The description says that the Elmwood Theatre was near Gunderson Avenue, which is three blocks east of the location at which Google Maps placed its pin icon. It might not be Google’s fault this time. The address of the theater might have been in the 400 block of Harrison Street, not the 600 block.
Although the following item was in the February 27 issue of Construction News in 1915, not 1913 when the Elmwood is supposed to have opened, I think it could be about the Elmwood Theatre:
“Motion Picture Theatre- 2 stores & 6 flats, $35,000, Oak Park, Ill., Elmwood & Harrison. Mason, W. Pillinger, 118 N. La Salle St. Carpt., Diegley & Campbell, 139 N. Clark St. Archt. Frank O. DeMoney, 19 S. La Salle St. Owner, C. H. Kessler, 725 S. Elmwood Av. Pressed brk. & terra cotta trim, 2 stys. & bsm., 100x125. Excavating.”
Elmwood Avenue is one block east of Gunderson Avenue. As for the 1915 construction date, if there was an Elmwood Theatre as early as 1913, it’s possible that the house opened as a small storefront operation and moved to new quarters two years later.
A Lyric Theatre at Lincoln was on a list of vaudeville houses published in the April 7, 1906, issue of theatrical trade journal The New York Clipper. However, an entry in a timeline of events of 1906 published in Nebraska Blue Book, 1915, said: “Aug. 27—Lincoln opened new Lyric theatre.” Perhaps the item in the Clipper referred to a previous Lyric Theatre.
The Lyric Theatre was in operation as a movie house at least as late as 1924. The operators of the house, Hostettler Bros., published weekly program guides to their theaters, and scans of a few are available from the Nebraska Memory web site. Here is a PDF file of the current and coming attractions published May 19, 1924.
The February, 1906, issue of Engineering World ran this announcement about the proposed Lyric Theatre in Mobile:
“Mobile, Ala.—The Lyric Theater Co., of this city, has incorporated to build a $100,000 opera house. Stone Brothers, Cora Bldg., New Orleans, La., are Architects.”
From 1901 to 1910, the Stone Brothers architectural firm consisted of Guy Stone, Grover C. Stone, and Sam Stone, Jr.
The Sanger Amusements web site offers this page with a brief history of the Lyric, and several illustrations.
The theater at left in this postcard photo could be either the original Grand or the New Grand, built after the fire in 1916. The postcard was mailed in 1919, but the photo could have been taken prior to the destruction of the old Grand.
Most of the buildings in the view from the 1910s are gone, but I’ve updated Street View to the most likely location from which the old photo was taken. The church in the distance on the left is still standing, hidden among the trees in Street View, but I think the theater in the old photo is gone.
However, if that was the original Grand, the new Grand might have been in one of the other buildings still standing on Main Street. The 1916 fire that destroyed the original Grand Theatre also destroyed other buildings on the block. One or more of the buildings at left in Street View might have been among their replacements.
I believe this theatre was most likely in the building that is now the Grace Tabernacle Christian Church, currently using the address 5122 Greenway Avenue. It is probably also the unnamed theater mentioned in the September 16, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“PHILADELPHIA, PA.—John C. Conner has taken title to the one-story brick moving picture theater at 5124-26-28 Greenway avenue. The building is situated on a lot 52 by 140 feet and is assessed at $15,000.”
The current building looks deeper than 140 feet, though, so the theater might have been rebuilt sometime after 1916, but it’s more likely that it was just expanded.
The Gem Theatre began showing movies in 1916, according to this item in the August 12 issue of The Moving Picture World:
“Billings, Mont.—Arthur Mann, proprietor of the Gem theater here, has succumbed to the lure of pictures. He shortly will reopen his playhouse with a regular offering for film fans.
Mann had only recently acquired the house, as noted in the September 16 issue of the same publication. The item also says that he had changed the name of the house to the American Theatre:
"BILLINGS, MONT.—The Gem theater, recently taken over by Arthur Mann, has been overhauled, the interior redecorated, and renamed the American.”
