The Carolina Theatre as rebuilt in 1948 was designed by architect Erle G. Stillwell, according to the history site Chuck linked to in his earlier comment.
It’s probable that the original theater on the Carolina’s site, partly destroyed by a fire in 1945, was the proposed house that was the subject of this item in the June 22, 1922, issue of Manufacturers Record:
“N. C, Lexington—Lexington Theater Co.. H. B. Varner, Prest.; $128,000 theater. Main St.; fireproof; 3 stores; theater in rear to seat 1500; offices on second floor; Harry Barton, Archt., Greensboro; Harbin Constr. Co., Contr., Lexington; B. McKenzle. Greensboro, heating and ventilating. $10,750: Durham Publicity Service Co.. Durham, electric fixtures and wiring, $14,500; plans include structure 79x210 ft.; ordinary construction; Barrett roof; wood and tile floors: electric lights.”
UNC’s Going to the Show collection has this page for a 1,200-seat house called the Lexington Theatre, located at 215 S. Main Street, operated by H. B. Varner and in operation by 1923.
Young’s Theatre was at 16 N. Main Street, according to this page at UNC’s Going to the Show collection. It was in operation by 1923, and had about 300 seats.
Fagan Arcade was the name of a West Palm Beach shopping arcade developed in the 1920s. I’m not sure the name was ever an AKA for the Arcade Theatre, and the two might not have been related at all, even though they were on the same block.
An advertisement for the proposed arcade development appeared in the Palm Beach Post of March 23, 1925, and made no mention of a theater as part of the project. The advertisement can be seen here at Google News.
This appears to have been the second Arcade Theatre in West Palm Beach. The first, operating by 1915, was the house on Narcissus Street that later became the Rialto. The Clematis Street Arcade might have been the projected theater that was mentioned in the May 18, 1922, issue of Manufacturers Record:
“Fla., West Palm Beach—Williams & Nichols, Inc., Palm Beach Tobacco Co., will erect theater on Clematis Ave. nr. Poinsettia St.; cost $50,000; 88x84 ft.; steel columns and trusses, hollow tile walls; 5-ply built-up roof; interior tile; wire glass; concrete floors; steel sash; ventilators; W. Manly King, Archt.; bids opened about May 25.”
Poinsettia Street has since been renamed Dixie Highway, which crosses Clematis Street a few doors west of the site of the Arcade Theatre. I’ve found no evidence that the second Arcade was actually in operation as early as 1922, but as the building has been demolished and its replacement is old enough to have developed a good-sized crack in the facade, it doesn’t seem unlikely that the theater would have been built that early.
Unless there was more than one Rialto Theatre in West Palm Beach, this house must be the one that was mentioned in an article about theater owner Carl Kettler in the Palm Beach Post of October 22, 1922:
“In 1915 he took over the Arcade Theatre and held it for one year, renaming it the Strand.
“‘In the Summer of 1916 we relinquished our rights to this theater to its original owners, Jonas & Garrison, and they in turn leased it to Alfred A. Tano, who after remodeling it renamed it the Rialto, under which name it is operate [sic] today by the Bijou-Amusu Company,’ Mr. Kettler stated.”
The remodeling of the Arcade in 1916 is mentioned in the March 25 issue of The Moving Picture World:
“WEST PALM BEACH, FLA—Arcade theater has plans by George L. Pfeiffer, Lemon City, Fla., for exterior and interior improvements to building. ”
The Arcade Theatre on Clematis Street must have been the second of that name in West Palm Beach, and built sometime after the original Arcade was renamed the Strand and then the Rialto.
This notice in the June 15, 1922, issue of The Manufacturers Record was about the house that became the State Theatre:
“Fla., Eustis—Mattocks-Wheeler Bldg. Co., J. E. Mattocks, Prest.; $30,000 theater; 58x125.6 ft.; brick, concrete and tile; stone trim; windows of pressed lens glass with tile and marble facings; metal ceilings; concrete and hardwood floors; wire glass; steel sash and trim; seating capacity 500 to 600; 2 stores on first floor; Allan J. McDonough, Archt., Eustis; J. B. Southard, Contr., Orlando.”
