The term “Nuevo Deco” used to describe the Washoe Theatre in the introduction to this page is a Spanish phrase apparently describing a neo-vintage style that has recently gained popularity in Latin America. The Washoe is simply Art Deco, though at the time it was built it would probably have been described as Art Moderne or Zig-Zag Modern (the term Art Deco was coined by English critic Bevis Hillier in the 1960s.)
The majority of web sites using the term Nuevo Deco are, not surprisingly, in Spanish, although the term has made its way into that demotic fount of misinformation, Wikipedia, so I suppose we can expect it to soon metastasize across the Internet.
Anaconda, Montana: Copper Smelting Boom Town on the Western Frontier, by Patrick F. Morris, says that the Margaret Theatre was inaugurated on September 28, 1897. The Margaret Theatre is listed in the 1910-1911 Cahn guide as a ground-floor house with 1,246 seats. Frank Cullen’s Vaudeville, Old and New lists the Margaret as having been on the Ackerman & Harris vaudeville circuit, but there are numerous period references to the house presenting everything from road shows to prize fights.
There is one reference to an exhibition of movies at the Margaret as early 1905, but I haven’t found the house mentioned in the movie industry trade journals of the period. However, the January 10, 1930, issue of The Film Daily did have a brief item saying that the recently-burned Sundial Theatre would be replaced by a new house, so the Sundial must have operated as a movie theater during its brief life.
The Glendale Theatre opened on December 1, 1947, according to this page at Silent Toronto. The opening day ad credits the companies involved in the design and construction of the theater, including architects Kaplan & Sprachman.
Mandel Sprachman also designed a house in the area which Boxoffice of October 25, 1965, mentioned only in passing as the Don Mills Theatre. It was leased to Odeon and opened about 1963. I don’t think it’s listed here yet. Another Sprachman design apparently not yet listed was the Odeon Albion, which I believe was also in the northern part of Toronto.
The LakeRidge Theatre is not yet listed, Tinseltoes. Most of the sources I’ve found say it was in Lakewood, Colorado, though one source says it was in Wheat Ridge. The Boxoffice article says it was on Wadsworth Boulevard, and an item in a 1973 issue of the magazine Science of Mind says that the Denver Church of Religious Science was holding Sunday morning services at the Lakeridge Theatre, on Wadsworth and W. 17th Avenue. That puts it in the Edgewood district of Lakewood, just south of Wheat Ridge.
The American Classic Images page I linked to indicated only that the Barstow Theatre had been twinned by 1982.
I notice that all the American Classic Images pages have gone missing, and the links fetch only a register.com page requesting that the domain name registration be renewed. Does anybody know what became of the site and its operator? If it has shut down permanently, it’s going to leave a huge number of dead links all over Cinema Treasures.
The October 3, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World had an effusive description of Quinn’s Superba Theatre:
“QUINN’S SUPERBA, LOS ANGELES, CAL.
“IT is quite within the bounds of reason to say that in the past year there is no other city in the world that has gone ahead in motion picture theater construction as rapidly as Los Angeles. A short twelve months ago the average theater manager was well satisfied with a modest interior and an exterior outlined with lights placed at intervals of a foot or more and a fair sized electric sign. A good exemplification of what the public now demands is the new picture palace erected on Broadway, near Fifth, by J. A. Quinn, and called Quinn’s Superba.
“Mr. Quinn is a Los Angeles manager of recognized ability and was among the first to employ, to the exclusion of all others systems, the indirect lighting plan that enhances the beauty of Quinn’s Superba; he has also been highly complimented in having worked out the elaborate light decorations on the facade which make this beautiful edifice stand out. Mr. Quinn is in favor of making Los Angeles preeminently the ‘City of Lights,’ and he is certainly doing his share towards carrying out his favorite hobby. The mammoth electric working sign which surmounts the three-story structure is among the largest used by any theater in the west. On each side of the name is a unicorn of heroic proportion darting a fiery tongue at his companion; ribbons of light steam over the front of the building, which is carried out in the rennaissance style of architecture, in colors of cream and white. A massive cornice and frieze with theatrical figures modeled therein gives an appropriate touch to the whole. The markee is a solid mass of lights, art glass and copper.
“The lobby, foyer and auditorium are carried out in the classic style of architecture. The woodwork of the foyer is selected mahogany of beautiful grain, and the walls are paneled with large beveled plate mirrors. The floor is carpeted in deep red Wilton velvet.
