The Leon Theatre was designed by Houston architect Ernest L. Shult. It was included on a list of his theater projects published in the 1950 edition of Theatre Catalog, with the design dated 1948.
The Palms Theatre was built in 1949, according to this weblog post from The Old Sugar Land Club House. It includes a photo of the construction. Additional photos can be seen at this post from the same weblog.
A list of theaters designed by architect Ernest L. Shult, published in the 1950 edition of The Theatre Catalog also says the Palms was a 1949 project.
Greater Indianapolis, by Jacob Piatt Dunn, which was published in 1910, noted that the Metropolitan, the first theater in Indianapolis, had been designed by architect Diedrich A. Bohlen, whose son Oscar D. Bohlen had recently designed the Murat Theatre, the city’s newest house.
An introduction to the records of the Daggett architectural firm mentions the Park Theatre as one of the projects designed by Robert Platt Daggett (the plans themselves are apparently lost, as they are not listed among the contents of the collection.) No date is given for the project, but as R. P. Daggett practiced in Indianapolis from 1868 to 1912, I would imagine that he was the architect for the rebuilding of the theater after the 1897 fire.
I’ve been unable to find any photos of the Metropolitan from before the fire, but the style of the facade as depicted in post-fire photos could have been designed in the 1850s, especially as Diedrich Bohlen was trained as an architect in his native Germany, where the classical influence was strong throughout the 19th century. It’s possible that the building’s outer walls survived the fire and were largely restored by Daggett rather than rebuilt. I’ll keep an eye out for pre-fire photos.
The Murat Theatre was opened on February 28, 1910. The building was designed by Indianapolis architect Oscar D. Bohlen of the firm D. A. Bohlen & Son. It is predominantly Moorish-Oriental in style, and originally had 1,950 seats. A major renovation undertaken in 1996 increased the seating capacity to 2,476.
In its early years, the Murat Theatre was leased by the Shubert organization, and it later served as the venue for the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. From the late 1940s until the early 1960s, it was the only house in Indianapolis capable of hosting the touring companies of major Broadway stage productions.
The building is still owned by the Shriners, but the Murat Theatre is now operated under a long-term lease by Live Nation, which lists upcoming events on this web page.
Here is another web page about the Victoria Theatre, focusing mostly on its later history as a nightclub, though with a few lines about its brief history as a theater.
The December 7, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World ran this item:
“Philadelphia, Pa. — A. W. Barnes, 130 South Fifteenth Street, is preparing plans and specifications for alterations and additions to the Dixie Theater, Manayunk; alterations to consist of one-story brick, 50 by 75 feet.”
The theater had already been renovated in 1911, according to Manayunk, by Thom Nickels, which features a photo of the neighborhood showing the rooftop sign “Dixie Vaudeville” from across a valley. The Dixie was apparently a popular neighborhood vaudeville house for quite some time. This biography of Imogene Coca, who was born in 1908, says that she made her vaudeville debut at the Dixie Theatre in Manayunk at the age of 13, which would have been about 1921.
If Google Street View is getting the address right, it looks like the Dixie Rose Theatre has been demolished. There are no surviving buildings on this block that could have housed a theater of its size.
Also, the spelling of the theater’s name still needs to be corrected to Juarez, as in Benito Juárez, the Mexican President for whom it was most likely named.
I’ve set Street View to the correct address. In the most recent listing I can find on the Internet, the building was occupied by the office of attorney Lemuel Lopez, but an obituary reveals that Lopez died in a hang gliding accident on October 13, 2010, so the building might be vacant now.
The Home Theatre was designed by architect David Saul Klafter. On December 9, 1912, not long after the house had opened, the roof of the building collapsed. A lawsuit was filed against Klafter, but he was cleared by the Illinois board of examiners for architects, as noted in this article in the January 10, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World.
I’ve discovered that it was a different house called the Home Theatre that partly collapsed in 1912. A brief mention of the event in the December 20 issue of Chicago Commerce says that the collapse of the roof had taken place at the Home Theatre on Milwaukee Avenue. That means it must have been the house that later became the Wicker Park Theatre.
Street View is currently stuck on the wrong side of the courthouse square. The address 222 E. University Drive is on the south side of the street, one door west of 13th Avenue and sandwiched between two nondescript buildings housing a pool hall and a mortgage company. The theater building looked like it was vacant at the time Google’s camera went by. It’s a very distinctive brick building of rather Moorish appearance. I don’t know if it looked like that when it was the Juarez Theater. If it did, it had an awfully narrow entrance for a 600-seat house, and the theater itself was quite narrow, but very deep.
The finding aid for the Liebenberg & Kaplan papers at the University of Minnesota has several references to theater projects the firm undertook in Perry, Iowa, including an entry specifically naming the Perry Theatre, dated 1935-36. That was probably when the ground floor facade was modernized.
