The architectural firm of Buechner & Orth designed the Empress Theatre. It is listed as a 1910 project in the finding aid to the firms papers in the Northwest Architectural Archives at the University of Minnesota, built for owner George Benz & Sons. Sullivan & Considine must have leased the house, so it would not have been designed by Lee DeCamp.
The Capitol is one of the theaters listed in the finding aid to the Buechner & Orth archives at the University of Minnesota. As the Capitol was built in 1926, it seems unlikely that Charles Buechner, who died in 1924, would have had anything to do with the project.
The current owner of the Ute Theatre has a bit of information about its operation on this web page. The building dates from 1916 and was originally a livery stable.
A few years of the Saguache Crescent have been digitized and can be searched from this web page (you’ll have to answer a couple of brief consumer survey-type questions to view the scans.) In 1925 and 1931, a movie house called the Saguache Theatre advertised in the paper, and in 1937 there was a Rialto Theatre. I don’t know if these were AKA’s for the Ute Theatre or not. The earliest available year of the newspaper with ads for the Ute is 1943.
Tinseltoes linked to the wrong page in an earlier comment. Here is the article about the Cinema Grossmont.
The Boxoffice article fails to mention the architect of this theater. Fred Stein’s Statewide Theatres was usually fairly adventurous in its choice of architects, and between 1963 and 1967, during which period the Cinema Grossmont was also built, the chain hired the San Diego modernists Tucker, Sadler, & Bennett to design four large 70mm theaters for them, including the Cinema 21 in San Diego (the other three were in Anaheim, Bakersfield, and San Bernardino). It is possible that the same firm designed the Cinema Grossmont as well, but I’ve been unable to find any confirmation of this.
The caption of the photo CSWalczak linked to also says that the architect of the City Hall and Opera House/Liberty Theatre was Frank P. Milburn.
Frank Pierce Milburn also designed a City Hall-Opera House building for Columbia, South Carolina (demolished in 1936) and, as part of the firm of Milburn, Heister & Co., the still-operating Durham Auditorium/Carolina Theatre in Durham, North Carolina.
The Isis Theatre at Wichita Falls is listed in Eric Ledell Smith’s book African American theater buildings: an illustrated historical directory, 1900-1955.
btkrefft is right. The Youth Center is in a corner building, and the theater was in mid-block. As the address is right for the Youth Center, it must be wrong for the Grand Theatre.
The Cambria Theatre was in operation prior to 1894. In that year it was purchased by Isaac Mishler, who rebuilt it and reopened it in 1895 as the New Cambria Theatre.
The State Street Theatre was built by Altoona, Pennsylvania theater magnate Isaac Mishler. The Historic American Buildings Survey report on the Mishler Theatre in Altoona (Google Documents quick view) mentions the State Street Theatre as a 1904 project designed by architect Albert E. Westover, who would later design the Mishler Theatre.
This twin might have been the house opened in 1968 as the Trans-Lux Inflight Cine. The 350-seat, single screen theater at Bartow, designed by architect John McNamara, was the first opened by the partnership formed the previous year by Trans-Lux and Inflight Motion Pictures, Inc. These theaters used a 16mm projection system originally developed for showing movies aboard airliners, but had all been converted to 35mm by the end of 1972. A number of the small, single-screen houses were later twinned.
The list of theaters opened the previous year that was published in the January 20, 1969, issue of Boxoffice included the Cine, Bartow, Florida, opened by Trans-Lux. Many sources on the Internet say that the Bartow Trans-Lux house opened in 1966, but the partnership was not even formed until 1967, as told in this article from Boxoffice of November 13, 1967, so the Internet sources must be wrong. I think I might have quoted this misinformation in one or more comments on other pages at Cinema Treasures myself before discovering that it was wrong.
A former Trans-Lux executive, Bob Maar, writing at Film-Tech Forum, says in the second reply on this forum page that the Trans-Lux Inflight Cine in Charlotte opened in June, 1968 (he also gives opening years for the other four Inflight operations in North Carolina, all of which were single-screeners.) Like the other early Inflight twins, the house had two auditoriums of 350 seats each.
