I’d forgotten that kenmc already posted this comment three years ago, quoting from a 1968 Times article about the renaming of the Iris. It was December 20, 1968, when the house reopened as the Fox.
The description currently says that the Iris was renamed the Fox in 1955. This house was still called the Iris at least as late as April, 1962. Here is a photo of the Iris with “2 Academy Award Winners” on the marquee, and the award winners are Two Women and The Hustler, both of which won Oscars in the ceremony held on April 9, 1962.
I can’t swear to it, but I think the remodeling/renaming took place in 1964. I do know that the tacky false front they slapped on the building when the theater was renamed was pure sixties.
The Champion Theatre was listed in the 1921-22 edition of the Julius Cahn-Gus Hill Theatrical Guide. The owner or manager was P. A. Engler, also listed as owner or manager of the Frolic Theatre. The only address given was 1774 Fourth Avenue, apparently the location of Mr. Engler’s office. CinemaTour lists the Frolic Theatre at 1720 Fourth Avenue. Though the Cahn guide lists both houses as picture theaters, the Frolic frequently presented live music shows.
This item from the February 17, 1915, issue of Engineering and Contracting could be about the Plaza Theatre:
“A theater costing approximately $100,000 will be erected by Edward W. McDonough on N. 7th St., near Orange St. Plans have been prepared by Henry Baechlin, architect, 665 Broad St., city.”
If Baechlin’s plans were used for the project, the theater should have opened by mid-1915, but I’ve been unable to find an opening date.
Here’s an item from the March 20, 1920, issue of Real Estate Record and Builders Guide:
“Henry Baechlin, 665 Broad st Newark, has completed preliminary plans for a 1-sty brick, limestone and terra cotta moving picture theatre, 105x165 ft, seating 3,300, in Ferry st, between Polk and Merchant sts, for Joseph Stern, 207 Market st, owner. Cost, about $350,000.
I’ve looked for an opening date for the Rivoli, but haven’t been able to find one. If it opened not too many months after the date of the magazine item, that would be an indication that Baechlin probably also did the final plans.
Ads in the November 21, 1916, issue of The Mansfield News include both the Arris and Grand Theatres, so Grand was probably never an aka for the Arris. The first Park Theatre was not listed, so that remains a possible aka for the Arris. The White Way Theatre was also advertised, so the Ritz building dates from at least that early. Other theaters advertised included the Opera House, Alvin and Royal, all showing movies.
A number of earlier comments have noted the narrowness of the Akron Civic Theatre’s entrance, but I don’t think anyone has commented on why it is so narrow, or why it is designed in such a different architectural style than Eberson’s Moorish-Spanish theater. In fact, the theater’s entrance was designed by a different architect, C. Howard Crane, and it was built about a decade before the theater itself.
Originally, the current theater entrance was intended to be only one entrance to a large project called the Hippodrome Arcade, which was to have included a glass-roofed galleria lined with thirty shops as well as a theater with some 3000 seats. As told in this Akron Beacon Journal article, the Hippodrome Arcade Company was founded in 1917 by L. Oscar Beck, but the project proved to be too ambitious, and the company collapsed in 1921. Only the entrance building with its Italian Renaissance facade was completed.
In late 1926, Marcus Loew bought the property at a sheriff’s auction. Crane’s original plans were abandoned, and Loew’s Akron Theatre was built on part of the site that Beck had intended for the shopping arcade (the original plans had the Hippodrome Theatre at the far end of the arcade, adjacent to Water Street, where there is now a parking lot.) Crane’s original entrance building was only slightly modified when the new theater was built, and thus retains its Italian style.
In most cases when a theater building’s owners took over operation of the business, it was because they were unable to find any reliable operators willing to lease the house from them, so that probably was the case with the Duplex. A tremendous number of theaters were built in Detroit during the 1910s, so the city probably had too many seats for several years, despite its rapid population growth.
This must have been true for the Duplex, which had to compete not only with other neighborhood theaters such as the Norwood, opened the same year, but with the Regent, a larger and more palatial house that opened nearby on Woodward Avenue in 1916.
I’ve rechecked the Crane project list in Ms. DiChiera’s thesis, and it looks like the Cary Duplex proposal dated from either 1912 or 1913. As project #96, it comes after the Comique Theatre (project #94,) opened in 1912, and before the Liberty Theatre (project #115,) which opened in 1913. Given the period, it wouldn’t have been the proposed theater on Gratiot Avenue announced in 1916.