Auction site Worthpoint had a real photo postcard (since sold) captioned “Eustis Theater- Mattocks & Wheeler Building- Eustis, Fla.” and it depicted the same building in street view. The photo did not enlarge enough to see if the name Eustis Theater (or State Theatre) was actually on the building.
The June 1, 1922, issue of The Manufacturers Record had this item:
“Fla., West Palm Bench—Carl Kettler will erect Bijou Theater de Luxe; 5 stories; about 12 offices on first floor; Bruce Mitchell, Archt.”>
As the description does not fit the Kettler Theatre, the plans were obviously changed before construction began. it’s possible that a different architect was brought in to design the theater as actually built. I’ve been unable to find any other references to a Florida architect of the period named Bruce Mitchell.
The Kettler Theatre was built on the southeast corner of Clematis Street and Narcissus Avenue in 1923. It might have opened as late as early 1924. The Kettler replaced an earlier theater owned by Carl Kettler on the same site, the Bijou, which was itself the second house of that name in West Palm Beach. There is a photo of the second Bijou dated July 30, 1923, on this page of the Palm Beach Post web site.
Carl Kettler’s intention to demolish the Bijou and build a new theater on its site is the subject of this article from the Palm Beach Post of October 22, 1922.
The May, 1907, issue of The Bridgemen’s Magazine said that the contract to build the Bijou Theatre in Montgomery had been let to Hodgson & Hannon, but the location given was Dexter Avenue. Dexter Street starts just the other side of Courthouse Square from Commerce Street. I don’t know if this is the same theater or not. The magazine might have just gotten the street name wrong.
There is an extensive collection of historical items about Montgomery on this page at Facebook, a site that is virtually unsearchable. A Google search returns results about the Bijou, but the result link doesn’t fetch the page it’s actually on. If historical groups are going to go cheap on their Internet hosting I wish they’d at least use Flickr or LiveJournal, both of which have decent internal search functions, and play well with regular search engines too. Facebook is one of the most useless and annoying sites on the Internet.
An item in the June 14, 1919, issue of Domestic Engineering mentioned the recently-remodeled New Rialto Theatre at Indianapolis. It gave the location of the theater as Kentucky Avenue and Washington Street. Today, these streets no longer intersect, which has confused Google Maps.
The actual location of the Lincoln Square Theatre would have been on the block just southwest of the modern intersection of Washington and Illinois Streets in downtown Indianapolis. This is the block now occupied by the Indianapolis Hyatt Regency Hotel. Several blocks of Kentucky Avenue were eliminated for the construction of the enormous Indiana Convention Center and associated buildings. The Hyatt was completed in 1977, but the theater could have been gone for many years before the hotel was built.
Several old maps of Indianapolis showing the former alignment of Kentucky Avenue can be seen at this page on the web site of the University of Alabama.
The Liberty Theatre at Yakima was one of the planned construction projects for Washington state listed in the April 5, 1919, issue of Domestic Engineering.
The Rex Theatre was mentioned in the September 23, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. The Rex and the Dream were noted as two theaters in Bremerton that were operated by the firm of Rantz & Oswald. The same firm was operating the Strand Theatre in Olympia, Washington.
Triumphal arch entrances had gone out of style by the 1920s, so the Hippodrome probably dated from the 1910s. The house was definitely in operation by 1923, when management came up with this stunt to publicize the Harold Lloyd comedy Safety Last.
Thanks for unearthing the construction date for this theater, buckstadrusso. I guess methods of construction didn’t change very much over the decades in this small town. Now that I look at the photo again, I can see that what looks like a facade in one of the revival styles of the mid-19th century could also have been inspired by the Mission Revival of the 1890s.