This web page has an article from the November, 1961, issue of Modern Mechanix which describes the automated, 16mm projection system developed by Inflight Motion Pictures, Inc, for showing movies on airliners. A version of this system was used in the earthbound theaters which Inflight opened in partnership with Trans-Lux beginning in 1968. The first house, a 350-seat single-screener, was opened at Bartow, Florida, that year.
This article (upper left) in Boxoffice of November 13, 1967, tells about Trans-Lux’s plans for the Inflight chain. It notes that the theaters were being designed by architect John McNamara.
The John and Drew Eberson Archives at the Wolfsonian Institute lists the Trans-Lux Sunshine Theatre as a 1968 project by Drew Eberson. He was also the architect for the theater’s twinning, which the Mall site says took place in 1977.
John and Drew Eberson were designing projects for Trans-Lux during the 1950s, and Drew Eberson continued to design theaters for the chain, both new houses and remodeling and twinning jobs, through the 1970s. He also designed offices for Trans-Lux at Norwalk, Connecticut in 1968.
In the Independent Theatres listings of the Los Angeles Times for February 10, 1971, the Vista was showing a double feature of Cindy and Donna (IMDb) and Girly (IMDB).
These were more low-budget sexploitation movies than full-on porn, but they were the sort of thing the Vista was running regularly around that time. The theater went to gay porn for a while later in the ‘70s, and then in 1980 it became a revival house, first operated by Thomas Theatres out of San Francisco and then by Landmark, which operated it more as a revival/art house combination.
Landmark abandoned the revival format at the Vista in 1985. The August 24, 1986 Los Angeles Times has the house listed as the New Vista, showing a double feature of Top Gun and Real Genius. I don’t think the Vista ever went back to porn after its time as a revival house. It did show some gay-themed movies during those years, aimed at the large gay audience in Silver Lake and East Hollywood, but I don’t think any of them were porn.
The Furby Theatre went up in flames on February 28, 1952. There’s a photo and an abstract from a Winnipeg Free Press article on this page at GenDisasters. The newspaper article said the theater was 42 years old, which would make the opening year 1910, but I’ve seen other modern sources saying it opened in 1912. The Furby was definitely in operation by 1913, when it was mentioned in the November 22 issue of The Moving Picture World.
The architect for the 1917 remodeling of the Holman Theatre was Joseph Raoul Gariepy. He is already listed at Cinema Treasures as architect of the Rialto Theatre on Avenue du Parc. According to this page of the Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada he also designed the Cartier Theatre on Rue Notre-Dame Ouest in 1929 and, in 1917-18, a neighborhood house called the Maisonneuve Theatre, which was located on Avenue la Salle at Rue Ontario. The Cartier is listed at Cinema Treasures, but I can’t find the Maisonneuve, which would have been about a block from the modern Complexe Desjardins 4 Cinemas.
The 1924 Stratford City Directory has a listing for the Majestic Theatre (rebuilding) at 97-99 Downie Street. The December 12, 1923, issue of Contract Record and Engineering Review had an item about this rebuilding project, datelined Stratford:
“Partridge Bros., Ontario Street, have the plumbing and heating contract in connection with addition and remodelling ‘Majestic Theatre’ to cost $40,000, owned by A. Brandenberger, Wellington St.”
A. Brandenberger must have been Albert Brandenberger, who is mentioned in several editions of Julius Cahn’s guide as manager of the Opera House in Stratford, with which he was connected at least as early as 1900.
The 1900-1901 and 1910-1911 editions of Cahn’s guide listed the theater the Opera House, but the 1910 edition includes the line “Dates to read Theatre Albert, Stratford.” The house is also called the Theatre Albert in the October 5, 1907, issue of The Billboard, so the names must have been used interchangeably.
Then the 1913-1914 edition of Cahn’s guide lists the theater as Griffin’s Opera House, so Albert Brandenberger must have given up control of the house for a time. Despite the retention of the Opera House appellation, a biography of John Griffin in the 1915 edition of Who’s Who in Canada says that the Griffin Amusement Company ran a chain of movie and vaudeville houses in Ontario, so this house might have been showing movies at least as early as 1913.