Possibly the Cary Duplex project was an earlier proposal for a twin-auditorium theater that didn’t get built. The Duplex Theatre of 1915 was probably the project noted in this item from the September 5, 1914, issue of The Music Trade Review:
:“The Grand Boulevard Theater Co. which will build a picture theater on Grand boulevard, Detroit, has been incorporated for $100,000. The principal stockholders are Fuller Claflin, E. Henry Griffin, and Daniel H. Kerney.”
I don’t think that the Boulevard Theatre Company which was planning the 1916 project on Gratiot Avenue was the same outfit as the Grand Boulevard Theatre Company that built the Duplex. The Boulevard Theatre Company, which was headed by J. C. Ritter, operated the Boulevard Theatre, as well as the Rialto.
James C. Ritter’s obituary in the December 1, 1951, issue of The Billboard said that he was one of the organizers and an officer of the Co-Operative Theatres of Michigan.
The obituary of James C. Ritter in the December 1, 1951, issue of The Billboard says that he built the Boulevard Theatre in 1911. A list of C. Howard Crane’s theater designs lists a “Ritter Theatre” as project #79, which would date it to about 1911. The house was most likely open by 1912.
The Oakland Theatre in Pontiac is on a list of theaters designed by C. Howard Crane as project #247. Plans for the Oakland Theatre were announced in the June 3, 1916, issue of Michigan Manufacturer and Financial Record, which said that construction was underway. The article described the seating arrangement of the house as being “amphitheater” style. The Oakland was one of several Crane-designed houses from the 1910s which featured this type of seating.
The July 8, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World said that the Oakland Theatre had been designed in the “Adams” style of architecture, and said that the project was being rushed to completion, and the theater was expected to be open by early October. The rush was apparently in vain, as an item in the April 16, 1918, issue of Michigan Film Review said that the Oakland had been in operation for one year as of March 27, which would give an opening date of March 27, 1917.
The Liberty Theatre was built within the shell of a former church, and was designed by architect C. Howard Crane. Photos of it were featured in an article on Crane’s theater designs in the September, 1914, issue of The American Architect, but I’ve been unable to find a digital version of that magazine online. Fortunately, some of the illustrations can be seen in The Theater Designs of C. Howard Crane, the Masters thesis of Lisa Maria DiChiera, available at The Internet Archive:
chippy1960: Thanks for revealing the specific location of the Ritz, and for the photo. I was pretty sure it had to be on one of those two lots in the 100 block.
The caption of a photo of North Main Street in the book Mansfield in Vintage Postcards (Google Books preview) says that the Ritz Theatre was called the White Way Theatre during the 1920s. It was one of four theaters on North Main Street, the others being the Park, the Grand, and the Royal.
I found an address for the Royal, at 77 N. Main. The Arris Theatre, which was sold in 1918, was at 5 N. Main, and might have been renamed. possibly becoming either the Grand or the Park. By the 1930s, the names Grand, Royal, and Park had vanished from Mansfield theater listings, but a house called the Majestic had appeared. I can’t find an address for the Majestic, but possibly it was either the Grand, Royal, or Park renamed.
There was a Palace Theatre in operation at Cedar Rapids at least as early as 1908. It was mentioned in the October 24 issue of The Moving Picture World. Beginning in 1913, trade publications mention the Palace Theatre at Cedar Rapids being operated by A.J.Diebold.
Comments on the New Times 70 Theatre page say that the Palace was located on 2nd Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets, and that it was taken over by Roy Metcalfe, operator of the New Times 70 Theatre, in December, 1956. One comment also notes that the Palace has been demolished.
Here is a more recent photo of the former Midelburg Theatre. A comment says that the theater was converted into a department store, but doesn’t say when. (A snippet view of the 1964 Motion Picture Almanac lists the Capitol, Logan and Midelburg Theatres at Logan, but I don’t know if all three were still open at that time.) At the time the Flickr comment was made (41 months ago) the building was vacant.
The obituary of Ferdinand Midelburg in the June 17, 1950, issue of The Billboard described him as the “…owner of a chain of Kentucky and West Virginia theatres, with headquarters in Logan, West Va….”
There is an inventory of historic buildings in Laguna Beach (available as a 9.8MB PDF file) put together by the state’s Department of Parks and Recreation, and it doesn’t quite match up with the information from the Laguna Beach Historical Society. The section of the document about the South Coast Theatre says that the Lynn Theatre building on Coast Highway was built in 1915.
