An item in the June 14, 1919, issue of Domestic Engineering mentioned the recently-remodeled New Rialto Theatre at Indianapolis. It gave the location of the theater as Kentucky Avenue and Washington Street. Today, these streets no longer intersect, which has confused Google Maps.
The actual location of the Lincoln Square Theatre would have been on the block just southwest of the modern intersection of Washington and Illinois Streets in downtown Indianapolis. This is the block now occupied by the Indianapolis Hyatt Regency Hotel. Several blocks of Kentucky Avenue were eliminated for the construction of the enormous Indiana Convention Center and associated buildings. The Hyatt was completed in 1977, but the theater could have been gone for many years before the hotel was built.
Several old maps of Indianapolis showing the former alignment of Kentucky Avenue can be seen at this page on the web site of the University of Alabama.
The Liberty Theatre at Yakima was one of the planned construction projects for Washington state listed in the April 5, 1919, issue of Domestic Engineering.
The Rex Theatre was mentioned in the September 23, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. The Rex and the Dream were noted as two theaters in Bremerton that were operated by the firm of Rantz & Oswald. The same firm was operating the Strand Theatre in Olympia, Washington.
Triumphal arch entrances had gone out of style by the 1920s, so the Hippodrome probably dated from the 1910s. The house was definitely in operation by 1923, when management came up with this stunt to publicize the Harold Lloyd comedy Safety Last.
Thanks for unearthing the construction date for this theater, buckstadrusso. I guess methods of construction didn’t change very much over the decades in this small town. Now that I look at the photo again, I can see that what looks like a facade in one of the revival styles of the mid-19th century could also have been inspired by the Mission Revival of the 1890s.
Todd G. Higdon’s reminiscence about the Orpheum Theatre in the Neosho Daily News of March 7 this year says that the last movie he recalls seeing there was Moonstruck in 1988, so the house lasted at least that long. The Orpheum has since been demolished. There is a photo of the Orpheum on this Facebook page, with a 1951 movie on the marquee.
The Orpheum was advertising in the August 30, 1921, issue of the Neosho Daily Democrat, so it was in operation at least that early. A comment on this page of a Neosho community forum says that the Orpheum was built as an opera house. The 1906-1907 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide lists the Neosho Opera House as a 600-seat theater, but fails to mention if it was on the ground floor or not. Quite possibly this was the house that became the Orpheum, though if so it was a rather plain building for even a small town opera house, unless the facade had been remodeled before that 1951 photo was taken.
Other comments in the forum say that there were once theaters on all four sides of the town square in Neosho, including one called the Lux on the south side and one called the Bandbox on the west side.
I found a 1913 reference to a house in Neosho called the Lyric. One early movie house in Neosho was opened around 1907-1908 by A. V. Cauger, later the founder of the Kansas City Slide Company, one of Walt Disney’s early employers.
This web page, Neosho and High School, is from a memoir by Russel R. Windes, who became an usher at the Orpheum Theatre about 1944 at the age of fourteen. There are quite a few paragraphs about the operation of the theater, including a couple of funny anecdotes worth reading. Windes names the other two theaters operating in Neosho during the war years as the Carmar, named for owner Hugh Gardner’s daughters, Carolyn and Marilyn, and the Photosho. I don’t know if Photosho was an AKA for the Lux or Bandbox or not, but the Carmar shows up in this vintage photo showing the east side of the square, ca.1943.
This is probably the ca.1911 photo of the Jefferson Theatre that was on the web site linked earlier which has gone missing. The photo must have been taken no earlier than 1916, though.
Here is an item from the February 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“E. D. Hines, of Roanoke, Va., who recently took over the Paramount theater in that place, has changed the name of the house to the Jefferson and is now running a picked program of features with an admission charge of fifteen cents.”
The Paramount Theatre is not listed in the 1915 Roanoke City Directory (which would have been published in late 1914 or very early 1915), so the house must have operated under its original name for a fairly short time.
The 1915 Directory does list three movie theaters in what was then the 300 block of S. Jefferson but has since become the 400 block: the Bijou Theatre at 303 Jefferson, The Virginian at 305, and The Comet at 307. If all three survived until the Paramount opened at 317, four of Roanoke’s five movie theaters would have been on that one block, all on the same side of the street.
The Roanoke Theatre was listed at 14 Campbell Avenue SW in the 1915 Roanoke City Directory. I believe Roanoke later converted to the Philadelphia street numbering system, eliminating one and two-digit addresses, so the location was the same as the later 114 Campbell.
I’ve found references to the Roanoke Theatre as early as 1912, in a history of Roanoke County that listed the theater as being among several important buildings that had been built in recent years.