The September 2, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had this item about the Majestic Theatre in Stratford:
“Toronto, Ont.—Announcement has been made that the Majestic theater at Stratford, Ont., one of the largest and best equipped houses in Western Ontario, has been purchased by Stratford interests from the Canadian Theaters, Limited, which owns a string of theaters in Ontario and Quebec. A. Brandenberger is now the manager of the Majestic.”
It’s possible that the Griffin circuit had changed the name of the theater to Majestic sometime before it was sold to the “Stratford interests”, which presumably included former (and restored) manager Brandenberger.
Stratford: Its Heritage and Its Festival, by Carolynn Bart-Riedstra and Lutzen Riedstra, says that before it became the Majestic the Avon had been called Theatre Albert and was also known as the Griffin Theatre for a while, so there is confirmation that all these earlier reports refer to the same house.
All the period references I’ve found to the architect of this theater (and there are quite a few) list him as J. Hunt Stanford. His first name was Joseph. There is a brief biographical sketch of him on this web page, which also displays a bookplate from his personal library.
The December 19, 1923, issue of Contract Record and Engineering Review had a notice about this theater:
“Foundations are going in for $100,000 theatre north east corner Woodbine and
Danforth Aves. for Danforth-Woodbine Theatre Ltd. Architect, J. Hunt Stanford & Son, 67 Yonge Arcade. Carpentry by day labor. Roofing, plumbing, heating, electric, plastering and painting to day labor.
J. Hunt Stanford & Son was formed in 1922, when Leo Hunt Stanford joined his father’s practice.
The NorView Theatre appears to have been dismantled in 1957. The History of Kempsville Masonic Lodge has this line referring to an event related to the opening of the Masons' new lodge hall in 1957: “Brother Talbot tore his hand on removing our first set of chairs from the old Norview Theatre.”
I’ve been unable to find any mention of the NorView Theatre in any of the trade publications of the 1940s and 1950s to which I have access, but the architectural style of the building is certainly characteristic of that period.
There is a problem with the address currently given for this theater. Albano Cleaners, the first building on the block north of Chesapeake Boulevard, has an address of 6132 N. Sewells Point Road. The block south of Chesapeake Boulevard is numbered 3600. There is today no 5200 block of Sewells Point Road.
This comment on a HamptonRoads.com article about High’s Ice Cream shops has this line: “Away back in the 1940s, High’s had a store in Norview at Hugo Street, just two doors south of the Norview Theatre.” This has led me to believe that the NorView Theatre was in what is now a rather nondescript, single-story brick building painted a yellowish cream color, about a block north of where Street View is currently set.
Satellite View shows an auditorium-sized structure behind it, backing up to Chesapeake Boulevard. I can’t determine the address of the building from Street View, and there’s no external indication of what it now houses, but the theater’s entrance was probably directly across the street from what is now Sabor Catracho Restaurant, for which the Internet provides the address 6163 Sewells Point Road. That means the modern address for the theater building would be approximately 6162-6164 Sewells Point Road.
The 1938 Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to back on August 27 says that the architect for the streamline modern remodeling of the De Luxe Theatre was Mark D. Kalischer.
The July 2, 1929, issue of The Film Daily ran the following obituary for architect Nicola Petti:
“Cleveland — Nocoli [sic] Petti, local architect who designed ten local picture theaters, is dead after a brief illness. He was 49 years old. Among the houses designed by Petti are the Uptown, Variety, Kinsman, Cedar-Lee and Imperial. He is survived by three sons and two daughters.”
The July 2, 1929, issue of The Film Daily ran the following obituary for architect Nicola Petti:
“Cleveland — Nocoli [sic] Petti, local architect who designed ten local picture theaters, is dead after a brief illness. He was 49 years old. Among the houses designed by Petti are the Uptown, Variety, Kinsman, Cedar-Lee and Imperial. He is survived by three sons and two daughters.”
The Cleveland Landmarks Commission’s list of buildings designed by architect Nicola Petti includes the State Theatre in Toledo. The design was done in 1927.
The Cleveland Landmarks Commission’s list of buildings designed by architect Nicola Petti includes an unnamed theater on Park Avenue in Mansfield. The project was designed in 1927, but the list notes that it has been demolished.