The original architect of the Symphony Theatre was William G. Massarene, according to an item in the April 26, 1919, issue of The Film Daily. The conversion of the existing building into a theater had cost $44,000.
this card in the Denver Public Library’s Western History Subject Index says that when the State Theatre was closed and demolished in 1953, its owners bought the Isis Theatre and changed its name to the New State Theatre.
Another card from the Index cites a January 1, 1955, item in the Rocky Mountain News saying that the Isis Theatre building was to be demolished. The Isis must have had the aka New State for less than two years.
Seating capacity is usually given by the person who submitted the theater. I suspect that some of them just guess at it. If the submitter doesn’t provide a seat count, theater editor Ken Roe sometimes adds it. For American and Canadian theaters I think he usually uses the capacity listings in The Film Daily Yearbook.
The yearbook doesn’t always give accurate seat counts. It relied on owners and managers to provide the numbers, and they would sometimes falsify them, usually under-reporting in order to beat the projectionist’s union’s rule that houses with more than 1,000 seats had to hire two projectionists. There were also cases of simple careless editing that would lead to an under-report.
It’s also the case that some theaters actually were greatly reduced in capacity over the years because, as business declined, balconies and galleries would be closed to the public to save on maintenance and insurance costs. Some old houses that had the greater part of their seats on upper levels would end up reporting nothing but the orchestra floor capacity, which was sometimes quite small.
There were other, lesser factors leading to reduced seating capacity. Operators of aging theaters would often cannibalize working seats from the front of the house to replace seats in other parts of the auditorium that had been broken. That would lead to a creeping decline in capacity. Old theaters also lost some capacity when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, forcing them to remove some seats to provide space and access for patrons in wheelchairs.
There have also been a few cases where operators would remove every other row of seats, in order to provide more leg room for today’s taller patrons. It’s much cheaper than completely re-seating a theater, and can buy a house with declining patronage a couple of extra years of operation.
No doubt many of the theater pages at Cinema Treasures do seriously under-report seating capacity, but there are also many cases where the capacity of a fairly large theater has actually been significantly reduced, and the numbers given are accurate even though they seem too small.
The State is one of several early Denver houses still missing from Cinema Treasures. The 1925 opening was actually a re-opening under new name. Here is an earlier photo showing the same house when it was called the Strand. The Strand opened September 9, 1915, according to The Moving Picture World of January 1, 1916, which also noted that the new house had been built on the site of the first Isis Theatre. The State Theatre was demolished in 1953.
An article in The Moving Picture World of January 1, 1916, indicates that the Strand Theatre (later the State), opened in 1915, had been built on the site of the first Isis Theatre. The article doesn’t say whether or not the first Isis operated under another name between the opening of the new Isis in 1913 and the old theater’s demolition.
News about the Ritz Theatre in Bartow from The Film Daily of September 12, 1936:
“The old Ernada Theater, Bartow, has been transformed into a modern, down to date house. Western Electric Wide Range projection and sound equipment has been installed. Leonard Bennett, manager, announces a change in name to The Ritz.”
Pullman, by Robert Luedeking and the Whitman County Historical Society (Google Books preview) says that the Audian Theatre had previously been called the Grand Theatre. There’s a photo of the Grand from about 1920, and the building is quite recognizable from the terra cotta cornice and parapet trim it still sports.
The 1936 reconstruction of the Audian, which was nearing completion in late summer, according to the September 12 issue of The Film Daily that year, was apparently confined to the auditorium and the interior of the building. I haven’t found any early mentions of the Grand Theatre in trade publications, but it was being advertised in the Pullman Herald in 1916.
A 350-seat house for movies and live events called the Pullman Theatre opened in December, 1913. I haven’t found the Pullman Theatre mentioned in the Herald later than 1915, about a year before the earliest mentions of the Grand Theatre. It’s possible that the Pullman Theatre became the Grand Theatre.