The office of Kansas City architect Samuel W. Bihr, Jr. submitted a questionnaire for the AIA’s Architects Roster in 1953, which included a list of some of his projects. The Stadium Theatre in Mt. Vernon is one of those listed. It was designed in 1946, and cost $150,000 to build. The questionnaire doesn’t give the year of construction, which might have been delayed due to post-war materials shortages, but it’s safe to assume that the theater was opened in the late 1940s.
The article Tinseltoes linked to has the name of the architect for the conversion of the Strand into the Fox, but the scan doesn’t show a few letters at the beginning of each line in the left column of the page, so the architect’s surname is missing. He was Samuel W. (something short) Jr..
I’m thinking it must have been Samuel W. Bihr, Jr., who was a contract architect for Fox Midwest in the early 1950s, designing everything from minor remodeling jobs to entirely new theaters. His designs of the period were typically transitional Streamline Modern/Midcentury Modern, which fits the Fort Madison Fox.
radarKW is correct. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History provides this page about the Colony Theatre, and gives January, 1992, as the time of its reopening as a 5-screen house. I’m not sure what my source was for the claim of 1983 for the multiplexing, but it might have been the Mesbur+Smith page which is now gone. Or it could have been a typo. Spell check, alas, never finds mistakes in numbers.
The Northside Theatre was demolished in 2006. According to this article in the South Bend Tribune, the building was being demolished by Mishawaka’s redevelopment agency, and the land will probably be marketed for residential use.
Here is an undated photo showing the Northside Theatre after it had been converted to another use. There is nothing resembling this building in Street View, so my guess is that it’s been demolished. Below the photo it says that this was the Mishawaka Theatre, “…also known as the Northside Theatre.”
The asymmetrical facade, the broad but shallow tile-roofed tower section, and the three arches framed by Solomonic columns gave the building a look that was more Moorish than anything else. I’ve been unable to discover the opening year, but sometime in the 1920s seems most likely, although an 800-seat house called the Mishawaka Theatre was listed in the 1910 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide. I couldn’t find a theater called the Mishawaka in the 1921 South Bend-Mishawaka City Directory.
A comment on the Cinema Endicott page says that the Elvin Theatre was owned by the Ammerman family. I think perhaps this item in the April 8, 1922, issue of The American Contractor was about the Elvin, and a copy editor just garbled the owner’s name:
“Theatre (M. P.): 1 sty. 52x140. Main St., Endicott, N. Y. Archt. Schenk & Normille, Phelps bldg., Binghamton. Owner S. H. Aminerson, village pres., L. H. Deitrich, care Lyric Theatre, Endicott. Hollow tile & t. c. Drawing plans.”
It wouldn’t be surprising that they got the owner’s name wrong, as they surely misspelled the name of one of the architects, William Normile, and probably the other, who must have been Gerald Schenck, later of Lacey, Schenck & Cummings.
In the letter in the trade ad Tinseltoes linked to, the operator of the theater, B. Worth Dittrich, says: “Just nine years ago we were engaged in the construction of the State in Endicott.” As the letter is dated February 18, 1948, the State must have been completed in 1939.
The Lyric Theatre has been demolished. It was on the southwest corner of Neville and Heber Streets, as seen in this photo. The site is now a parking lot.
Erasmus: The Star Theatre building is still standing, but the interior has long since been reconfigured for use as retail space. You’d essentially have to build a new theater inside the shell, assuming the building is even on the market.
There are issues with this theater’s reported opening year. This PDF of a walking tour of Clarksburg dates Moore’s Opera House to 1917, but also says that it opened on June 10, 1911 with a Charlie Chaplin movie called A Dog’s Lips. Chaplin’s first appearance in a movie was in 1914, and he never made a movie about a dog’s lips, though in 1918 he made one called A Dog’s Life.
I believe the walking tour text is the source of the current description for this theater, as part of it is identical. However, there was evidently no donation of land involved, and Frank Moore continued to own the property long after the theater was built on it as a speculative venture. An item datelined Clarksburg in the March 27, 1918, issue of show business journal The New York Clipper said this:
“What is said to be one of the handsomest and best appointed theatres in the entire South will be opened in Clarksburg shortly. It will be known as the Opera House, and will cost $150,000.
“Frank Moore, formerly a clerk in the United States Supreme Court, is the owner of the theatre. Jack Marks, who made a fortune with a movie theatre here, is manager”
The NRHP Registration form for the Downtown Clarksburg Historic District is more accurate than the guide for the walking tour. It says that the Opera House was built by Jack Marks on land owned by Frank Moore, that it cost $54,000 to build, and that it opened on June 10, 1918, and closed in 1956. It even gets the name of the Chaplin movie shown on opening night right. The document’s estimate of the cost of the project is probably more accurate than the one in the Clipper, too. The Clipper item was most likely sent in by either Jack Marks or Frank Moore, and such press releases typically gave exaggerated estimates of costs.