As this is the only theater on Park Avenue that is listed at Cinema Treasures, and I’ve found no evidence that there was ever another theater on that street, perhaps the Landmarks Commission was mistaken about the Petti-designed theater having been demolished and it was indeed this house.
CinemaTour does attribute the design of the Renaissance Theatre to Petti, but doesn’t cite a source. The building is listed on the NRHP, but the Register’s web site says that the document with the theater’s information has not yet been digitized.
The architectural firm of Buechner & Orth designed the Empress Theatre. It is listed as a 1910 project in the finding aid to the firms papers in the Northwest Architectural Archives at the University of Minnesota, built for owner George Benz & Sons. Sullivan & Considine must have leased the house, so it would not have been designed by Lee DeCamp.
The Capitol is one of the theaters listed in the finding aid to the Buechner & Orth archives at the University of Minnesota. As the Capitol was built in 1926, it seems unlikely that Charles Buechner, who died in 1924, would have had anything to do with the project.
The current owner of the Ute Theatre has a bit of information about its operation on this web page. The building dates from 1916 and was originally a livery stable.
A few years of the Saguache Crescent have been digitized and can be searched from this web page (you’ll have to answer a couple of brief consumer survey-type questions to view the scans.) In 1925 and 1931, a movie house called the Saguache Theatre advertised in the paper, and in 1937 there was a Rialto Theatre. I don’t know if these were AKA’s for the Ute Theatre or not. The earliest available year of the newspaper with ads for the Ute is 1943.
A rendering of the Cinema Theatre appeared on this page of Boxoffice, October 11, 1965. The groundbreaking for the project had just taken place.
Tinseltoes linked to the wrong page in an earlier comment. Here is the article about the Cinema Grossmont.
The Boxoffice article fails to mention the architect of this theater. Fred Stein’s Statewide Theatres was usually fairly adventurous in its choice of architects, and between 1963 and 1967, during which period the Cinema Grossmont was also built, the chain hired the San Diego modernists Tucker, Sadler, & Bennett to design four large 70mm theaters for them, including the Cinema 21 in San Diego (the other three were in Anaheim, Bakersfield, and San Bernardino). It is possible that the same firm designed the Cinema Grossmont as well, but I’ve been unable to find any confirmation of this.
The caption of the photo CSWalczak linked to also says that the architect of the City Hall and Opera House/Liberty Theatre was Frank P. Milburn.
Frank Pierce Milburn also designed a City Hall-Opera House building for Columbia, South Carolina (demolished in 1936) and, as part of the firm of Milburn, Heister & Co., the still-operating Durham Auditorium/Carolina Theatre in Durham, North Carolina.
The Isis Theatre at Wichita Falls is listed in Eric Ledell Smith’s book African American theater buildings: an illustrated historical directory, 1900-1955.
btkrefft is right. The Youth Center is in a corner building, and the theater was in mid-block. As the address is right for the Youth Center, it must be wrong for the Grand Theatre.
The Cambria Theatre was in operation prior to 1894. In that year it was purchased by Isaac Mishler, who rebuilt it and reopened it in 1895 as the New Cambria Theatre.
The State Street Theatre was built by Altoona, Pennsylvania theater magnate Isaac Mishler. The Historic American Buildings Survey report on the Mishler Theatre in Altoona (Google Documents quick view) mentions the State Street Theatre as a 1904 project designed by architect Albert E. Westover, who would later design the Mishler Theatre.
This twin might have been the house opened in 1968 as the Trans-Lux Inflight Cine. The 350-seat, single screen theater at Bartow, designed by architect John McNamara, was the first opened by the partnership formed the previous year by Trans-Lux and Inflight Motion Pictures, Inc. These theaters used a 16mm projection system originally developed for showing movies aboard airliners, but had all been converted to 35mm by the end of 1972. A number of the small, single-screen houses were later twinned.
