Here is a photo of the Delbee Theatre, probably from 1920. There is a poster for director William Desmond Taylor’s 1920 film, The Furnace, at lower left. The brick facade now on the building doesn’t resemble the original theater front at all.
The web site of the Liberty Theatre’s current owner, the Greater Cincinnati Deaf Club, features this photo gallery which includes a few shots of events taking place in the upstairs hall. It appears that the original auditorium was divided into two floors, with offices, rest rooms, smaller meeting rooms and such on the ground floor and a large hall occupying the upper half.
The ceiling looks like it might be pressed tin, and is probably the Liberty’s original ceiling. The stage in the hall appears to have been built above the original stage, and its proscenium is probably part of the original, though it was most likely raised above its original level, which would not have come so close to the theater’s ceiling.
The Blue Mouse was on Washington at 11th, not 10th. A parking deck for the office building at 10th and Washington now sits on its site.
PSTOS has a couple of photos on this web page, though it also gives the wrong location of 10th and Washington. In the exterior photo, the ornate facade on 11th next to the three-story theater entrance building was actually the auditorium’s back wall. The doors are the auditorium’s exits.
Gary Lacher and Steve Stone’s book Theatres of Portland gives the correct location of the Blue Mouse, and has several photographs (Google Books preview.) The book gives the original opening date of the Globe as September 12, 1912.
A 1919 issue of a retail clothing industry trade journal called The Boys' Outfitter published a photo of the Globe Theatre’s auditorium with an audience of children attending a movie as guests of a local retail store.
Here is an article about the Adams Theatre from Boxoffice of January 3, 1942. The conclusion of the article is several pages later, so here’s a direct link to it. The architect for the conversion of the skating rink into a theater was Roger G. Rand.
All the old links to Boxoffice articles that were posted at issuu.com are dead, and I’m gradually updating them as I come across them. Archived issues of Boxoffice are now in a section called The Vault at the magazine’s own web site.
I’ve noticed that a lot of the old links have the wrong issue dates or wrong pages. Either I made a lot of mistakes, or the magazines at issuu.com were different editions than the ones now available at The Vault (Boxoffice published a national edition and multiple regional editions, and the content didn’t always match up.)
The magazine has also set up The Vault in a way that makes it inaccessible to search engines, so I can’t always find the new locations of the articles I cited in earlier comments. The article about the Colonial is one of those I can’t find, but I have found the drawing of the proposed redesign of the theater, at the upper right corner of this page of the April 26, 1941, issue.
The only other mention of the Grand I can recall in Boxoffice was the drawing in the “Just Off the Boards” feature of the April 26, 1941, issue, but it’s the same drawing that appears in the 1942 article.
Patsy: Boxoffice has removed its archive from issuu.com and posted most of it on a section of its own web site called The Vault. I’m gradually updating my old links as I run across them.
The 1942 article about the Grand Theatre by Michael DeAngelis begins on this page and continues on the two subsequent pages.
Here is a 1943 photo of the Rivoli Theatre. It had a handsome facade of brick and terra cotta. It’s hard to tell from the limited view the photo provides, but the style looks to have been predominantly Italian Rennaisance. I haven’t found any interior photos.
The Rivoli opened in 1922, according to the final paragraph of this web page. An announcement that the theater was being planned appeared in the January 28, 1922, issue of The American Contractor:
“Theater. 65x120. Washington St., Two Rivers, Wis. Archt. Rudolph M. Hansen Co., 113 Walnut St., Green Bay. Owner Rivioli Theater Co., care Ed Miquette, Two Rivers. Gen. contr. let to L. M. Hansen Co., 113 Walnut St., Green Bay. Drawing plans.”
A history of the Two Rivers Opera House (7MB PDF here) has a photo of the Rivoli under construction (about halfway through the document.) It says that that the Rivoli opened in December, 1922, with a vaudeville show and the feature film Rich Men’s Wives. The Rivoli was equipped with a Barton organ.