“In the auditorium the walls and ceiling are held in soft light green tones, trimmed with cream and gray effects and high-lighted in orange. The sounding cove over the proscenium arch has a beautiful mural painting by a well-known local artist. This cove, aside from its decorative effect, assures such perfect accoustic properties that the faintest whisper from the proscenium area can be distinctly heard in any part of the house. On each side of the proscenium and midway between the footlight line and the cornice, are balconies with draped French windows, adaptable for singing-specialties. The stage itself is well equipped in spite of the fact that it is a miniature one.
“The floor of the auditorium is bowled and the seats are arranged in circular form. The carpets, luxurious upholstered leather opera chairs, silk velour drapes and velvet stage curtains are of a deep red. An efficient ventilating system assures the air’s changing completely every few moments, it being estimated that there is supplied thirty cubic feet of fresh air to each person, each minute, allowing for a capacity audience at all times.
“The Superba is using the best available pictures and the equipment for its proper projection is unsurpassed.
“Their soloists provide high-class musical numbers on each program and an orchestra of twelve pieces under the direction of Miss Mae Gates plays accompaniments for both pictures and the vocal numbers.”
According to Orfordville’s official web site, this theater was called the Star Opera House in 1900, when it was the site of an election held to determine whether or not Orfordville would incorporate as a village.
The June 10, 1905, issue of the Janesville Daily Gazette said that T. O. Wee had bought the Star Opera House and planned to make improvements to it.
The October 3, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World carried this notice: “Wee’s Opera House at Orfordville has installed a machine and will give picture shows.”
This article from the February 5, 2011, issue of the Gazette says that the old white brick building at Beloit and Brodhead Streets, now a store called Donna’s Gas & Grocery, has over the years served as an opera house, bus garage, and service station. Maybe the Triangle Theatre has not been demolished, although in Street View the current building looks too small to have ever housed a theater.
As noted in the article vokoban quoted in the previous comment, this house was called the Madrid Theatre when it opened in 1926. The house operated under that name at least into the early 1930s. It had been renamed the Park Theatre by 1966.
As the Grand Theatre that opened at 513 Cedar Street in 1915 is already listed at Cinema Treasures, Maybe we could make this page for the first Grand, seen in the photo on this page at the PSTOS web site.
A building at 518 Cedar Street now housing part of Fonk’s General Store might or might not be the same building that housed the first Grand. As the theater probably closed when the new Grand opened, the building now on the site might have been built after that, or it might be the theater’s building remodeled.
Street View currently shows the wrong location. The Madrid was on the northeast corner of Vermont and 82nd Street, in the building that now houses the Tires R-Us store. The building is not recognizable as a former theater from the front, but one of the rear exits can still be seen opening onto the alley off of 82nd Street.
I was never in the Uptown after the 1964 renovation, but I don’t think there were any significant changes to the auditorium. I saw a couple of movies there in 1962, and it looked pretty much as it does in the photos on the CinemaTour page, except for the paint job. In 1962 it was all quite dark.
Given the location in the Triangle Shopping Center, the Triangle Theatre might have been one of the shopping center houses developed by Ron Lesser Enterprises in the 1960s.
The guide to the John and Drew Eberson papers at the Wolfsonian Institute lists a Yorktown Heights Theatre for a client named Lesser as a 1965 design by Drew Eberson. If there were no other theaters built in Yorktown Heights around that time, it must have been the Triangle that was listed.
The June 23, 1963, issue of the Orangetown Telegram has an article announcing the opening of a Cinema 45 the following night. The article gives the location of the theater as Hillcrest, New York, but items in later issues of the same newspaper say it is in Spring Valley.
The 600-seat house was to be programmed as an art cinema, with the Peter Sellers film Only Two Can Play as the opening attraction. The theater was located in the Hillcrest Shopping Center on Route 45 (Main Street) at the northeast corner of Hickory Street. The address I found for the shopping center is 288 N. Main Street, Spring Valley, NY, 10977.
B. F. Shearer Studios was associated with the National Theatre Supply Company at least through 1927. The January 1, 1928, issue of The Film Daily said that Ben Shearer, A. M. Larsen and Frank Harris were reportedly leaving NTS and that Shearer intended to form his own company in association with Larsen and Harris. Apparently a number of other former NTS employees went with them.
B. F. Shearer & Co. soon had branch offices in Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other western cities. In 1931, the company supplied all the custom-designed carpets and draperies for the Los Angeles Theatre. B. F. Shearer & Co. operated until about 1972.
In addition to the theater supply business, the Shearer family eventually operated a small chain of about a dozen theaters from California to Alaska.
As can be seen in this photo uploaded by Senorsock, the Beverly Theatre’s auditorium kept its East Indian theme even after it had been converted into a retail store. The 1960 renovation pictured in the Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to was, not surprisingly, Midcentury Modern rather than Art Deco, and the major changes were done primarily to the facade and lobby. The boxy black entrance in this photo uploaded by RonP was built when the building was converted to retail use, and replaced the flat modern marquee seen in the Boxoffice article.
The Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to says that Weldon Moore was the supervising architect for the Capri Theatre. I’m wondering if he might have been related to William J. Moore, Jack Corgan’s partner (and nephew of R. E. Griffith, founder of the circuit that became Video Independent Theatres.) If so, the Capri was probably designed by Corgan & Moore.
In the interior photo currently displayed, the style of the auditorium looks Moorish/Oriental rather than Renaissance Revival. The facade in the exterior photo looks like a standard commercial block of the period, with a few Art Deco touches and a Moorish arcade on the top floor.
The modern address of the American Theatre’s site is 215 S. Jefferson. Roanoke converted its street numbering system sometime after the theater was built. Street View is set to the wrong block. The American Theatre was in the next block south, on the northwest corner of Jefferson and Kirk Avenue.
The term “Nuevo Deco” used to describe the Washoe Theatre in the introduction to this page is a Spanish phrase apparently describing a neo-vintage style that has recently gained popularity in Latin America. The Washoe is simply Art Deco, though at the time it was built it would probably have been described as Art Moderne or Zig-Zag Modern (the term Art Deco was coined by English critic Bevis Hillier in the 1960s.)
The majority of web sites using the term Nuevo Deco are, not surprisingly, in Spanish, although the term has made its way into that demotic fount of misinformation, Wikipedia, so I suppose we can expect it to soon metastasize across the Internet.
Anaconda, Montana: Copper Smelting Boom Town on the Western Frontier, by Patrick F. Morris, says that the Margaret Theatre was inaugurated on September 28, 1897. The Margaret Theatre is listed in the 1910-1911 Cahn guide as a ground-floor house with 1,246 seats. Frank Cullen’s Vaudeville, Old and New lists the Margaret as having been on the Ackerman & Harris vaudeville circuit, but there are numerous period references to the house presenting everything from road shows to prize fights.
There is one reference to an exhibition of movies at the Margaret as early 1905, but I haven’t found the house mentioned in the movie industry trade journals of the period. However, the January 10, 1930, issue of The Film Daily did have a brief item saying that the recently-burned Sundial Theatre would be replaced by a new house, so the Sundial must have operated as a movie theater during its brief life.
The Glendale Theatre opened on December 1, 1947, according to this page at Silent Toronto. The opening day ad credits the companies involved in the design and construction of the theater, including architects Kaplan & Sprachman.
Mandel Sprachman also designed a house in the area which Boxoffice of October 25, 1965, mentioned only in passing as the Don Mills Theatre. It was leased to Odeon and opened about 1963. I don’t think it’s listed here yet. Another Sprachman design apparently not yet listed was the Odeon Albion, which I believe was also in the northern part of Toronto.
The LakeRidge Theatre is not yet listed, Tinseltoes. Most of the sources I’ve found say it was in Lakewood, Colorado, though one source says it was in Wheat Ridge. The Boxoffice article says it was on Wadsworth Boulevard, and an item in a 1973 issue of the magazine Science of Mind says that the Denver Church of Religious Science was holding Sunday morning services at the Lakeridge Theatre, on Wadsworth and W. 17th Avenue. That puts it in the Edgewood district of Lakewood, just south of Wheat Ridge.
The American Classic Images page I linked to indicated only that the Barstow Theatre had been twinned by 1982.
I notice that all the American Classic Images pages have gone missing, and the links fetch only a register.com page requesting that the domain name registration be renewed. Does anybody know what became of the site and its operator? If it has shut down permanently, it’s going to leave a huge number of dead links all over Cinema Treasures.
The October 3, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World had an effusive description of Quinn’s Superba Theatre:
According to Orfordville’s official web site, this theater was called the Star Opera House in 1900, when it was the site of an election held to determine whether or not Orfordville would incorporate as a village.
The June 10, 1905, issue of the Janesville Daily Gazette said that T. O. Wee had bought the Star Opera House and planned to make improvements to it.
The October 3, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World carried this notice: “Wee’s Opera House at Orfordville has installed a machine and will give picture shows.”
This article from the February 5, 2011, issue of the Gazette says that the old white brick building at Beloit and Brodhead Streets, now a store called Donna’s Gas & Grocery, has over the years served as an opera house, bus garage, and service station. Maybe the Triangle Theatre has not been demolished, although in Street View the current building looks too small to have ever housed a theater.
As noted in the article vokoban quoted in the previous comment, this house was called the Madrid Theatre when it opened in 1926. The house operated under that name at least into the early 1930s. It had been renamed the Park Theatre by 1966.