The list of theaters opened the previous year that was published in the January 20, 1969, issue of Boxoffice included the Cine, Bartow, Florida, opened by Trans-Lux. Many sources on the Internet say that the Bartow Trans-Lux house opened in 1966, but the partnership was not even formed until 1967, as told in this article from Boxoffice of November 13, 1967, so the Internet sources must be wrong. I think I might have quoted this misinformation in one or more comments on other pages at Cinema Treasures myself before discovering that it was wrong.
A former Trans-Lux executive, Bob Maar, writing at Film-Tech Forum, says in the second reply on this forum page that the Trans-Lux Inflight Cine in Charlotte opened in June, 1968 (he also gives opening years for the other four Inflight operations in North Carolina, all of which were single-screeners.) Like the other early Inflight twins, the house had two auditoriums of 350 seats each.
This web page has an article from the November, 1961, issue of Modern Mechanix which describes the automated, 16mm projection system developed by Inflight Motion Pictures, Inc, for showing movies on airliners. A version of this system was used in the earthbound theaters which Inflight opened in partnership with Trans-Lux beginning in 1968. The first house, a 350-seat single-screener, was opened at Bartow, Florida, that year.
This article (upper left) in Boxoffice of November 13, 1967, tells about Trans-Lux’s plans for the Inflight chain. It notes that the theaters were being designed by architect John McNamara.
This capsule history of Clearwater’s Sunshine Mall at Mall Hall of Fame says that the “…single-screen, Trans-Lux Theatre showed its first feature in mid-October 1968.”
The John and Drew Eberson Archives at the Wolfsonian Institute lists the Trans-Lux Sunshine Theatre as a 1968 project by Drew Eberson. He was also the architect for the theater’s twinning, which the Mall site says took place in 1977.
John and Drew Eberson were designing projects for Trans-Lux during the 1950s, and Drew Eberson continued to design theaters for the chain, both new houses and remodeling and twinning jobs, through the 1970s. He also designed offices for Trans-Lux at Norwalk, Connecticut in 1968.
In the Independent Theatres listings of the Los Angeles Times for February 10, 1971, the Vista was showing a double feature of Cindy and Donna (IMDb) and Girly (IMDB).
These were more low-budget sexploitation movies than full-on porn, but they were the sort of thing the Vista was running regularly around that time. The theater went to gay porn for a while later in the ‘70s, and then in 1980 it became a revival house, first operated by Thomas Theatres out of San Francisco and then by Landmark, which operated it more as a revival/art house combination.
Landmark abandoned the revival format at the Vista in 1985. The August 24, 1986 Los Angeles Times has the house listed as the New Vista, showing a double feature of Top Gun and Real Genius. I don’t think the Vista ever went back to porn after its time as a revival house. It did show some gay-themed movies during those years, aimed at the large gay audience in Silver Lake and East Hollywood, but I don’t think any of them were porn.
The Furby Theatre went up in flames on February 28, 1952. There’s a photo and an abstract from a Winnipeg Free Press article on this page at GenDisasters. The newspaper article said the theater was 42 years old, which would make the opening year 1910, but I’ve seen other modern sources saying it opened in 1912. The Furby was definitely in operation by 1913, when it was mentioned in the November 22 issue of The Moving Picture World.
The architect for the 1917 remodeling of the Holman Theatre was Joseph Raoul Gariepy. He is already listed at Cinema Treasures as architect of the Rialto Theatre on Avenue du Parc. According to this page of the Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada he also designed the Cartier Theatre on Rue Notre-Dame Ouest in 1929 and, in 1917-18, a neighborhood house called the Maisonneuve Theatre, which was located on Avenue la Salle at Rue Ontario. The Cartier is listed at Cinema Treasures, but I can’t find the Maisonneuve, which would have been about a block from the modern Complexe Desjardins 4 Cinemas.
According to this page of the Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada, the Cartier Theatre was designed by architect Joseph Raoul Gariepy.
The 1924 Stratford City Directory has a listing for the Majestic Theatre (rebuilding) at 97-99 Downie Street. The December 12, 1923, issue of Contract Record and Engineering Review had an item about this rebuilding project, datelined Stratford:
A. Brandenberger must have been Albert Brandenberger, who is mentioned in several editions of Julius Cahn’s guide as manager of the Opera House in Stratford, with which he was connected at least as early as 1900.The 1900-1901 and 1910-1911 editions of Cahn’s guide listed the theater the Opera House, but the 1910 edition includes the line “Dates to read Theatre Albert, Stratford.” The house is also called the Theatre Albert in the October 5, 1907, issue of The Billboard, so the names must have been used interchangeably.