The Rivoli closed for about two years in the late 1950s, but was reopened in 1959 according to an item in the May 2 issue of The Milwaukee Sentinal that year. I’ve been unable to discover how long the theater remained open after that, but I doubt it was very long. When the subsequent occupant, Evans Department Store, closed down a couple of years ago, it had been in operation for 47 years. The building is currently vacant and on the market. The current interior can be seen in this small PDF from the city’s economic development department. The interior has been altered as drastically as the facade, and is unlikely to be suitable for theatrical use. It looks like the auditorium was gutted and converted into two floors of retail space.
This PDF of an undated page from the Marshfield Times has an ad for the Adler Opera House, which was presenting a program of “Vivaphone Singing and Talking Motion Pictures” on September 3. The year was most likely 1913, as that’s when the English Vivaphone system premiered, and the ad touts the “New York and London Success” of the movies.
James, your description of the Roxy definitely sounds like the theater in the photo in the 1933 Courier article. The photo is a bit fuzzy, but from the architectural style I’d say it could have been built in the early 20th century. This makes me wonder if it might have originally have been the 600-seat theater opened in 1908 as the Alford Opera House.
I used Google Street View to find the building in Don Lewis’s photo at Flickr, and it turns out to be at 104-106 E. Main Street, and currently has a pool hall in one storefront and the E & Z Clothing company in the other. If there was ever a theater in that building it wasn’t the Roxy, which was at 108 W. Main.
Dave, at Flickr Don Lewis posted a photo from Billy Holcomb’s collection showing Washington Street in the 1940s, with a side-on view of the Rialto’s vertical sign. I guess Don never got around to putting a link to it on this page, so here it is. I’d still like to see a full view of the front of the theater, but haven’t found one yet.
The 1933 Courier article I cited in my previous comment can be seen online here at NewspaerARCHIVE.com., which allows visiting non-subscribers to view three newspapers a day at no charge.
James, was the Roxy you remember located in the building in this photo? I’m a bit confused by the photo, as a 1933 article in the Blytheville Courier featured a photo of the house then called the Roxy, and it looks like a different building than the one in Don Lewis’s photo at Flickr. The 1933 Roxy was three floors instead of two, and the second floor had much wider windows than the building in Don’s photo.
The only explanations I can think of are that either Don got the caption wrong, and that building never was the Roxy, or the Roxy name was moved to that two story building sometime after 1933.
Also, the Courier article says that the Roxy of 1933 had been called the Home Theatre prior to being renamed Roxy by new operators sometime in the winter of 1932-1933. If, as you say, the Gem Theatre was once known as the Home Theatre, maybe the name Home was used for two different Blytheville theaters at different times.
If you go to Cinema Treasures page for the Ritz Theatre, you’ll find a comment I made that has a link to a 1951 article in Boxoffice about the recently-rebuilt Ritz. It has a photo of the opening night crowd. Maybe it was the same photo the Courier published.
This web page with a history of the Ritz Theatre also has a bit about the Gem. The house that became the Ritz was apparently called the Gem from about 1914 until 1924, when it suffered a fire. When it was rebuilt it was called the Ritz, and in the meantime this new Gem Theatre had been built at 125 West Main Street.
The 1930 opening date currently cited in the description must have been a re-opening. The Gem apparently closed and reopened more than once during the depressed early 1930s.
This puzzling page (the words are English, but the syntax might as well be Martian) says that the Home Theatre that became the Roxy was at 106/108 West Main Street. I’ve been unable to find anything about a Home Theatre on South Broadway.
Here is a fresh link to the 1951 Boxoffice article about the Ritz Theatre. The impression I get from the article is that the old Ritz was completely razed to make way for the new Ritz. The article doesn’t mention a fire in the Ritz prior to its demolition, though other sources mention a fire in 1931.