As the Grand Theatre that opened at 513 Cedar Street in 1915 is already listed at Cinema Treasures, Maybe we could make this page for the first Grand, seen in the photo on this page at the PSTOS web site.
A building at 518 Cedar Street now housing part of Fonk’s General Store might or might not be the same building that housed the first Grand. As the theater probably closed when the new Grand opened, the building now on the site might have been built after that, or it might be the theater’s building remodeled.
Street View currently shows the wrong location. The Madrid was on the northeast corner of Vermont and 82nd Street, in the building that now houses the Tires R-Us store. The building is not recognizable as a former theater from the front, but one of the rear exits can still be seen opening onto the alley off of 82nd Street.
I was never in the Uptown after the 1964 renovation, but I don’t think there were any significant changes to the auditorium. I saw a couple of movies there in 1962, and it looked pretty much as it does in the photos on the CinemaTour page, except for the paint job. In 1962 it was all quite dark.
An early photo of the Ruskin Theatres is on this page of Boxoffice, January 15, 1968.
In the photo on this page of Boxoffice, January 15, 1968, the name on the theater’s marquee is RKO Twin Rockaway Boulevard.
Here is a fresh link to the June 19, 1967, Boxoffice page with the two photos of the Antioch Theatre.
As a bonus, on this page of Boxoffice, January 15, 1968, is a photo of the Antioch’s lobby and concession stand.
This page needs the AKA’s Saxon Theatre and Studio Theatre, per the Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to.
Given the location in the Triangle Shopping Center, the Triangle Theatre might have been one of the shopping center houses developed by Ron Lesser Enterprises in the 1960s.
The guide to the John and Drew Eberson papers at the Wolfsonian Institute lists a Yorktown Heights Theatre for a client named Lesser as a 1965 design by Drew Eberson. If there were no other theaters built in Yorktown Heights around that time, it must have been the Triangle that was listed.
The June 23, 1963, issue of the Orangetown Telegram has an article announcing the opening of a Cinema 45 the following night. The article gives the location of the theater as Hillcrest, New York, but items in later issues of the same newspaper say it is in Spring Valley.
The 600-seat house was to be programmed as an art cinema, with the Peter Sellers film Only Two Can Play as the opening attraction. The theater was located in the Hillcrest Shopping Center on Route 45 (Main Street) at the northeast corner of Hickory Street. The address I found for the shopping center is 288 N. Main Street, Spring Valley, NY, 10977.
There are photos of the front and the auditorium of the Beach Theatre in Boxoffice of January 15, 1968. Boxoffice misspells the name as Beech.
B. F. Shearer Studios was associated with the National Theatre Supply Company at least through 1927. The January 1, 1928, issue of The Film Daily said that Ben Shearer, A. M. Larsen and Frank Harris were reportedly leaving NTS and that Shearer intended to form his own company in association with Larsen and Harris. Apparently a number of other former NTS employees went with them.
B. F. Shearer & Co. soon had branch offices in Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other western cities. In 1931, the company supplied all the custom-designed carpets and draperies for the Los Angeles Theatre. B. F. Shearer & Co. operated until about 1972.
In addition to the theater supply business, the Shearer family eventually operated a small chain of about a dozen theaters from California to Alaska.
The history section of the Star Cinema’s official web site says that the theater was designed by Salem architect Lyle P. Bartholomew.
As can be seen in this photo uploaded by Senorsock, the Beverly Theatre’s auditorium kept its East Indian theme even after it had been converted into a retail store. The 1960 renovation pictured in the Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to was, not surprisingly, Midcentury Modern rather than Art Deco, and the major changes were done primarily to the facade and lobby. The boxy black entrance in this photo uploaded by RonP was built when the building was converted to retail use, and replaced the flat modern marquee seen in the Boxoffice article.
The link to the photo at Yesco has quit working for some reason. Here’s a new link.
The Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to says that Weldon Moore was the supervising architect for the Capri Theatre. I’m wondering if he might have been related to William J. Moore, Jack Corgan’s partner (and nephew of R. E. Griffith, founder of the circuit that became Video Independent Theatres.) If so, the Capri was probably designed by Corgan & Moore.
In the interior photo currently displayed, the style of the auditorium looks Moorish/Oriental rather than Renaissance Revival. The facade in the exterior photo looks like a standard commercial block of the period, with a few Art Deco touches and a Moorish arcade on the top floor.
The modern address of the American Theatre’s site is 215 S. Jefferson. Roanoke converted its street numbering system sometime after the theater was built. Street View is set to the wrong block. The American Theatre was in the next block south, on the northwest corner of Jefferson and Kirk Avenue.