As some of the entries have no theater name attached, Liebenberg & Kaplan might have worked on the other indoor theater in Perry as well. As it turns out the other theater was indeed called the Foxy, at least for a while, the former Rex Theatre having been renamed about 1927.
There is also one entry for a Perry Outdoor Theatre in Perry, dated 1947, so the firm must also have drawn the plans for the drive-in that once operated there. Drive-ins.com says it was called the Corral Drive-In.
Here is a photo of the Hamilton Theatre. It, and two others, can be seen about a third of the way down this long web page about the Marshall-Matheson department store, which was once located next door to the theater. The commercial building that replaced both structures is now occupied by the Yonkers Public Library.
In its issue of January 3, 1928, The Film Daily had an item about the demise of the Hamilton Theatre:
“Yonkers, N. Y.— Strahan Theaters
Corp. have sold their lease of the Hamilton to the Ross Stores who are to erect a department store on the site. The lease had four and a half years to run, and $50,000 was paid to abrogate it.”
The January 3, 1928, issue of The Film Daily said that the Garfield Theatre had been opened. It said that the house had 1,300 seats, and had been built by Frank Porsinski, who would operate with a policy of four changes of program a week.
The streamline modern tower over the entrance seen in the 1948 photo must have been the result of a 1930s or 1940s remodeling. Google Street View shows that the tower has been removed. Southeast Carpet Company is no longer located in the Garfield Theatre building, so it the space is probably vacant, if the building is even still standing.
This theater was in operation as the Grand Opera House at least as early as 1908, when it was mentioned in issues of The Billboard. The building is recognizable in this postcard, which has a 1912 postmark on it. The ground floor has been altered, but the upper part of the building is largely unchanged, except for having been painted and having had the windows altered.
The Grand Theatre mentioned in the January 3, 1928, issue of The Film Daily is probably this house:
“Perry, Ia. — Youngclass & Latta,
owners of the Foxy and Grand here, have bought the Strand at Woodward. They are planning a circuit in this territory.”
The Grand Opera House was listed in the 1913-1914 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide as a ground-floor theater with 769 seats, but was not listed in the 1901 guide. I’m not sure if the other theater mentioned in the FD item was actually called the Foxy, or of that was a typo for Roxy.
A list of movie theaters in Canton that was published in the September 5, 1908, issue of The Billboard included the Dixie Theatre, but with the address No. 14 N. Market Street. Canton must have changed its numbering system at some point, converting one and two-digit addresses to three-digit addresses.
The list gives the seating capacity of the Dixie as 500, which was probably rounded up, but still a sizable house. The manager at the time was named P. H. Kane, and the house offered continuous shows. It was one of six movie houses listed in Canton.
The Dixie was also on a list of buildings inspected by the State of Ohio in 1907, but I’ve been unable to find any other references to it.
Winnipeg Theatres gives the address of the Elite Theatre as 527-529 Main Street, and gives it the AKA Unique Theatre.
According to the book Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895-1939, by Peter Morris, the Unique Theatre was opened in the fall of 1903 by John Schuberg. It was located in space that had been occupied by a funeral parlor in a building called the Cement Block (try researching that name on Google!) The first move shown at the Unique was Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery.
The earliest reference I can find to the name Elite Theatre in Winnipeg comes from January, 1909, when the Elite was the site of a religious meeting, according to the February issue of Unitarian Word and Work.
Winnipeg Theatres says that this house opened around 1910 as the Columbia Theatre, and became the Fox in 1935. I found an article about the Columbia Theatre in the April 6, 1912, issue of Electrical Review and Western Electrician, which noted that the house was the latest movie theater to be opened in Winnipeg (page 663 of the Google Books scan.)
I’ve found a period source which adds a missing piece to the early history of the Bijou Theatre as told here and at Theatres of Winnipeg. The source is the 1913 edition of Western Law Reporter (Canada), which gives a synopsis of a 1912 court case involving events that took place in 1910. The details of the case are not relevant, but the following sentences are:
“On the 21st April following the date of the contract, the lessees of the Empress Theatre vacated the premises and removed all their plant (excepting the drop curtain, which did not fit the new building) to another building, in another street in Winnipeg. The new building was given the name “Empress Theatre,” and the building vacated was afterwards known as the “Bijou.” The Empress, both in the old and in the new building, was what is generally known as a vaudeville show, while the Bijou was run as a moving picture show.”
As the Empress, this house was part of the Sullivan & Considine vaudeville circuit, which used the name Empress for most of its theaters. The Bijou joined the circuit in 1908, when the October 3 issue of The Billboard said:
“Mr. and Mrs. Frank Fairchilds are touring Western Canada and meeting with great success. They are playing a new circuit formed by J. M. Nash of the Bijou Theatre, Winnipeg, and booked through the Sullivan and Considine office.”