This photo shows the Ritz before the 1951 rebuilding. The Boxoffice article says that the adjacent space in the building was occupied by a shoe store and a grocers prior to rebuilding. Doubling the theater’s width would have required at the very least the complete demolition of the interior, and at least the center section of the old facade would have to have come down as well, to provide for the new center entrance. If all that was coming down, then the roof must have been removed too. That adds up to virtually an entirely new building between the old side walls.
The entry for Uzzell S. Branson in the 1956 edition of the AIA’s American Architects Directory lists the Ritz Theatre as a 1951 project. Our description currently says that he designed a 1936 remodeling of the Ritz, but this web page says that the Ritz was severely damaged by fire in 1931, and reopened in October that year after a $30,000 reconstruction job. It’s possible that Branson was the architect for that project as well, as his practice was established in Blytheville in 1923, according to the AIA directory.
Here is a paragraph from a January 16, 1926, article about the proposed Midland Theatre in The Reel Journal:
“T. W. Lamb, a New York architect, and Robert C. Boller, of Boller Bros.,
Kansas City architects, are preparing plans for the big four-story movie palace and office building. Contracts for the construction will be let as soon as
plans are finished, it has been announced.”
As finally built, the theater portion of the project was six floors, rather than four, and the adjacent office tower had twelve floors.
It’s noted in the description on this page that the Midland Theatre cost $4,000,000 to build in 1926-27. The theater was indeed large and lavish, but I don’t think it accounted for the entire budget. The twelve story Midland Building at the back end of the theater has about three times the floor space of the theater portion of the project, and probably consumed at least half of that $4,000,000 construction cost.
Here is a 1927 photo showing the office building and theater under construction, taken from the office building end of the project.
SK: Sorry for the delayed response, but my subscription to this page lapsed and I didn’t see your question until today.
The August 7, 1954, article about the remodeling of the Criterion now begins at this link.
The scans of Boxoffice that used to be at issuu.com have been moved to a section of the magazine’s own web site called The Vault. If you find any more of my old links that I haven’t gotten around to updating, you can (if you have javascript installed, and your browser supports it) find the date of the issue and the page number of the article by hovering your cursor over the obsolete link (it’s 080754/103 for the Criterion article, for example.) Then you can go to The Vault and navigate through it to find the article. Some of the pages at The Vault are one or two numbers off from the page numbers they had at issuu (the Criterion article starts on Vault page 102, not page 103.)
Some issues of the magazine haven’t yet been uploaded to the Vault, and sometimes The Vault has different editions of an issue, and they will be missing a particular article, but most of the Boxoffice stuff I linked to can still be found by this method.
I should add that I’ve found no evidence to show that the theater was opened as part of the hotel project in 1910. It might have been added sometime later, either converted entirely from existing space, or with a new auditorium added behind the hotel and its entrance in former retail space.
The house might also have operated under a different name in its early years. I’ve found references to theaters called the Rialto (1924) and the Gem (1926) operating in Monett in the 1920s, but no details about either of them. So far I haven’t found the Strand mentioned in any of the trade journals.
A book about the Gillioz Theatre in Springfield includes a small illustration of the Monett Gillioz on page 1928 (Google Books preview.)
The book says that Maurice Gillioz also financed and built the Fox Theatre in Joplin, Missouri. The NRHP-listed Fox is still standing, functioning as a church and special events center, with occasional movies.
The Strand Theatre was at one end of the building that was built in 1910 as the Martin Hotel. About 1947, the hotel closed and was converted into a factory for the Vaisey-Bristol Shoe Company. By sometime the 1950s, the factory had taken over the entire building, including the theater space.
At some point the building was expanded along the entire block of Front Street to 5th Street. It’s possible that the auditorium portion of the theater was demolished as part of this expansion, or it might have been incorporated into the expansion, but it’s impossible to tell from the aerial views of the structure.
After the shoe factory moved out, the ground floor of the 4th Street side of the building, which had been extensively altered, was returned to something more closely resembling the row of storefronts it had featured when it was a hotel, but the location of the Strand’s entrance is still closed up. The building now houses a tire retailer and brake repair shop.