Opera House was a somewhat grandiose name for this theater. It was a smaller house than the earlier Robinson Grand (AKA Rose Garden) Theatre, and was apparently intended to serve as a movie house from the beginning, though it also had adequate stage facilities. An item in the February 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World says “Frank R. Moore is having plans prepared for a $30,000 moving picture theatre.” This is most likely the project that evolved into the Opera House.
I’m also wondering about the reported seating capacity of 1,150. I’ve seen that exact number on other web sites, CinemaTour and Silent Era, but none cite a source for the number. I came across something about the Powers trial in 1931 (which I have since lost track of) that gave the seating capacity of the Opera House as 600. I don’t know if that was the actual capacity of the theater, or its capacity as it was reconfigured for the trial. Maybe a Film Daily Yearbook would give a different capacity (though that not-always-reliable publication might have been the unnamed source for the 1,150 the three web sites all give, of course.)
A book in the Images of America series, Ashtabula: People and Places, by Evelyn Schaeffer and Richard E. Stoner (Google Books preview), has about a dozen photos related to Shea’s Theatre.
The book says that the senior center occupies the former lobby of the theater, which is a good-sized space in a building built in 1927 and converted for theater use when the auditorium was built behind it in 1949. The auditorium itself has apparently been dark since 1982, when the house closed after about six years of operation by a local nonprofit group.
The address of the Centier Bank branch now located in the former Miller Theatre building is 650 S. Lake Street. The Miller Historical Society has an early photo of the theater on its Facebook page.
The facade is little changed, aside from the addition of the faux gable and the removal of the vertical sign which once rose from the left corner of the front. The theater didn’t have much of a marquee- just a shallow canopy- probably due to the sidewalk being so narrow. Oddly, there was no attraction board on the front, either. There might have been one on the side of the building facing the parking area.
The Washington Post obituary for architect Joseph Wilkes said this about his position in the firm of Wilkes & Faulkner: “Mr. Wilkes’s business partner, Winthrop W. Faulkner, did most of the firm’s design work. Mr. Wilkes, an expert in construction methods and materials, was responsible for the nuts-and-bolts work of translating the drawings into buildings.”
An item in the June 14, 1919, issue of Domestic Engineering mentioned the recently-remodeled New Rialto Theatre at Indianapolis. It gave the location of the theater as Kentucky Avenue and Washington Street. Today, these streets no longer intersect, which has confused Google Maps.
The actual location of the Lincoln Square Theatre would have been on the block just southwest of the modern intersection of Washington and Illinois Streets in downtown Indianapolis. This is the block now occupied by the Indianapolis Hyatt Regency Hotel. Several blocks of Kentucky Avenue were eliminated for the construction of the enormous Indiana Convention Center and associated buildings. The Hyatt was completed in 1977, but the theater could have been gone for many years before the hotel was built.
Several old maps of Indianapolis showing the former alignment of Kentucky Avenue can be seen at this page on the web site of the University of Alabama.
The Liberty Theatre at Yakima was one of the planned construction projects for Washington state listed in the April 5, 1919, issue of Domestic Engineering.
The Rex Theatre was mentioned in the September 23, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. The Rex and the Dream were noted as two theaters in Bremerton that were operated by the firm of Rantz & Oswald. The same firm was operating the Strand Theatre in Olympia, Washington.
Here is an advertisement for the Rialto Theatre from Racine, an Historical Narrative, published in 1920.
Triumphal arch entrances had gone out of style by the 1920s, so the Hippodrome probably dated from the 1910s. The house was definitely in operation by 1923, when management came up with this stunt to publicize the Harold Lloyd comedy Safety Last.
The address for the Norbury Theatre still needs to be corrected to 73 Center Street.
Thanks for unearthing the construction date for this theater, buckstadrusso. I guess methods of construction didn’t change very much over the decades in this small town. Now that I look at the photo again, I can see that what looks like a facade in one of the revival styles of the mid-19th century could also have been inspired by the Mission Revival of the 1890s.
Todd G. Higdon’s reminiscence about the Orpheum Theatre in the Neosho Daily News of March 7 this year says that the last movie he recalls seeing there was Moonstruck in 1988, so the house lasted at least that long. The Orpheum has since been demolished. There is a photo of the Orpheum on this Facebook page, with a 1951 movie on the marquee.