Todd G. Higdon’s reminiscence about the Orpheum Theatre in the Neosho Daily News of March 7 this year says that the last movie he recalls seeing there was Moonstruck in 1988, so the house lasted at least that long. The Orpheum has since been demolished. There is a photo of the Orpheum on this Facebook page, with a 1951 movie on the marquee.
The Orpheum was advertising in the August 30, 1921, issue of the Neosho Daily Democrat, so it was in operation at least that early. A comment on this page of a Neosho community forum says that the Orpheum was built as an opera house. The 1906-1907 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide lists the Neosho Opera House as a 600-seat theater, but fails to mention if it was on the ground floor or not. Quite possibly this was the house that became the Orpheum, though if so it was a rather plain building for even a small town opera house, unless the facade had been remodeled before that 1951 photo was taken.
Other comments in the forum say that there were once theaters on all four sides of the town square in Neosho, including one called the Lux on the south side and one called the Bandbox on the west side.
I found a 1913 reference to a house in Neosho called the Lyric. One early movie house in Neosho was opened around 1907-1908 by A. V. Cauger, later the founder of the Kansas City Slide Company, one of Walt Disney’s early employers.
This web page, Neosho and High School, is from a memoir by Russel R. Windes, who became an usher at the Orpheum Theatre about 1944 at the age of fourteen. There are quite a few paragraphs about the operation of the theater, including a couple of funny anecdotes worth reading. Windes names the other two theaters operating in Neosho during the war years as the Carmar, named for owner Hugh Gardner’s daughters, Carolyn and Marilyn, and the Photosho. I don’t know if Photosho was an AKA for the Lux or Bandbox or not, but the Carmar shows up in this vintage photo showing the east side of the square, ca.1943.
This is probably the ca.1911 photo of the Jefferson Theatre that was on the web site linked earlier which has gone missing. The photo must have been taken no earlier than 1916, though.
Here is an item from the February 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“E. D. Hines, of Roanoke, Va., who recently took over the Paramount theater in that place, has changed the name of the house to the Jefferson and is now running a picked program of features with an admission charge of fifteen cents.”
The Paramount Theatre is not listed in the 1915 Roanoke City Directory (which would have been published in late 1914 or very early 1915), so the house must have operated under its original name for a fairly short time.
The 1915 Directory does list three movie theaters in what was then the 300 block of S. Jefferson but has since become the 400 block: the Bijou Theatre at 303 Jefferson, The Virginian at 305, and The Comet at 307. If all three survived until the Paramount opened at 317, four of Roanoke’s five movie theaters would have been on that one block, all on the same side of the street.
The Roanoke Theatre was listed at 14 Campbell Avenue SW in the 1915 Roanoke City Directory. I believe Roanoke later converted to the Philadelphia street numbering system, eliminating one and two-digit addresses, so the location was the same as the later 114 Campbell.
I’ve found references to the Roanoke Theatre as early as 1912, in a history of Roanoke County that listed the theater as being among several important buildings that had been built in recent years.
The office of Kansas City architect Samuel W. Bihr, Jr. submitted a questionnaire for the AIA’s Architects Roster in 1953, which included a list of some of his projects. The Stadium Theatre in Mt. Vernon is one of those listed. It was designed in 1946, and cost $150,000 to build. The questionnaire doesn’t give the year of construction, which might have been delayed due to post-war materials shortages, but it’s safe to assume that the theater was opened in the late 1940s.
The article Tinseltoes linked to has the name of the architect for the conversion of the Strand into the Fox, but the scan doesn’t show a few letters at the beginning of each line in the left column of the page, so the architect’s surname is missing. He was Samuel W. (something short) Jr..
I’m thinking it must have been Samuel W. Bihr, Jr., who was a contract architect for Fox Midwest in the early 1950s, designing everything from minor remodeling jobs to entirely new theaters. His designs of the period were typically transitional Streamline Modern/Midcentury Modern, which fits the Fort Madison Fox.
radarKW is correct. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History provides this page about the Colony Theatre, and gives January, 1992, as the time of its reopening as a 5-screen house. I’m not sure what my source was for the claim of 1983 for the multiplexing, but it might have been the Mesbur+Smith page which is now gone. Or it could have been a typo. Spell check, alas, never finds mistakes in numbers.