There are photos from ca. 1947 and from the 1950s on page 35 of the book Monett, by Elaine L. Orr (Google Books preview.)
Here is a photo of the Delbee Theatre, probably from 1920. There is a poster for director William Desmond Taylor’s 1920 film, The Furnace, at lower left. The brick facade now on the building doesn’t resemble the original theater front at all.
Here is a photo of the Broadway Theatre in the 1930s. Note that the old Hippodrome sign is still on the roof above the Broadway marquee.
The web site of the Liberty Theatre’s current owner, the Greater Cincinnati Deaf Club, features this photo gallery which includes a few shots of events taking place in the upstairs hall. It appears that the original auditorium was divided into two floors, with offices, rest rooms, smaller meeting rooms and such on the ground floor and a large hall occupying the upper half.
The ceiling looks like it might be pressed tin, and is probably the Liberty’s original ceiling. The stage in the hall appears to have been built above the original stage, and its proscenium is probably part of the original, though it was most likely raised above its original level, which would not have come so close to the theater’s ceiling.
The Blue Mouse was on Washington at 11th, not 10th. A parking deck for the office building at 10th and Washington now sits on its site.
PSTOS has a couple of photos on this web page, though it also gives the wrong location of 10th and Washington. In the exterior photo, the ornate facade on 11th next to the three-story theater entrance building was actually the auditorium’s back wall. The doors are the auditorium’s exits.
Gary Lacher and Steve Stone’s book Theatres of Portland gives the correct location of the Blue Mouse, and has several photographs (Google Books preview.) The book gives the original opening date of the Globe as September 12, 1912.
A 1919 issue of a retail clothing industry trade journal called The Boys' Outfitter published a photo of the Globe Theatre’s auditorium with an audience of children attending a movie as guests of a local retail store.
Here is an article about the Adams Theatre from Boxoffice of January 3, 1942. The conclusion of the article is several pages later, so here’s a direct link to it. The architect for the conversion of the skating rink into a theater was Roger G. Rand.
An article about the Brunswick Theatre begins on this page of the January 3, 1942, issue of Boxoffice.
All the old links to Boxoffice articles that were posted at issuu.com are dead, and I’m gradually updating them as I come across them. Archived issues of Boxoffice are now in a section called The Vault at the magazine’s own web site.
I’ve noticed that a lot of the old links have the wrong issue dates or wrong pages. Either I made a lot of mistakes, or the magazines at issuu.com were different editions than the ones now available at The Vault (Boxoffice published a national edition and multiple regional editions, and the content didn’t always match up.)
The magazine has also set up The Vault in a way that makes it inaccessible to search engines, so I can’t always find the new locations of the articles I cited in earlier comments. The article about the Colonial is one of those I can’t find, but I have found the drawing of the proposed redesign of the theater, at the upper right corner of this page of the April 26, 1941, issue.
The only other mention of the Grand I can recall in Boxoffice was the drawing in the “Just Off the Boards” feature of the April 26, 1941, issue, but it’s the same drawing that appears in the 1942 article.
An article about the Bard Theatre begins on this page of the April 25, 1942, issue of Boxoffice.
Patsy: Boxoffice has removed its archive from issuu.com and posted most of it on a section of its own web site called The Vault. I’m gradually updating my old links as I run across them.
The 1942 article about the Grand Theatre by Michael DeAngelis begins on this page and continues on the two subsequent pages.
Here is a 1943 photo of the Rivoli Theatre. It had a handsome facade of brick and terra cotta. It’s hard to tell from the limited view the photo provides, but the style looks to have been predominantly Italian Rennaisance. I haven’t found any interior photos.