The Strand might have been the successor of the Dunlap Theatre, which was listed in Julius Cahn’s guides for 1906-1907 and 1913-1914. The September 12, 1936, issue of The Film Daily reported that the Dunlap Theatre in Clarksville was being rebuilt and refurnished after having been damaged by a fire about two months previously. The Cahn guides listed the Dunlap as a ground-floor house of 750 seats, so it was about the same size as the Strand. I haven’t found any mentions of the Dunlap Theatre dating from later than 1936.
The March, 1917, issue of The Doherty News has a bit of information about the America Theatre:
“The new America Theatre of Denver, one of the finest in that city, recognizes that ‘Business Follows the Lighted Lamp,’ and uses two immense signs to designate its locality.
“One of the signs is already in position on the side of the building, and is fifty feet long, by ten feet high, requiring 1,200 lamps of 40,000 candle power. The other sign, believed to be the largest in the west, will be erected on the roof and will be 52 feet high and 60 feet long, weighing fifteen tons, requiring 2,300 lamps of 30,000 candle power. This sign will carry the words, ‘America Theatre—See "America” First.’ The fact that the streets on which the theatre is located are illuminated adds greatly to the effect. One sees the two lighted avenues crossing each other, forming a distinct cross with the glow from the signs at the center.
“The theatre further capitalized illumination in its interior. The lighting effects obtained through dimmers and varied colored lamps surpasses anything seen in Denver, and is causing much favorable comment.”
In its early days, the America Theatre had entrances on both 16th Street and Curtis Street, as can be seen in this 1922 photo from the Denver Public Library.
The America Theatre’s Robert Morgan theater organ, installed in 1922, is now installed in the Broome Center for the Performing Arts (The Forum) in Binghamton, New York. A document from the Center says that the America Theatre closed in 1930 and was replaced by a ten-cent store. Here is the Cinema Treasure page for the Forum Theatre.
According to the book Denver’s Early Architecture, by James Bretzhe, the Victory Theatre closed in the late 1930s, and its operators moved across the street to the former Empress Theatre, renaming that house the New Victory Theatre. The former Empress is probably the Victory Theatre seen in the last photo linked in CSWalczak’s earlier comment.
A card in the Denver Public Library’s History Index says that the Empress Theatre was renamed the Victory Theatre in 1937, so unless the original Victory was itself later reopened under another name, 1937 must have seen the end of it.
An ad for architects Leon H. Lempert & Son in the 1900-1901 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide has the Opera House in Corning on a list headed “Some of our theatres.”
The August 12, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had the following item about the Opera House:
“The Corning (N. Y.) opera house recently closed its doors. Just when the house will again be opened is much in doubt. In this connection a late report from Corning says the five-year lease under which the house has been operated expired July 1. Although the house has been kept open since on the old lease. It is understood that the arrangement has not been satisfactory to either party.”
Then the September 30 issue of the same publication has this item about the Opera House:
“Corning, N. Y.—L. E. Harris, proprietor of the Family theater, Albion, and Jack Lee, of that city, have leased the Corning Opera House. The theater has been redecorated throughout and has new opera chairs. The house seats 1,000 and will have an orchestra each evening. Mr. Harris will look after the mechanical end of the theater and Mr. Lee will take care of the executive duties. Road shows, vaudeville and moving pictures will be featured.”
Will: The Princess was one of two houses in Corning that were mentioned in the August 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World (the other was the Bijou.) As the Princess was mentioned between the two articles about the Opera House that were less than two months apart it seems unlikely that they were the same theater.
There is an article about exterior lighting on Denver’s theaters in the October 19, 1912, issue of Electrical Review (Google Books scan) with a drawing of this Isis Theater captioned “How New Isis Theater Will Be Illuminated.”