The Northside Theatre was demolished in 2006. According to this article in the South Bend Tribune, the building was being demolished by Mishawaka’s redevelopment agency, and the land will probably be marketed for residential use.
Here is an undated photo showing the Northside Theatre after it had been converted to another use. There is nothing resembling this building in Street View, so my guess is that it’s been demolished. Below the photo it says that this was the Mishawaka Theatre, “…also known as the Northside Theatre.”
The asymmetrical facade, the broad but shallow tile-roofed tower section, and the three arches framed by Solomonic columns gave the building a look that was more Moorish than anything else. I’ve been unable to discover the opening year, but sometime in the 1920s seems most likely, although an 800-seat house called the Mishawaka Theatre was listed in the 1910 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide. I couldn’t find a theater called the Mishawaka in the 1921 South Bend-Mishawaka City Directory.
The Carolina Theatre as rebuilt in 1948 was designed by architect Erle G. Stillwell, according to the history site Chuck linked to in his earlier comment.
It’s probable that the original theater on the Carolina’s site, partly destroyed by a fire in 1945, was the proposed house that was the subject of this item in the June 22, 1922, issue of Manufacturers Record:
UNC’s Going to the Show collection has this page for a 1,200-seat house called the Lexington Theatre, located at 215 S. Main Street, operated by H. B. Varner and in operation by 1923.Young’s Theatre was at 16 N. Main Street, according to this page at UNC’s Going to the Show collection. It was in operation by 1923, and had about 300 seats.
Fagan Arcade was the name of a West Palm Beach shopping arcade developed in the 1920s. I’m not sure the name was ever an AKA for the Arcade Theatre, and the two might not have been related at all, even though they were on the same block.
An advertisement for the proposed arcade development appeared in the Palm Beach Post of March 23, 1925, and made no mention of a theater as part of the project. The advertisement can be seen here at Google News.
This appears to have been the second Arcade Theatre in West Palm Beach. The first, operating by 1915, was the house on Narcissus Street that later became the Rialto. The Clematis Street Arcade might have been the projected theater that was mentioned in the May 18, 1922, issue of Manufacturers Record:
Poinsettia Street has since been renamed Dixie Highway, which crosses Clematis Street a few doors west of the site of the Arcade Theatre. I’ve found no evidence that the second Arcade was actually in operation as early as 1922, but as the building has been demolished and its replacement is old enough to have developed a good-sized crack in the facade, it doesn’t seem unlikely that the theater would have been built that early.Unless there was more than one Rialto Theatre in West Palm Beach, this house must be the one that was mentioned in an article about theater owner Carl Kettler in the Palm Beach Post of October 22, 1922:
The remodeling of the Arcade in 1916 is mentioned in the March 25 issue of The Moving Picture World:The Arcade Theatre on Clematis Street must have been the second of that name in West Palm Beach, and built sometime after the original Arcade was renamed the Strand and then the Rialto.The Palace might have been the projected house mentioned in the June 22, 1922, issue of Manufacturers Record
This notice in the June 15, 1922, issue of The Manufacturers Record was about the house that became the State Theatre:
Auction site Worthpoint had a real photo postcard (since sold) captioned “Eustis Theater- Mattocks & Wheeler Building- Eustis, Fla.” and it depicted the same building in street view. The photo did not enlarge enough to see if the name Eustis Theater (or State Theatre) was actually on the building.The June 1, 1922, issue of The Manufacturers Record had this item:
As the description does not fit the Kettler Theatre, the plans were obviously changed before construction began. it’s possible that a different architect was brought in to design the theater as actually built. I’ve been unable to find any other references to a Florida architect of the period named Bruce Mitchell.The Kettler Theatre was built on the southeast corner of Clematis Street and Narcissus Avenue in 1923. It might have opened as late as early 1924. The Kettler replaced an earlier theater owned by Carl Kettler on the same site, the Bijou, which was itself the second house of that name in West Palm Beach. There is a photo of the second Bijou dated July 30, 1923, on this page of the Palm Beach Post web site.