The Rivoli opened in 1922, according to the final paragraph of this web page. An announcement that the theater was being planned appeared in the January 28, 1922, issue of The American Contractor:
A history of the Two Rivers Opera House (7MB PDF here) has a photo of the Rivoli under construction (about halfway through the document.) It says that that the Rivoli opened in December, 1922, with a vaudeville show and the feature film Rich Men’s Wives. The Rivoli was equipped with a Barton organ.The Rivoli closed for about two years in the late 1950s, but was reopened in 1959 according to an item in the May 2 issue of The Milwaukee Sentinal that year. I’ve been unable to discover how long the theater remained open after that, but I doubt it was very long. When the subsequent occupant, Evans Department Store, closed down a couple of years ago, it had been in operation for 47 years. The building is currently vacant and on the market. The current interior can be seen in this small PDF from the city’s economic development department. The interior has been altered as drastically as the facade, and is unlikely to be suitable for theatrical use. It looks like the auditorium was gutted and converted into two floors of retail space.
This PDF of an undated page from the Marshfield Times has an ad for the Adler Opera House, which was presenting a program of “Vivaphone Singing and Talking Motion Pictures” on September 3. The year was most likely 1913, as that’s when the English Vivaphone system premiered, and the ad touts the “New York and London Success” of the movies.
James, your description of the Roxy definitely sounds like the theater in the photo in the 1933 Courier article. The photo is a bit fuzzy, but from the architectural style I’d say it could have been built in the early 20th century. This makes me wonder if it might have originally have been the 600-seat theater opened in 1908 as the Alford Opera House.
I used Google Street View to find the building in Don Lewis’s photo at Flickr, and it turns out to be at 104-106 E. Main Street, and currently has a pool hall in one storefront and the E & Z Clothing company in the other. If there was ever a theater in that building it wasn’t the Roxy, which was at 108 W. Main.
This theater’s site is now part of a parking lot.
Dave, at Flickr Don Lewis posted a photo from Billy Holcomb’s collection showing Washington Street in the 1940s, with a side-on view of the Rialto’s vertical sign. I guess Don never got around to putting a link to it on this page, so here it is. I’d still like to see a full view of the front of the theater, but haven’t found one yet.
The 1933 Courier article I cited in my previous comment can be seen online here at NewspaerARCHIVE.com., which allows visiting non-subscribers to view three newspapers a day at no charge.
James, was the Roxy you remember located in the building in this photo? I’m a bit confused by the photo, as a 1933 article in the Blytheville Courier featured a photo of the house then called the Roxy, and it looks like a different building than the one in Don Lewis’s photo at Flickr. The 1933 Roxy was three floors instead of two, and the second floor had much wider windows than the building in Don’s photo.
The only explanations I can think of are that either Don got the caption wrong, and that building never was the Roxy, or the Roxy name was moved to that two story building sometime after 1933.
Also, the Courier article says that the Roxy of 1933 had been called the Home Theatre prior to being renamed Roxy by new operators sometime in the winter of 1932-1933. If, as you say, the Gem Theatre was once known as the Home Theatre, maybe the name Home was used for two different Blytheville theaters at different times.
If you go to Cinema Treasures page for the Ritz Theatre, you’ll find a comment I made that has a link to a 1951 article in Boxoffice about the recently-rebuilt Ritz. It has a photo of the opening night crowd. Maybe it was the same photo the Courier published.
This web page with a history of the Ritz Theatre also has a bit about the Gem. The house that became the Ritz was apparently called the Gem from about 1914 until 1924, when it suffered a fire. When it was rebuilt it was called the Ritz, and in the meantime this new Gem Theatre had been built at 125 West Main Street.
The 1930 opening date currently cited in the description must have been a re-opening. The Gem apparently closed and reopened more than once during the depressed early 1930s.
This puzzling page (the words are English, but the syntax might as well be Martian) says that the Home Theatre that became the Roxy was at 106/108 West Main Street. I’ve been unable to find anything about a Home Theatre on South Broadway.
Here is a fresh link to the 1951 Boxoffice article about the Ritz Theatre. The impression I get from the article is that the old Ritz was completely razed to make way for the new Ritz. The article doesn’t mention a fire in the Ritz prior to its demolition, though other sources mention a fire in 1931.