The text of the same article has this information:
“The history of the illumination of Curtis Street is rather interesting and dates back a little more than four years. At that time one of the enterprising theater managers of Denver opened the Cameraphone Theater and installed some very elaborate illuminating effects. This was when the moving-picture business was in its infancy in Denver, and although the illumination on the Cameraphone gave it tremendous advertising, the quality of the shows presented were not on a par with the illumination on the outside and it eventually became unprofitable to operate. Later it was taken over by Samuel Baxter and renamed the Isis. Under the new management the lighting was discontinued and the quality of the shows bettered, but without the pulling force of the light it did not do a paying business. In the course of time the illumination which had been displaced was again installed and later increased, until today the theater has a total of 2,200 lamps and a candlepower of 8,500, and it is now one of the best payers of the several first-run houses.”
The article indicates that the New Isis was under construction, while the existing Isis was one of the seven movie theaters already in operation on Curtis Street between 14th and 18th Streets. So far I’ve been unable to discover what became of the first Isis when the new house opened. Possibly it was kept open under a new name.
I’m unable to reconcile the address of 216 W. Broadway with the description of the Jewel Theatre as having been “atop a hill.” The top of the hill is about 5th Street, a block west of the location of the Crystal Theatre, which is at 401 W. Broadway. I’d expect the State to have had an address in the 400 or 500 block.
The last paragraph of this weblog post by Stevie Joe Payne says that the State Theatre was south of the courthouse, so it must have been on or near the northwest corner of Main and Grandview. As the Constantine Theatre is at 110 W. Main and is across the street and a bit farther east, 121 W. Main sounds about right for the State Theatre’s address.
109 W. Main must have been the lot between Kihekah Avenue and Grandview Avenue. As the building was listed as vacant on the 1927 insurance map, I’m thinking that it might have housed the Jackson Theatre.
A photo of the lobby of the Harper Theatre appeared in Boxoffice of December 2, 1950.
The description says that the Elmwood Theatre was near Gunderson Avenue, which is three blocks east of the location at which Google Maps placed its pin icon. It might not be Google’s fault this time. The address of the theater might have been in the 400 block of Harrison Street, not the 600 block.
Although the following item was in the February 27 issue of Construction News in 1915, not 1913 when the Elmwood is supposed to have opened, I think it could be about the Elmwood Theatre:
Elmwood Avenue is one block east of Gunderson Avenue. As for the 1915 construction date, if there was an Elmwood Theatre as early as 1913, it’s possible that the house opened as a small storefront operation and moved to new quarters two years later.The obituary of W. J. Hartwig (quoted here) said that he had built the Hartwig Theatre in 1917.
A Lyric Theatre at Lincoln was on a list of vaudeville houses published in the April 7, 1906, issue of theatrical trade journal The New York Clipper. However, an entry in a timeline of events of 1906 published in Nebraska Blue Book, 1915, said: “Aug. 27—Lincoln opened new Lyric theatre.” Perhaps the item in the Clipper referred to a previous Lyric Theatre.
The Lyric Theatre was in operation as a movie house at least as late as 1924. The operators of the house, Hostettler Bros., published weekly program guides to their theaters, and scans of a few are available from the Nebraska Memory web site. Here is a PDF file of the current and coming attractions published May 19, 1924.
The February, 1906, issue of Engineering World ran this announcement about the proposed Lyric Theatre in Mobile:
From 1901 to 1910, the Stone Brothers architectural firm consisted of Guy Stone, Grover C. Stone, and Sam Stone, Jr.The Sanger Amusements web site offers this page with a brief history of the Lyric, and several illustrations.
The theater at left in this postcard photo could be either the original Grand or the New Grand, built after the fire in 1916. The postcard was mailed in 1919, but the photo could have been taken prior to the destruction of the old Grand.
Most of the buildings in the view from the 1910s are gone, but I’ve updated Street View to the most likely location from which the old photo was taken. The church in the distance on the left is still standing, hidden among the trees in Street View, but I think the theater in the old photo is gone.