Carl Kettler’s intention to demolish the Bijou and build a new theater on its site is the subject of this article from the Palm Beach Post of October 22, 1922.
The May, 1907, issue of The Bridgemen’s Magazine said that the contract to build the Bijou Theatre in Montgomery had been let to Hodgson & Hannon, but the location given was Dexter Avenue. Dexter Street starts just the other side of Courthouse Square from Commerce Street. I don’t know if this is the same theater or not. The magazine might have just gotten the street name wrong.
There is an extensive collection of historical items about Montgomery on this page at Facebook, a site that is virtually unsearchable. A Google search returns results about the Bijou, but the result link doesn’t fetch the page it’s actually on. If historical groups are going to go cheap on their Internet hosting I wish they’d at least use Flickr or LiveJournal, both of which have decent internal search functions, and play well with regular search engines too. Facebook is one of the most useless and annoying sites on the Internet.
An item in the June 14, 1919, issue of Domestic Engineering mentioned the recently-remodeled New Rialto Theatre at Indianapolis. It gave the location of the theater as Kentucky Avenue and Washington Street. Today, these streets no longer intersect, which has confused Google Maps.
The actual location of the Lincoln Square Theatre would have been on the block just southwest of the modern intersection of Washington and Illinois Streets in downtown Indianapolis. This is the block now occupied by the Indianapolis Hyatt Regency Hotel. Several blocks of Kentucky Avenue were eliminated for the construction of the enormous Indiana Convention Center and associated buildings. The Hyatt was completed in 1977, but the theater could have been gone for many years before the hotel was built.
Several old maps of Indianapolis showing the former alignment of Kentucky Avenue can be seen at this page on the web site of the University of Alabama.
The Liberty Theatre at Yakima was one of the planned construction projects for Washington state listed in the April 5, 1919, issue of Domestic Engineering.
The Rex Theatre was mentioned in the September 23, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. The Rex and the Dream were noted as two theaters in Bremerton that were operated by the firm of Rantz & Oswald. The same firm was operating the Strand Theatre in Olympia, Washington.
Here is an advertisement for the Rialto Theatre from Racine, an Historical Narrative, published in 1920.
Triumphal arch entrances had gone out of style by the 1920s, so the Hippodrome probably dated from the 1910s. The house was definitely in operation by 1923, when management came up with this stunt to publicize the Harold Lloyd comedy Safety Last.
The address for the Norbury Theatre still needs to be corrected to 73 Center Street.
Thanks for unearthing the construction date for this theater, buckstadrusso. I guess methods of construction didn’t change very much over the decades in this small town. Now that I look at the photo again, I can see that what looks like a facade in one of the revival styles of the mid-19th century could also have been inspired by the Mission Revival of the 1890s.
Todd G. Higdon’s reminiscence about the Orpheum Theatre in the Neosho Daily News of March 7 this year says that the last movie he recalls seeing there was Moonstruck in 1988, so the house lasted at least that long. The Orpheum has since been demolished. There is a photo of the Orpheum on this Facebook page, with a 1951 movie on the marquee.
The Orpheum was advertising in the August 30, 1921, issue of the Neosho Daily Democrat, so it was in operation at least that early. A comment on this page of a Neosho community forum says that the Orpheum was built as an opera house. The 1906-1907 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide lists the Neosho Opera House as a 600-seat theater, but fails to mention if it was on the ground floor or not. Quite possibly this was the house that became the Orpheum, though if so it was a rather plain building for even a small town opera house, unless the facade had been remodeled before that 1951 photo was taken.
Other comments in the forum say that there were once theaters on all four sides of the town square in Neosho, including one called the Lux on the south side and one called the Bandbox on the west side.