Then the 1913-1914 edition of Cahn’s guide lists the theater as Griffin’s Opera House, so Albert Brandenberger must have given up control of the house for a time. Despite the retention of the Opera House appellation, a biography of John Griffin in the 1915 edition of Who’s Who in Canada says that the Griffin Amusement Company ran a chain of movie and vaudeville houses in Ontario, so this house might have been showing movies at least as early as 1913.
The September 2, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had this item about the Majestic Theatre in Stratford:
It’s possible that the Griffin circuit had changed the name of the theater to Majestic sometime before it was sold to the “Stratford interests”, which presumably included former (and restored) manager Brandenberger.Stratford: Its Heritage and Its Festival, by Carolynn Bart-Riedstra and Lutzen Riedstra, says that before it became the Majestic the Avon had been called Theatre Albert and was also known as the Griffin Theatre for a while, so there is confirmation that all these earlier reports refer to the same house.
All the period references I’ve found to the architect of this theater (and there are quite a few) list him as J. Hunt Stanford. His first name was Joseph. There is a brief biographical sketch of him on this web page, which also displays a bookplate from his personal library.
The December 19, 1923, issue of Contract Record and Engineering Review had a notice about this theater:
J. Hunt Stanford & Son was formed in 1922, when Leo Hunt Stanford joined his father’s practice.The NorView Theatre appears to have been dismantled in 1957. The History of Kempsville Masonic Lodge has this line referring to an event related to the opening of the Masons' new lodge hall in 1957: “Brother Talbot tore his hand on removing our first set of chairs from the old Norview Theatre.”
I’ve been unable to find any mention of the NorView Theatre in any of the trade publications of the 1940s and 1950s to which I have access, but the architectural style of the building is certainly characteristic of that period.
There is a problem with the address currently given for this theater. Albano Cleaners, the first building on the block north of Chesapeake Boulevard, has an address of 6132 N. Sewells Point Road. The block south of Chesapeake Boulevard is numbered 3600. There is today no 5200 block of Sewells Point Road.
This comment on a HamptonRoads.com article about High’s Ice Cream shops has this line: “Away back in the 1940s, High’s had a store in Norview at Hugo Street, just two doors south of the Norview Theatre.” This has led me to believe that the NorView Theatre was in what is now a rather nondescript, single-story brick building painted a yellowish cream color, about a block north of where Street View is currently set.
Satellite View shows an auditorium-sized structure behind it, backing up to Chesapeake Boulevard. I can’t determine the address of the building from Street View, and there’s no external indication of what it now houses, but the theater’s entrance was probably directly across the street from what is now Sabor Catracho Restaurant, for which the Internet provides the address 6163 Sewells Point Road. That means the modern address for the theater building would be approximately 6162-6164 Sewells Point Road.
The 1938 Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to back on August 27 says that the architect for the streamline modern remodeling of the De Luxe Theatre was Mark D. Kalischer.
The July 2, 1929, issue of The Film Daily ran the following obituary for architect Nicola Petti:
The July 2, 1929, issue of The Film Daily ran the following obituary for architect Nicola Petti:
The Cleveland Landmarks Commission’s list of buildings designed by architect Nicola Petti includes the State Theatre in Toledo. The design was done in 1927.
The Cleveland Landmarks Commission’s list of buildings designed by architect Nicola Petti includes an unnamed theater on Park Avenue in Mansfield. The project was designed in 1927, but the list notes that it has been demolished.
As this is the only theater on Park Avenue that is listed at Cinema Treasures, and I’ve found no evidence that there was ever another theater on that street, perhaps the Landmarks Commission was mistaken about the Petti-designed theater having been demolished and it was indeed this house.
CinemaTour does attribute the design of the Renaissance Theatre to Petti, but doesn’t cite a source. The building is listed on the NRHP, but the Register’s web site says that the document with the theater’s information has not yet been digitized.