However, if that was the original Grand, the new Grand might have been in one of the other buildings still standing on Main Street. The 1916 fire that destroyed the original Grand Theatre also destroyed other buildings on the block. One or more of the buildings at left in Street View might have been among their replacements.
I believe this theatre was most likely in the building that is now the Grace Tabernacle Christian Church, currently using the address 5122 Greenway Avenue. It is probably also the unnamed theater mentioned in the September 16, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
The current building looks deeper than 140 feet, though, so the theater might have been rebuilt sometime after 1916, but it’s more likely that it was just expanded.The Gem Theatre began showing movies in 1916, according to this item in the August 12 issue of The Moving Picture World:
Mann had only recently acquired the house, as noted in the September 16 issue of the same publication. The item also says that he had changed the name of the house to the American Theatre:The original architect of the Symphony Theatre was William G. Massarene, according to an item in the April 26, 1919, issue of The Film Daily. The conversion of the existing building into a theater had cost $44,000.
CinemaTour gives the address of the Ritz as 250 E. Main, which is definitely in the block where drewcjm placed it.
I’ve updated Street View to roughly match the location of this photo by Flickr user drewcjm, who says this is where the Ritz was.
this card in the Denver Public Library’s Western History Subject Index says that when the State Theatre was closed and demolished in 1953, its owners bought the Isis Theatre and changed its name to the New State Theatre.
Another card from the Index cites a January 1, 1955, item in the Rocky Mountain News saying that the Isis Theatre building was to be demolished. The Isis must have had the aka New State for less than two years.
Seating capacity is usually given by the person who submitted the theater. I suspect that some of them just guess at it. If the submitter doesn’t provide a seat count, theater editor Ken Roe sometimes adds it. For American and Canadian theaters I think he usually uses the capacity listings in The Film Daily Yearbook.
The yearbook doesn’t always give accurate seat counts. It relied on owners and managers to provide the numbers, and they would sometimes falsify them, usually under-reporting in order to beat the projectionist’s union’s rule that houses with more than 1,000 seats had to hire two projectionists. There were also cases of simple careless editing that would lead to an under-report.
It’s also the case that some theaters actually were greatly reduced in capacity over the years because, as business declined, balconies and galleries would be closed to the public to save on maintenance and insurance costs. Some old houses that had the greater part of their seats on upper levels would end up reporting nothing but the orchestra floor capacity, which was sometimes quite small.
There were other, lesser factors leading to reduced seating capacity. Operators of aging theaters would often cannibalize working seats from the front of the house to replace seats in other parts of the auditorium that had been broken. That would lead to a creeping decline in capacity. Old theaters also lost some capacity when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, forcing them to remove some seats to provide space and access for patrons in wheelchairs.
There have also been a few cases where operators would remove every other row of seats, in order to provide more leg room for today’s taller patrons. It’s much cheaper than completely re-seating a theater, and can buy a house with declining patronage a couple of extra years of operation.
No doubt many of the theater pages at Cinema Treasures do seriously under-report seating capacity, but there are also many cases where the capacity of a fairly large theater has actually been significantly reduced, and the numbers given are accurate even though they seem too small.
The State is one of several early Denver houses still missing from Cinema Treasures. The 1925 opening was actually a re-opening under new name. Here is an earlier photo showing the same house when it was called the Strand. The Strand opened September 9, 1915, according to The Moving Picture World of January 1, 1916, which also noted that the new house had been built on the site of the first Isis Theatre. The State Theatre was demolished in 1953.
An article in The Moving Picture World of January 1, 1916, indicates that the Strand Theatre (later the State), opened in 1915, had been built on the site of the first Isis Theatre. The article doesn’t say whether or not the first Isis operated under another name between the opening of the new Isis in 1913 and the old theater’s demolition.
News about the Ritz Theatre in Bartow from The Film Daily of September 12, 1936:
Pullman, by Robert Luedeking and the Whitman County Historical Society (Google Books preview) says that the Audian Theatre had previously been called the Grand Theatre. There’s a photo of the Grand from about 1920, and the building is quite recognizable from the terra cotta cornice and parapet trim it still sports.