It also says that the building itself was moved to the Ocean Avenue location so that the Lynn could continue to operate while the new theater on PCH was being built. The two lots are pretty close to each other, so the move would have been short, and it does seem plausible. Moving buildings, even large, substantial ones, was much more common then than it is now.
The Water Winter Wonderland page for the Savoy says the theater opened in 1908. A Savoy Theatre at Flint suffered a fire on May 13, 1913, according to a list of theater fires in the September, 1913, issue of Safety Engineering. It didn’t reveal the extent of the damage, but if it was considerable and substantial repairs had to be made, that might explain why the theater was called the New Savoy for a while.
Chuck: The State replaced the Orpheum at 513 S. Saginaw in 1924. The small building you refer to was in between the Strand and the Orpheum/State.
The Orpheum and the State were on the lot where Blackstone’s is now. Every web site on the Internet lists Blackstone’s at 531 S. Saginaw. It looks like Flint has shifted its addresses, so the current one doesn’t match up with the historic one of 513 S. Saginaw, or maybe somebody at Blackstone’s is dyslexic and gave out an address with the 1 and the 3 reversed.
The 1918 Flint City Directory lists three theaters on this block of S. Saginaw Street, all on the same side: the Strand, at 507-509; the Orpheum, at 513; and the Empress, at 521. The State Theatre replaced the Orpheum in 1924, and its site is now occupied by Blackstone’s Pub and Grill. Multiple web sites list Blackstone’s as being at 531 S. Saginaw, which doesn’t match the historic address, but the building was just about mid-block, so 521 must have been very near the corner of 2nd Street. That’s open space now, so the Empress has been demolished.
The Google Maps pin is a bit off. This page from the Oneida County Historical Society says that the Orpheum was at the northeast corner of Lafayette and Washington Streets. It was a second-floor house converted from an assembly room that had been part of the 1900 project which rebuilt the 1871 Utica Opera House as the Majestic Theatre.
The Orpheum, opened on January 19, 1901, was leased to the Wilmer & Vincent vaudeville circuit for most of its history, and only became a movie theater on May 1, 1915. On March 20, 1917, the building was extensively damaged by an early morning fire, and the Orpheum was never reopened as a theater.
The architect for the rebuilding of the Utica Opera House as the Majestic and Orpheum Theatres was Fuller Claflin, at that time still an associate of the firm of J. B. McElfatrick & Son.
I’d forgotten that kenmc already posted this comment three years ago, quoting from a 1968 Times article about the renaming of the Iris. It was December 20, 1968, when the house reopened as the Fox.
The description currently says that the Iris was renamed the Fox in 1955. This house was still called the Iris at least as late as April, 1962. Here is a photo of the Iris with “2 Academy Award Winners” on the marquee, and the award winners are Two Women and The Hustler, both of which won Oscars in the ceremony held on April 9, 1962.
I can’t swear to it, but I think the remodeling/renaming took place in 1964. I do know that the tacky false front they slapped on the building when the theater was renamed was pure sixties.
The Champion Theatre has been demolished. It was two doors down from the Famous Theatre, which is still standing.
The Champion Theatre was listed in the 1921-22 edition of the Julius Cahn-Gus Hill Theatrical Guide. The owner or manager was P. A. Engler, also listed as owner or manager of the Frolic Theatre. The only address given was 1774 Fourth Avenue, apparently the location of Mr. Engler’s office. CinemaTour lists the Frolic Theatre at 1720 Fourth Avenue. Though the Cahn guide lists both houses as picture theaters, the Frolic frequently presented live music shows.
This item from the February 17, 1915, issue of Engineering and Contracting could be about the Plaza Theatre:
If Baechlin’s plans were used for the project, the theater should have opened by mid-1915, but I’ve been unable to find an opening date.Here’s an item from the March 20, 1920, issue of Real Estate Record and Builders Guide:
I’ve looked for an opening date for the Rivoli, but haven’t been able to find one. If it opened not too many months after the date of the magazine item, that would be an indication that Baechlin probably also did the final plans.Ads in the November 21, 1916, issue of The Mansfield News include both the Arris and Grand Theatres, so Grand was probably never an aka for the Arris. The first Park Theatre was not listed, so that remains a possible aka for the Arris. The White Way Theatre was also advertised, so the Ritz building dates from at least that early. Other theaters advertised included the Opera House, Alvin and Royal, all showing movies.