The Orpheum was advertising in the August 30, 1921, issue of the Neosho Daily Democrat, so it was in operation at least that early. A comment on this page of a Neosho community forum says that the Orpheum was built as an opera house. The 1906-1907 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide lists the Neosho Opera House as a 600-seat theater, but fails to mention if it was on the ground floor or not. Quite possibly this was the house that became the Orpheum, though if so it was a rather plain building for even a small town opera house, unless the facade had been remodeled before that 1951 photo was taken.
Other comments in the forum say that there were once theaters on all four sides of the town square in Neosho, including one called the Lux on the south side and one called the Bandbox on the west side.
I found a 1913 reference to a house in Neosho called the Lyric. One early movie house in Neosho was opened around 1907-1908 by A. V. Cauger, later the founder of the Kansas City Slide Company, one of Walt Disney’s early employers.
This web page, Neosho and High School, is from a memoir by Russel R. Windes, who became an usher at the Orpheum Theatre about 1944 at the age of fourteen. There are quite a few paragraphs about the operation of the theater, including a couple of funny anecdotes worth reading. Windes names the other two theaters operating in Neosho during the war years as the Carmar, named for owner Hugh Gardner’s daughters, Carolyn and Marilyn, and the Photosho. I don’t know if Photosho was an AKA for the Lux or Bandbox or not, but the Carmar shows up in this vintage photo showing the east side of the square, ca.1943.
This is probably the ca.1911 photo of the Jefferson Theatre that was on the web site linked earlier which has gone missing. The photo must have been taken no earlier than 1916, though.
Here is an item from the February 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
The Paramount Theatre is not listed in the 1915 Roanoke City Directory (which would have been published in late 1914 or very early 1915), so the house must have operated under its original name for a fairly short time.The 1915 Directory does list three movie theaters in what was then the 300 block of S. Jefferson but has since become the 400 block: the Bijou Theatre at 303 Jefferson, The Virginian at 305, and The Comet at 307. If all three survived until the Paramount opened at 317, four of Roanoke’s five movie theaters would have been on that one block, all on the same side of the street.
The Roanoke Theatre was listed at 14 Campbell Avenue SW in the 1915 Roanoke City Directory. I believe Roanoke later converted to the Philadelphia street numbering system, eliminating one and two-digit addresses, so the location was the same as the later 114 Campbell.
I’ve found references to the Roanoke Theatre as early as 1912, in a history of Roanoke County that listed the theater as being among several important buildings that had been built in recent years.
The office of Kansas City architect Samuel W. Bihr, Jr. submitted a questionnaire for the AIA’s Architects Roster in 1953, which included a list of some of his projects. The Stadium Theatre in Mt. Vernon is one of those listed. It was designed in 1946, and cost $150,000 to build. The questionnaire doesn’t give the year of construction, which might have been delayed due to post-war materials shortages, but it’s safe to assume that the theater was opened in the late 1940s.
The article Tinseltoes linked to has the name of the architect for the conversion of the Strand into the Fox, but the scan doesn’t show a few letters at the beginning of each line in the left column of the page, so the architect’s surname is missing. He was Samuel W. (something short) Jr..
I’m thinking it must have been Samuel W. Bihr, Jr., who was a contract architect for Fox Midwest in the early 1950s, designing everything from minor remodeling jobs to entirely new theaters. His designs of the period were typically transitional Streamline Modern/Midcentury Modern, which fits the Fort Madison Fox.
radarKW is correct. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History provides this page about the Colony Theatre, and gives January, 1992, as the time of its reopening as a 5-screen house. I’m not sure what my source was for the claim of 1983 for the multiplexing, but it might have been the Mesbur+Smith page which is now gone. Or it could have been a typo. Spell check, alas, never finds mistakes in numbers.
The Northside Theatre was demolished in 2006. According to this article in the South Bend Tribune, the building was being demolished by Mishawaka’s redevelopment agency, and the land will probably be marketed for residential use.
Here is an undated photo showing the Northside Theatre after it had been converted to another use. There is nothing resembling this building in Street View, so my guess is that it’s been demolished. Below the photo it says that this was the Mishawaka Theatre, “…also known as the Northside Theatre.”
The asymmetrical facade, the broad but shallow tile-roofed tower section, and the three arches framed by Solomonic columns gave the building a look that was more Moorish than anything else. I’ve been unable to discover the opening year, but sometime in the 1920s seems most likely, although an 800-seat house called the Mishawaka Theatre was listed in the 1910 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide. I couldn’t find a theater called the Mishawaka in the 1921 South Bend-Mishawaka City Directory.