The 1936 reconstruction of the Audian, which was nearing completion in late summer, according to the September 12 issue of The Film Daily that year, was apparently confined to the auditorium and the interior of the building. I haven’t found any early mentions of the Grand Theatre in trade publications, but it was being advertised in the Pullman Herald in 1916.
A 350-seat house for movies and live events called the Pullman Theatre opened in December, 1913. I haven’t found the Pullman Theatre mentioned in the Herald later than 1915, about a year before the earliest mentions of the Grand Theatre. It’s possible that the Pullman Theatre became the Grand Theatre.
The Strand might have been the successor of the Dunlap Theatre, which was listed in Julius Cahn’s guides for 1906-1907 and 1913-1914. The September 12, 1936, issue of The Film Daily reported that the Dunlap Theatre in Clarksville was being rebuilt and refurnished after having been damaged by a fire about two months previously. The Cahn guides listed the Dunlap as a ground-floor house of 750 seats, so it was about the same size as the Strand. I haven’t found any mentions of the Dunlap Theatre dating from later than 1936.
The March, 1917, issue of The Doherty News has a bit of information about the America Theatre:
In its early days, the America Theatre had entrances on both 16th Street and Curtis Street, as can be seen in this 1922 photo from the Denver Public Library.The America Theatre’s Robert Morgan theater organ, installed in 1922, is now installed in the Broome Center for the Performing Arts (The Forum) in Binghamton, New York. A document from the Center says that the America Theatre closed in 1930 and was replaced by a ten-cent store. Here is the Cinema Treasure page for the Forum Theatre.
According to the book Denver’s Early Architecture, by James Bretzhe, the Victory Theatre closed in the late 1930s, and its operators moved across the street to the former Empress Theatre, renaming that house the New Victory Theatre. The former Empress is probably the Victory Theatre seen in the last photo linked in CSWalczak’s earlier comment.
A card in the Denver Public Library’s History Index says that the Empress Theatre was renamed the Victory Theatre in 1937, so unless the original Victory was itself later reopened under another name, 1937 must have seen the end of it.
An ad for architects Leon H. Lempert & Son in the 1900-1901 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide has the Opera House in Corning on a list headed “Some of our theatres.”
The August 12, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had the following item about the Opera House:
Then the September 30 issue of the same publication has this item about the Opera House:Will: The Princess was one of two houses in Corning that were mentioned in the August 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World (the other was the Bijou.) As the Princess was mentioned between the two articles about the Opera House that were less than two months apart it seems unlikely that they were the same theater.There is an article about exterior lighting on Denver’s theaters in the October 19, 1912, issue of Electrical Review (Google Books scan) with a drawing of this Isis Theater captioned “How New Isis Theater Will Be Illuminated.”
The text of the same article has this information:
The article indicates that the New Isis was under construction, while the existing Isis was one of the seven movie theaters already in operation on Curtis Street between 14th and 18th Streets. So far I’ve been unable to discover what became of the first Isis when the new house opened. Possibly it was kept open under a new name.I’m unable to reconcile the address of 216 W. Broadway with the description of the Jewel Theatre as having been “atop a hill.” The top of the hill is about 5th Street, a block west of the location of the Crystal Theatre, which is at 401 W. Broadway. I’d expect the State to have had an address in the 400 or 500 block.
The last paragraph of this weblog post by Stevie Joe Payne says that the State Theatre was south of the courthouse, so it must have been on or near the northwest corner of Main and Grandview. As the Constantine Theatre is at 110 W. Main and is across the street and a bit farther east, 121 W. Main sounds about right for the State Theatre’s address.
109 W. Main must have been the lot between Kihekah Avenue and Grandview Avenue. As the building was listed as vacant on the 1927 insurance map, I’m thinking that it might have housed the Jackson Theatre.