A number of earlier comments have noted the narrowness of the Akron Civic Theatre’s entrance, but I don’t think anyone has commented on why it is so narrow, or why it is designed in such a different architectural style than Eberson’s Moorish-Spanish theater. In fact, the theater’s entrance was designed by a different architect, C. Howard Crane, and it was built about a decade before the theater itself.
Originally, the current theater entrance was intended to be only one entrance to a large project called the Hippodrome Arcade, which was to have included a glass-roofed galleria lined with thirty shops as well as a theater with some 3000 seats. As told in this Akron Beacon Journal article, the Hippodrome Arcade Company was founded in 1917 by L. Oscar Beck, but the project proved to be too ambitious, and the company collapsed in 1921. Only the entrance building with its Italian Renaissance facade was completed.
In late 1926, Marcus Loew bought the property at a sheriff’s auction. Crane’s original plans were abandoned, and Loew’s Akron Theatre was built on part of the site that Beck had intended for the shopping arcade (the original plans had the Hippodrome Theatre at the far end of the arcade, adjacent to Water Street, where there is now a parking lot.) Crane’s original entrance building was only slightly modified when the new theater was built, and thus retains its Italian style.
In most cases when a theater building’s owners took over operation of the business, it was because they were unable to find any reliable operators willing to lease the house from them, so that probably was the case with the Duplex. A tremendous number of theaters were built in Detroit during the 1910s, so the city probably had too many seats for several years, despite its rapid population growth.
This must have been true for the Duplex, which had to compete not only with other neighborhood theaters such as the Norwood, opened the same year, but with the Regent, a larger and more palatial house that opened nearby on Woodward Avenue in 1916.
I’ve rechecked the Crane project list in Ms. DiChiera’s thesis, and it looks like the Cary Duplex proposal dated from either 1912 or 1913. As project #96, it comes after the Comique Theatre (project #94,) opened in 1912, and before the Liberty Theatre (project #115,) which opened in 1913. Given the period, it wouldn’t have been the proposed theater on Gratiot Avenue announced in 1916.
Possibly the Cary Duplex project was an earlier proposal for a twin-auditorium theater that didn’t get built. The Duplex Theatre of 1915 was probably the project noted in this item from the September 5, 1914, issue of The Music Trade Review:
I don’t think that the Boulevard Theatre Company which was planning the 1916 project on Gratiot Avenue was the same outfit as the Grand Boulevard Theatre Company that built the Duplex. The Boulevard Theatre Company, which was headed by J. C. Ritter, operated the Boulevard Theatre, as well as the Rialto.James C. Ritter’s obituary in the December 1, 1951, issue of The Billboard said that he was one of the organizers and an officer of the Co-Operative Theatres of Michigan.
The obituary of James C. Ritter in the December 1, 1951, issue of The Billboard says that he built the Boulevard Theatre in 1911. A list of C. Howard Crane’s theater designs lists a “Ritter Theatre” as project #79, which would date it to about 1911. The house was most likely open by 1912.
The Oakland Theatre in Pontiac is on a list of theaters designed by C. Howard Crane as project #247. Plans for the Oakland Theatre were announced in the June 3, 1916, issue of Michigan Manufacturer and Financial Record, which said that construction was underway. The article described the seating arrangement of the house as being “amphitheater” style. The Oakland was one of several Crane-designed houses from the 1910s which featured this type of seating.
The July 8, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World said that the Oakland Theatre had been designed in the “Adams” style of architecture, and said that the project was being rushed to completion, and the theater was expected to be open by early October. The rush was apparently in vain, as an item in the April 16, 1918, issue of Michigan Film Review said that the Oakland had been in operation for one year as of March 27, which would give an opening date of March 27, 1917.
The Liberty Theatre was built within the shell of a former church, and was designed by architect C. Howard Crane. Photos of it were featured in an article on Crane’s theater designs in the September, 1914, issue of The American Architect, but I’ve been unable to find a digital version of that magazine online. Fortunately, some of the illustrations can be seen in The Theater Designs of C. Howard Crane, the Masters thesis of Lisa Maria DiChiera, available at The Internet Archive:
An exterior photo, along with a drawing of the church.
A floor plan of the theater as redesigned by Crane.
A photo fo the auditorium.
chippy1960: Thanks for revealing the specific location of the Ritz, and for the photo. I was pretty sure it had to be on one of those two lots in the 100 block.
The caption of a photo of North Main Street in the book Mansfield in Vintage Postcards (Google Books preview) says that the Ritz Theatre was called the White Way Theatre during the 1920s. It was one of four theaters on North Main Street, the others being the Park, the Grand, and the Royal.