The Bijou probably adopted the name Empress shortly after joining the Sullivan & Considine circuit, so must have had the name for less than two years, until it was moved to the former Dominion Theatre in 1910.
The Leon Theatre was designed by Houston architect Ernest L. Shult. It was included on a list of his theater projects published in the 1950 edition of Theatre Catalog, with the design dated 1948.
The Palms Theatre was built in 1949, according to this weblog post from The Old Sugar Land Club House. It includes a photo of the construction. Additional photos can be seen at this post from the same weblog.
A list of theaters designed by architect Ernest L. Shult, published in the 1950 edition of The Theatre Catalog also says the Palms was a 1949 project.
Greater Indianapolis, by Jacob Piatt Dunn, which was published in 1910, noted that the Metropolitan, the first theater in Indianapolis, had been designed by architect Diedrich A. Bohlen, whose son Oscar D. Bohlen had recently designed the Murat Theatre, the city’s newest house.
An introduction to the records of the Daggett architectural firm mentions the Park Theatre as one of the projects designed by Robert Platt Daggett (the plans themselves are apparently lost, as they are not listed among the contents of the collection.) No date is given for the project, but as R. P. Daggett practiced in Indianapolis from 1868 to 1912, I would imagine that he was the architect for the rebuilding of the theater after the 1897 fire.
I’ve been unable to find any photos of the Metropolitan from before the fire, but the style of the facade as depicted in post-fire photos could have been designed in the 1850s, especially as Diedrich Bohlen was trained as an architect in his native Germany, where the classical influence was strong throughout the 19th century. It’s possible that the building’s outer walls survived the fire and were largely restored by Daggett rather than rebuilt. I’ll keep an eye out for pre-fire photos.
The Murat Theatre was opened on February 28, 1910. The building was designed by Indianapolis architect Oscar D. Bohlen of the firm D. A. Bohlen & Son. It is predominantly Moorish-Oriental in style, and originally had 1,950 seats. A major renovation undertaken in 1996 increased the seating capacity to 2,476.
In its early years, the Murat Theatre was leased by the Shubert organization, and it later served as the venue for the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. From the late 1940s until the early 1960s, it was the only house in Indianapolis capable of hosting the touring companies of major Broadway stage productions.
The building is still owned by the Shriners, but the Murat Theatre is now operated under a long-term lease by Live Nation, which lists upcoming events on this web page.
Here is another web page about the Victoria Theatre, focusing mostly on its later history as a nightclub, though with a few lines about its brief history as a theater.
The December 7, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World ran this item:
The theater had already been renovated in 1911, according to Manayunk, by Thom Nickels, which features a photo of the neighborhood showing the rooftop sign “Dixie Vaudeville” from across a valley. The Dixie was apparently a popular neighborhood vaudeville house for quite some time. This biography of Imogene Coca, who was born in 1908, says that she made her vaudeville debut at the Dixie Theatre in Manayunk at the age of 13, which would have been about 1921.If Google Street View is getting the address right, it looks like the Dixie Rose Theatre has been demolished. There are no surviving buildings on this block that could have housed a theater of its size.
Also, the spelling of the theater’s name still needs to be corrected to Juarez, as in Benito Juárez, the Mexican President for whom it was most likely named.
I’ve set Street View to the correct address. In the most recent listing I can find on the Internet, the building was occupied by the office of attorney Lemuel Lopez, but an obituary reveals that Lopez died in a hang gliding accident on October 13, 2010, so the building might be vacant now.
The Home Theatre was designed by architect David Saul Klafter. On December 9, 1912, not long after the house had opened, the roof of the building collapsed. A lawsuit was filed against Klafter, but he was cleared by the Illinois board of examiners for architects, as noted in this article in the January 10, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World.
I’ve discovered that it was a different house called the Home Theatre that partly collapsed in 1912. A brief mention of the event in the December 20 issue of Chicago Commerce says that the collapse of the roof had taken place at the Home Theatre on Milwaukee Avenue. That means it must have been the house that later became the Wicker Park Theatre.
Street View is currently stuck on the wrong side of the courthouse square. The address 222 E. University Drive is on the south side of the street, one door west of 13th Avenue and sandwiched between two nondescript buildings housing a pool hall and a mortgage company. The theater building looked like it was vacant at the time Google’s camera went by. It’s a very distinctive brick building of rather Moorish appearance. I don’t know if it looked like that when it was the Juarez Theater. If it did, it had an awfully narrow entrance for a 600-seat house, and the theater itself was quite narrow, but very deep.
There are several photos of the Venetian Theatre at this post from the weblog of the Racine Post.
