has been demolished, but I think the building is still there. Google Satellite View and (very distant) Street View show a building with a pent-roofed portico at the front and a lower portico along the sides, just like the theater in the photo in Boxoffice. 1600 Willow is now the address of the Judah First Church of God in Christ. The church probably adapted the theater for multiple uses and altered the interior, but I’m sure its the same building.
There’s a fairly long article about the New Mission Theatre on pages 1990-1991 of the September 23, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. Scan at Google Books.
Obituaries of San Francisco architect William H. Crim, Jr. list the El Capitan Theatre in San Francisco as one of his designs. I think that the current attribution of the house to G. Albert Lansburgh on this page might be the result of a conflation of the San Francisco El Capitan with the Hollywood El Capitan, which Lansburgh did design. I’ve been unable to find any sources showing any connection between Lansburgh and this San Francisco house, though I suppose it’s possible he was architect for a later remodeling job.
It looks like the NRHP document got the date of the Larkin’s conversion to movies wrong. An item in the March 18, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World said that the Larkin Theatre, which had been closed for some time, had been remodeled and would open as “…a first class moving picture house….” under the direction of Charles Goodwin, former operator of the Elite Theatre.
A document prepared for the NRHP says that this theater was designed by architect William Knowles. This was probably William F. Knowles, who practiced in San Francisco early in the 20th century, but as the document doesn’t specify, I suppose there is a slight possibility that it refers to the much younger William K. Knowles as the architect of a later remodeling.
The document, which is a bit ambiguous, appears to indicate that there was a theater at this location as early as 1914, that the Larkin Theatre operated as a movie house from 1920 to 1962, and that it began operating as the Century Theatre in 1980. It doesn’t offer any clues as to what went on between 1962 and 1980. A document about the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District prepared for the NRHP mentions the Larkin as a live theater that was in operation by 1915.
I’m trying to find more information about a house called the Ferris Harriman Theatre, which was located very near the Tivoli. It was built in 1911 in conjunction with a hotel of the same name. The hotel was renamed the Ambassador in 1922, and is still standing today at 55 Mason Street. The theater was converted into a garage in 1929. I’ve been unable to discover whether or not the theater ever operated as a movie house, or if its name was ever changed; neither do I know its address, or if the garage it became is still standing.
Does anybody know? Bueller? Tillmany?
Jimmy Edwards' desire to build a theater in San Marino was the subject of an item in the February 12, 1937, issue of Southwest Builder & Contractor. Plans for a 750-seat reinforced concrete movie house with dimensions of 55x130 feet were being prepared by architect John Walker Smart.
Three years after being rebuffed by San Marino, Edwards was planning to build a theater on Huntington Drive in adjacent South Pasadena. A February 9, 1940, Southwest Builder item said that S. Charles Lee would be the architect for the South Pasadena house. This project was never carried out either, though I have no idea why.
I’ve come across several references to proposed Edwards theaters that never got built. Among them were two proposals for theaters on Garvey Avenue in Monterey Park— a 1,000-seat house in 1939 and a 1,200 seat house in 1945— that failed to materialize.
Incidentally, John Walker Smart was the architect of Sylvester Dupuy’s Pyrenees Castle, the hilltop mansion in Alhambra which became infamous a few years ago as the site of record producer Phil Spector’s murder of Lana Clarkson.
Smart was also the architect of an unbuilt Moorish-style theater proposed for Alhambra in late 1923. It’s possible that it was intended for the site of the Alhambra Theatre itself. Even if Smart’s project was intended for some other site, if it had been built the Alhambra, dating to late 1924, might not have been.
Architect/contractor Colonel J. W. Wood designed the Metropole Hotel and Broadway Theatre with an exterior in a rather austere version of the Romanesque Revival style, but the auditorium, seen in this photo from the Denver Public Library’s L. C. McClure collection, was a lavishly Oriental space, encrusted with decoration.
As the photo is black and white, we can only imagine what riot of color the room must have displayed. William G. M. Stone’s 1892 guide The Colorado Handbook describes the Broadway Theatre as having one of “…the prettiest interiors in The Great West, in luxurious appointments equal to the best.” The description of the Broadway’s auditorium in Andrew Craig Morrison’s Theaters is positively effusive:
Here is a photo of the Isis Theatre, with a photo of the sprawling Holiday Inn that now occupies the sites of both the Isis and the Paramount Theatre. The caption notes that the Isis was a reverse theater, with the screen at the entrance end of the auditorium.
The August 12, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World said that Jake Wells had secured Fred Karch to play the Seeburg organ at the Isis Theatre. Wells was one of the leading vaudeville impresarios and movie exhibitors in the south before selling his holdings in 1919.
I was a bit surprised to see the mention of a Seeburg organ. J. P. Seeburg Co., later known for its jukeboxes, was then known for making coin-operated player pianos and orchestrions, and I had no idea they had ever made theater organs. Apparently they were quite popular around 1916, when The Music Trade Review ran an article about the expansion of the Seeburg plant to accommodate the demand for theater pipe organs.
An item in the July 1, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World said that the Signal Amusement Company, operators of six movie theaters in Chattanooga, intended to built a new theater with 1,500 seats in that city. The item also said that Signal Amusement would remodel their Alcazar Theatre and expand its seating capacity from 675 to 1,100.
The papers of Rock Island architect George P. Stauduhar include plans for the Spencer Square Theatre, dated 1915-16. The only other theater project in the papers is a house called Shield’s Movie Theatre, also in Rock Island, dated 1917. I’ve been unable to find any other references to it on the Internet.
The Badger Hotel and its associated theater were built in 1907 by August H. Stange, a local lumber magnate, banker, and sash and door manufacturer. The theater was originally called the Badger Opera House, and I’ve found references to it under that name published as late as 1924.
The Badger Opera House was listed in the 1913-1914 Cahn guide as a ground floor house with 988 seats, 402 of which were in the second balcony and gallery. These two sections were probably closed when the house converted to movies.
A ca.1915 photo of the auditorium of the Badger Opera House can bee seen on this web page.