I found an address for the Royal, at 77 N. Main. The Arris Theatre, which was sold in 1918, was at 5 N. Main, and might have been renamed. possibly becoming either the Grand or the Park. By the 1930s, the names Grand, Royal, and Park had vanished from Mansfield theater listings, but a house called the Majestic had appeared. I can’t find an address for the Majestic, but possibly it was either the Grand, Royal, or Park renamed.
There was a Palace Theatre in operation at Cedar Rapids at least as early as 1908. It was mentioned in the October 24 issue of The Moving Picture World. Beginning in 1913, trade publications mention the Palace Theatre at Cedar Rapids being operated by A.J.Diebold.
Comments on the New Times 70 Theatre page say that the Palace was located on 2nd Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets, and that it was taken over by Roy Metcalfe, operator of the New Times 70 Theatre, in December, 1956. One comment also notes that the Palace has been demolished.
Another photo, showing the rear of the former Midelburg Theatre.
Here is a more recent photo of the former Midelburg Theatre. A comment says that the theater was converted into a department store, but doesn’t say when. (A snippet view of the 1964 Motion Picture Almanac lists the Capitol, Logan and Midelburg Theatres at Logan, but I don’t know if all three were still open at that time.) At the time the Flickr comment was made (41 months ago) the building was vacant.
The obituary of Ferdinand Midelburg in the June 17, 1950, issue of The Billboard described him as the “…owner of a chain of Kentucky and West Virginia theatres, with headquarters in Logan, West Va….”
A Wurlitzer organ, opus 995, was shipped to the Midelburg Theater on April 2, 1925.
There is an inventory of historic buildings in Laguna Beach (available as a 9.8MB PDF file) put together by the state’s Department of Parks and Recreation, and it doesn’t quite match up with the information from the Laguna Beach Historical Society. The section of the document about the South Coast Theatre says that the Lynn Theatre building on Coast Highway was built in 1915.
It also says that the building itself was moved to the Ocean Avenue location so that the Lynn could continue to operate while the new theater on PCH was being built. The two lots are pretty close to each other, so the move would have been short, and it does seem plausible. Moving buildings, even large, substantial ones, was much more common then than it is now.
For some reason, Google Maps is putting this theater on South Saginaw Street instead of North Saginaw.
The Water Winter Wonderland page for the Savoy says the theater opened in 1908. A Savoy Theatre at Flint suffered a fire on May 13, 1913, according to a list of theater fires in the September, 1913, issue of Safety Engineering. It didn’t reveal the extent of the damage, but if it was considerable and substantial repairs had to be made, that might explain why the theater was called the New Savoy for a while.
Chuck: The State replaced the Orpheum at 513 S. Saginaw in 1924. The small building you refer to was in between the Strand and the Orpheum/State.
The Orpheum and the State were on the lot where Blackstone’s is now. Every web site on the Internet lists Blackstone’s at 531 S. Saginaw. It looks like Flint has shifted its addresses, so the current one doesn’t match up with the historic one of 513 S. Saginaw, or maybe somebody at Blackstone’s is dyslexic and gave out an address with the 1 and the 3 reversed.
The 1918 Flint City Directory lists three theaters on this block of S. Saginaw Street, all on the same side: the Strand, at 507-509; the Orpheum, at 513; and the Empress, at 521. The State Theatre replaced the Orpheum in 1924, and its site is now occupied by Blackstone’s Pub and Grill. Multiple web sites list Blackstone’s as being at 531 S. Saginaw, which doesn’t match the historic address, but the building was just about mid-block, so 521 must have been very near the corner of 2nd Street. That’s open space now, so the Empress has been demolished.
The Google Maps pin is a bit off. This page from the Oneida County Historical Society says that the Orpheum was at the northeast corner of Lafayette and Washington Streets. It was a second-floor house converted from an assembly room that had been part of the 1900 project which rebuilt the 1871 Utica Opera House as the Majestic Theatre.
The Orpheum, opened on January 19, 1901, was leased to the Wilmer & Vincent vaudeville circuit for most of its history, and only became a movie theater on May 1, 1915. On March 20, 1917, the building was extensively damaged by an early morning fire, and the Orpheum was never reopened as a theater.
The architect for the rebuilding of the Utica Opera House as the Majestic and Orpheum Theatres was Fuller Claflin, at that time still an associate of the firm of J. B. McElfatrick & Son.