The finding aid for the Liebenberg & Kaplan papers at the University of Minnesota has several references to theater projects the firm undertook in Perry, Iowa, including an entry specifically naming the Perry Theatre, dated 1935-36. That was probably when the ground floor facade was modernized.
As some of the entries have no theater name attached, Liebenberg & Kaplan might have worked on the other indoor theater in Perry as well. As it turns out the other theater was indeed called the Foxy, at least for a while, the former Rex Theatre having been renamed about 1927.
There is also one entry for a Perry Outdoor Theatre in Perry, dated 1947, so the firm must also have drawn the plans for the drive-in that once operated there. Drive-ins.com says it was called the Corral Drive-In.
Here is a photo of the Hamilton Theatre. It, and two others, can be seen about a third of the way down this long web page about the Marshall-Matheson department store, which was once located next door to the theater. The commercial building that replaced both structures is now occupied by the Yonkers Public Library.
In its issue of January 3, 1928, The Film Daily had an item about the demise of the Hamilton Theatre:
The Film Daily of January 3, 1928, said that the Signal Theatre in Baird, Texas, was being remodeled and enlarged at a cost of $7,000.
The January 3, 1928, issue of The Film Daily said that the Garfield Theatre had been opened. It said that the house had 1,300 seats, and had been built by Frank Porsinski, who would operate with a policy of four changes of program a week.
The streamline modern tower over the entrance seen in the 1948 photo must have been the result of a 1930s or 1940s remodeling. Google Street View shows that the tower has been removed. Southeast Carpet Company is no longer located in the Garfield Theatre building, so it the space is probably vacant, if the building is even still standing.
This theater was in operation as the Grand Opera House at least as early as 1908, when it was mentioned in issues of The Billboard. The building is recognizable in this postcard, which has a 1912 postmark on it. The ground floor has been altered, but the upper part of the building is largely unchanged, except for having been painted and having had the windows altered.
The Grand Theatre mentioned in the January 3, 1928, issue of The Film Daily is probably this house:
The Grand Opera House was listed in the 1913-1914 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide as a ground-floor theater with 769 seats, but was not listed in the 1901 guide. I’m not sure if the other theater mentioned in the FD item was actually called the Foxy, or of that was a typo for Roxy.Here’s a puzzling item from the January 3, 1928, issue of The Film Daily: “Portland, Ore. — The Geller opened on Foster Road just before Christmas.”
Did the magazine get the location wrong, or did Portland have more than one Geller Theatre?
A list of movie theaters in Canton that was published in the September 5, 1908, issue of The Billboard included the Dixie Theatre, but with the address No. 14 N. Market Street. Canton must have changed its numbering system at some point, converting one and two-digit addresses to three-digit addresses.
The list gives the seating capacity of the Dixie as 500, which was probably rounded up, but still a sizable house. The manager at the time was named P. H. Kane, and the house offered continuous shows. It was one of six movie houses listed in Canton.
The Dixie was also on a list of buildings inspected by the State of Ohio in 1907, but I’ve been unable to find any other references to it.
Winnipeg Theatres gives the address of the Elite Theatre as 527-529 Main Street, and gives it the AKA Unique Theatre.
According to the book Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895-1939, by Peter Morris, the Unique Theatre was opened in the fall of 1903 by John Schuberg. It was located in space that had been occupied by a funeral parlor in a building called the Cement Block (try researching that name on Google!) The first move shown at the Unique was Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery.
The earliest reference I can find to the name Elite Theatre in Winnipeg comes from January, 1909, when the Elite was the site of a religious meeting, according to the February issue of Unitarian Word and Work.
Winnipeg Theatres says that this house opened around 1910 as the Columbia Theatre, and became the Fox in 1935. I found an article about the Columbia Theatre in the April 6, 1912, issue of Electrical Review and Western Electrician, which noted that the house was the latest movie theater to be opened in Winnipeg (page 663 of the Google Books scan.)
Winnipeg Theatres gives the address of the Colonial Theatre as 634 Main Street.
I’ve found a period source which adds a missing piece to the early history of the Bijou Theatre as told here and at Theatres of Winnipeg. The source is the 1913 edition of Western Law Reporter (Canada), which gives a synopsis of a 1912 court case involving events that took place in 1910. The details of the case are not relevant, but the following sentences are:
As the Empress, this house was part of the Sullivan & Considine vaudeville circuit, which used the name Empress for most of its theaters. The Bijou joined the circuit in 1908, when the October 3 issue of The Billboard said:The Bijou probably adopted the name Empress shortly after joining the Sullivan & Considine circuit, so must have had the name for less than two years, until it was moved to the former Dominion Theatre in 1910.Theatres of Winnipeg says that this house opened as the Strand in 1914, and was renamed the Beacon in 1930.