This photo shows the Ritz before the 1951 rebuilding. The Boxoffice article says that the adjacent space in the building was occupied by a shoe store and a grocers prior to rebuilding. Doubling the theater’s width would have required at the very least the complete demolition of the interior, and at least the center section of the old facade would have to have come down as well, to provide for the new center entrance. If all that was coming down, then the roof must have been removed too. That adds up to virtually an entirely new building between the old side walls.
The entry for Uzzell S. Branson in the 1956 edition of the AIA’s American Architects Directory lists the Ritz Theatre as a 1951 project. Our description currently says that he designed a 1936 remodeling of the Ritz, but this web page says that the Ritz was severely damaged by fire in 1931, and reopened in October that year after a $30,000 reconstruction job. It’s possible that Branson was the architect for that project as well, as his practice was established in Blytheville in 1923, according to the AIA directory.
Here is a paragraph from a January 16, 1926, article about the proposed Midland Theatre in The Reel Journal:
As finally built, the theater portion of the project was six floors, rather than four, and the adjacent office tower had twelve floors.It’s noted in the description on this page that the Midland Theatre cost $4,000,000 to build in 1926-27. The theater was indeed large and lavish, but I don’t think it accounted for the entire budget. The twelve story Midland Building at the back end of the theater has about three times the floor space of the theater portion of the project, and probably consumed at least half of that $4,000,000 construction cost.
Here is a 1927 photo showing the office building and theater under construction, taken from the office building end of the project.
SK: Sorry for the delayed response, but my subscription to this page lapsed and I didn’t see your question until today.
The August 7, 1954, article about the remodeling of the Criterion now begins at this link.
The scans of Boxoffice that used to be at issuu.com have been moved to a section of the magazine’s own web site called The Vault. If you find any more of my old links that I haven’t gotten around to updating, you can (if you have javascript installed, and your browser supports it) find the date of the issue and the page number of the article by hovering your cursor over the obsolete link (it’s 080754/103 for the Criterion article, for example.) Then you can go to The Vault and navigate through it to find the article. Some of the pages at The Vault are one or two numbers off from the page numbers they had at issuu (the Criterion article starts on Vault page 102, not page 103.)
Some issues of the magazine haven’t yet been uploaded to the Vault, and sometimes The Vault has different editions of an issue, and they will be missing a particular article, but most of the Boxoffice stuff I linked to can still be found by this method.
I should add that I’ve found no evidence to show that the theater was opened as part of the hotel project in 1910. It might have been added sometime later, either converted entirely from existing space, or with a new auditorium added behind the hotel and its entrance in former retail space.
The house might also have operated under a different name in its early years. I’ve found references to theaters called the Rialto (1924) and the Gem (1926) operating in Monett in the 1920s, but no details about either of them. So far I haven’t found the Strand mentioned in any of the trade journals.
A book about the Gillioz Theatre in Springfield includes a small illustration of the Monett Gillioz on page 1928 (Google Books preview.)
The book says that Maurice Gillioz also financed and built the Fox Theatre in Joplin, Missouri. The NRHP-listed Fox is still standing, functioning as a church and special events center, with occasional movies.
The Strand Theatre was at one end of the building that was built in 1910 as the Martin Hotel. About 1947, the hotel closed and was converted into a factory for the Vaisey-Bristol Shoe Company. By sometime the 1950s, the factory had taken over the entire building, including the theater space.
At some point the building was expanded along the entire block of Front Street to 5th Street. It’s possible that the auditorium portion of the theater was demolished as part of this expansion, or it might have been incorporated into the expansion, but it’s impossible to tell from the aerial views of the structure.
After the shoe factory moved out, the ground floor of the 4th Street side of the building, which had been extensively altered, was returned to something more closely resembling the row of storefronts it had featured when it was a hotel, but the location of the Strand’s entrance is still closed up. The building now houses a tire retailer and brake repair shop.
There are photos from ca. 1947 and from the 1950s on page 35 of the book Monett, by Elaine L. Orr (Google Books preview.)