A comment on the Cinema Endicott page says that the Elvin Theatre was owned by the Ammerman family. I think perhaps this item in the April 8, 1922, issue of The American Contractor was about the Elvin, and a copy editor just garbled the owner’s name:
It wouldn’t be surprising that they got the owner’s name wrong, as they surely misspelled the name of one of the architects, William Normile, and probably the other, who must have been Gerald Schenck, later of Lacey, Schenck & Cummings.In the letter in the trade ad Tinseltoes linked to, the operator of the theater, B. Worth Dittrich, says: “Just nine years ago we were engaged in the construction of the State in Endicott.” As the letter is dated February 18, 1948, the State must have been completed in 1939.
The Lyric Theatre has been demolished. It was on the southwest corner of Neville and Heber Streets, as seen in this photo. The site is now a parking lot.
The Boxoffice item Tinseltoes linked to says that the Manos Theatre was designed by architect Victor A. Rigaumont.
Erasmus: You’re too late for this one. The Manos Theatre has been purchased by the International Mother’s Day Shrine and is already being renovated.
Erasmus: The Star Theatre building is still standing, but the interior has long since been reconfigured for use as retail space. You’d essentially have to build a new theater inside the shell, assuming the building is even on the market.
There are issues with this theater’s reported opening year. This PDF of a walking tour of Clarksburg dates Moore’s Opera House to 1917, but also says that it opened on June 10, 1911 with a Charlie Chaplin movie called A Dog’s Lips. Chaplin’s first appearance in a movie was in 1914, and he never made a movie about a dog’s lips, though in 1918 he made one called A Dog’s Life.
I believe the walking tour text is the source of the current description for this theater, as part of it is identical. However, there was evidently no donation of land involved, and Frank Moore continued to own the property long after the theater was built on it as a speculative venture. An item datelined Clarksburg in the March 27, 1918, issue of show business journal The New York Clipper said this:
The NRHP Registration form for the Downtown Clarksburg Historic District is more accurate than the guide for the walking tour. It says that the Opera House was built by Jack Marks on land owned by Frank Moore, that it cost $54,000 to build, and that it opened on June 10, 1918, and closed in 1956. It even gets the name of the Chaplin movie shown on opening night right. The document’s estimate of the cost of the project is probably more accurate than the one in the Clipper, too. The Clipper item was most likely sent in by either Jack Marks or Frank Moore, and such press releases typically gave exaggerated estimates of costs.Opera House was a somewhat grandiose name for this theater. It was a smaller house than the earlier Robinson Grand (AKA Rose Garden) Theatre, and was apparently intended to serve as a movie house from the beginning, though it also had adequate stage facilities. An item in the February 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World says “Frank R. Moore is having plans prepared for a $30,000 moving picture theatre.” This is most likely the project that evolved into the Opera House.
I’m also wondering about the reported seating capacity of 1,150. I’ve seen that exact number on other web sites, CinemaTour and Silent Era, but none cite a source for the number. I came across something about the Powers trial in 1931 (which I have since lost track of) that gave the seating capacity of the Opera House as 600. I don’t know if that was the actual capacity of the theater, or its capacity as it was reconfigured for the trial. Maybe a Film Daily Yearbook would give a different capacity (though that not-always-reliable publication might have been the unnamed source for the 1,150 the three web sites all give, of course.)
Erasmus: Moore’s Opera House was demolished in the 1990s. I believe the only old theater still standing in Clarksburg is the Rose Garden Theatre.
A book in the Images of America series, Ashtabula: People and Places, by Evelyn Schaeffer and Richard E. Stoner (Google Books preview), has about a dozen photos related to Shea’s Theatre.
The book says that the senior center occupies the former lobby of the theater, which is a good-sized space in a building built in 1927 and converted for theater use when the auditorium was built behind it in 1949. The auditorium itself has apparently been dark since 1982, when the house closed after about six years of operation by a local nonprofit group.
The address of the Centier Bank branch now located in the former Miller Theatre building is 650 S. Lake Street. The Miller Historical Society has an early photo of the theater on its Facebook page.
The facade is little changed, aside from the addition of the faux gable and the removal of the vertical sign which once rose from the left corner of the front. The theater didn’t have much of a marquee- just a shallow canopy- probably due to the sidewalk being so narrow. Oddly, there was no attraction board on the front, either. There might have been one on the side of the building facing the parking area.
The Washington Post obituary for architect Joseph Wilkes said this about his position in the firm of Wilkes & Faulkner: “Mr. Wilkes’s business partner, Winthrop W. Faulkner, did most of the firm’s design work. Mr. Wilkes, an expert in construction methods and materials, was responsible for the nuts-and-bolts work of translating the drawings into buildings.”