I found a 1913 reference to a house in Neosho called the Lyric. One early movie house in Neosho was opened around 1907-1908 by A. V. Cauger, later the founder of the Kansas City Slide Company, one of Walt Disney’s early employers.
This web page, Neosho and High School, is from a memoir by Russel R. Windes, who became an usher at the Orpheum Theatre about 1944 at the age of fourteen. There are quite a few paragraphs about the operation of the theater, including a couple of funny anecdotes worth reading. Windes names the other two theaters operating in Neosho during the war years as the Carmar, named for owner Hugh Gardner’s daughters, Carolyn and Marilyn, and the Photosho. I don’t know if Photosho was an AKA for the Lux or Bandbox or not, but the Carmar shows up in this vintage photo showing the east side of the square, ca.1943.
This is probably the ca.1911 photo of the Jefferson Theatre that was on the web site linked earlier which has gone missing. The photo must have been taken no earlier than 1916, though.
Here is an item from the February 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
The Paramount Theatre is not listed in the 1915 Roanoke City Directory (which would have been published in late 1914 or very early 1915), so the house must have operated under its original name for a fairly short time.The 1915 Directory does list three movie theaters in what was then the 300 block of S. Jefferson but has since become the 400 block: the Bijou Theatre at 303 Jefferson, The Virginian at 305, and The Comet at 307. If all three survived until the Paramount opened at 317, four of Roanoke’s five movie theaters would have been on that one block, all on the same side of the street.
The Roanoke Theatre was listed at 14 Campbell Avenue SW in the 1915 Roanoke City Directory. I believe Roanoke later converted to the Philadelphia street numbering system, eliminating one and two-digit addresses, so the location was the same as the later 114 Campbell.
I’ve found references to the Roanoke Theatre as early as 1912, in a history of Roanoke County that listed the theater as being among several important buildings that had been built in recent years.
The office of Kansas City architect Samuel W. Bihr, Jr. submitted a questionnaire for the AIA’s Architects Roster in 1953, which included a list of some of his projects. The Stadium Theatre in Mt. Vernon is one of those listed. It was designed in 1946, and cost $150,000 to build. The questionnaire doesn’t give the year of construction, which might have been delayed due to post-war materials shortages, but it’s safe to assume that the theater was opened in the late 1940s.
The article Tinseltoes linked to has the name of the architect for the conversion of the Strand into the Fox, but the scan doesn’t show a few letters at the beginning of each line in the left column of the page, so the architect’s surname is missing. He was Samuel W. (something short) Jr..
I’m thinking it must have been Samuel W. Bihr, Jr., who was a contract architect for Fox Midwest in the early 1950s, designing everything from minor remodeling jobs to entirely new theaters. His designs of the period were typically transitional Streamline Modern/Midcentury Modern, which fits the Fort Madison Fox.
radarKW is correct. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History provides this page about the Colony Theatre, and gives January, 1992, as the time of its reopening as a 5-screen house. I’m not sure what my source was for the claim of 1983 for the multiplexing, but it might have been the Mesbur+Smith page which is now gone. Or it could have been a typo. Spell check, alas, never finds mistakes in numbers.
The Northside Theatre was demolished in 2006. According to this article in the South Bend Tribune, the building was being demolished by Mishawaka’s redevelopment agency, and the land will probably be marketed for residential use.
Here is an undated photo showing the Northside Theatre after it had been converted to another use. There is nothing resembling this building in Street View, so my guess is that it’s been demolished. Below the photo it says that this was the Mishawaka Theatre, “…also known as the Northside Theatre.”
The asymmetrical facade, the broad but shallow tile-roofed tower section, and the three arches framed by Solomonic columns gave the building a look that was more Moorish than anything else. I’ve been unable to discover the opening year, but sometime in the 1920s seems most likely, although an 800-seat house called the Mishawaka Theatre was listed in the 1910 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide. I couldn’t find a theater called the Mishawaka in the 1921 South Bend-Mishawaka City Directory.