JackCoursey: The Empire was on the corner, and the Rose a few doors up the block. The Anacortes Museum has a web page with quite a bit of information about the Rose, which I’ll link to on the Rose page.
The permalinks in my previous comment are supposed to open directly to the parts of the pages with the articles on them, and be enlarged, but the links aren’t working properly, at least for me. All four articles are at the top of their respective pages, so you’ll have to scroll up and then enlarge using the bar at the upper left of the page (unless the scroll wheel on your mouse will enlarge it, as mine does.)
The Queen Theatre was mentioned in the February 2, 1922 issue of The Celina Record. A 1937 article about the theater’s operators, Mr. and Mrs. J. T. McClure and their son Richard, said that the Queen had been in the last building on the street running along the north side of the square. The article did not specify which of the two storefronts in that building housed the theater, but it would have been at either 301 or 303 West Pecan Street. When the first Ritz Theatre burned in 1946, the new Ritz was built in the former Queen building, but being larger it occupied both storefronts.
The first Ritz was down the block from the Queen’s location, probably at either 307 or 309 Pecan. The 1937 article said that the McClures had been in the theater business at Celina for most of the previous twenty years, and that their original theater (no name was given) had been on the south side of the square. It didn’t say how long that house had remained in operation, but did note that prior to the McClures arrival movies had been shown in the town’s old opera house, which had been upstairs over the old Post Office.
The opening of Celina’s first Ritz Theatre on September 2, 1932 (permalink) was announced in the previous day’s edition of The Celina Record. The opening feature was Paramount’s “Sky Bride” with Richard Arlen, Virginia Bruce, Jack Oakie, and child star Robert Coogan, younger brother of Jackie Coogan.
The destruction of the first Ritz by fire on January 29, 1946, was reported in the Record of January 31, (permalink) which said that theater owner J. T. McClure said that he would begin construction on a new Ritz in the former Queen Theatre building immediately. The opening of that house on June 15 was announced in the June 13 issue of the Record (permalink).
An article about McClure in the August 5, 1937 Record (permalink) said that “[f]or years, the last building on the street running across the north side of the square was the picture show building.” That building must have been the one at 301-303 West Pecan Street. From the article about the fire it appears that the intervening Ritz, from 1932 to 1946, was a couple of doors down the block from the Queen/second Ritz, probably at 307 or 309 West Pecan.
This April 26, 2020 article from Broadway World Dallas has about a dozen photos of the Fine Arts Theatre taken in March, 2018.
This web page from the Denton County Office of History and Culture has a few historic photos. It says that the theater building was built in 1890 on the site of an opera house built in 1877. The building was occupied by a funeral parlor and then a furniture store until being converted for the Texas Theatre in 1935.
The original restoration project’s Facebook page is still up, but hasn’t been updated since 2014. Likewise their Twitter page. The Facebook page is worth scrolling through, though, as it also has some vintage photos. I don’t think the current owners of the building have anything to do with those pages. I can’t find anything recent about them, so the whole project appears to be in limbo.
The renovation of the Fairborn Theatre is being managed by the Fairborn Phoenix Foundation, a local non-profit group. Here is their web site. It has a few recent photos, mostly on the “News & Updates” page. A couple of events have been held for fundraising (screenings of a locally-made movie and of The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and only one live event is scheduled (a Beatles tribute in June) so it’s not really open yet. The place is still pretty rough, as can be seen from the photos, and most of the renovation work remains to be done, but progress is being made, bit by bit.
Architects of the Majestic were Drach & Miller (Gustave W. Drach and William F. Miller) according to the plan rivest266 just posted. Drach appears to have been the lead architect in the firm, and gets an entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Cincinnati Architects, which Miller doesn’t.
“Earl Annett has installed new seats in his Durand Theatre at Durand, Mich., after equipping it with sound proof wall and completely redecorating it.”
Vintage photos, including the one on our photo page, show that this Durand Theatre was not at 208 N. Saginaw Street, but at 204 N. Saginaw, which is on the ground floor of the Masonic Temple building.
A photo on this Facebook post is dated ca 1917 and shows the same building, and the sign over the space later occupied by the Durand Theatre is marked by a sign saying Theatorium. The Theatorium is listed in the FDY from 1926 into the early 1930s with 298 seats. By 1936 the Durand Theatre is listed, also with 298 seats. So this house was the Theatorium from the late 1910s into the early 1930s, and then became the Durand Theatre. At this point things take a turn.
The photo on this Facebook post shows the same Durand Theatre marquee as the photo on our page, but it is on a different building, two doors up at 208-210 N. Saginaw. That’s the address given in the 1949 FDY, which gives the house a seating capacity of 422. The movie on the marquee in the Facebook photo came out in 1946, but the 1947 FDY still lists the Durand with 298 seats. The 1948 FDY doesn’t list theaters for some reason, so the new Durand doesn’t show up until 1949, but I suspect that it opened in 1947.
While the building that housed the first Durand Theatre is still standing, it looks like the new one from the 1940s is entirely or at least partly gone. The building there now is lower than the theater in the photo, and there is a parking lot behind it where the auditorium would have been. I haven’t been able to discover what became of the second Duran at 208-210 N. Saginaw, or when it closed, but the Theatorium/first Durand at 204 N. Saginaw looks to have operated for at least three decades.
The Theatorium is listed in a 1921 Polk directory, along with a house called the Star Theatre, but is not in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, which lists only a house called the Family Theatre. Family, of course, might have been an earlier name for the Theatorium, or the Star, or neither.
The Alameda first appears in the FDY in 1937 with 450 seats. !936 was the last year a 350-seat house called the Majestic, located on S. Pearl St., was listed. The Majestic was listed at Pearl and Alameda street in the 1929 FDY, with 466 seats. It’s possible that the Alameda was the old Majestic, remodeled and renamed, though it might have been a new theater built to replace the Majestic, or a new theater that put the Majestic out of business.
The FDY screwed up the listings in 1927 and 1928, with the entire state of Colorado left out of the 1927 edition and large numbers of Denver’s theaters left unlisted in 1928, but the 1926 FDY lists a house called the Mena Theatre at Pearl and Alameda. There’s a possibility that the Mena was an earlier name for the Majestic, and thus possibly of the Alameda as well. Someone would have to come up with addresses for the Mena and the Majestic to be sure, or course.
Camelot 1 & 2 Cinemas were at 101 Crown Drive, at the corner of Camelot Drive, in the Hollywood district of Ruidoso. The cinemas were open in the 1980s, though I’ve been unable to find the exact years of operation. The pseudo-castle-like building was the entrance of a planned community of some sort (Camelot Drive runs through the building.) After the movie theater closed the building was used for live community theater for a while, but currently it is part of a storage facility.
The April 7, 1947 issue of Motion Picture Daily said that “E. J. Blaylock has sold the Apache and Pueblo Theatres in Ruidoso, N. M., to Theatre Enterprises, Inc.” An item in The Ruidoso News about the same time said that Mr. and Mrs. Jennings Blaylock had built the Pueblo in 1940. A small, blurry photo I was unable to capture digitally was just clear enough to reveal that the Pueblo was designed, not surprisingly, in the Pueblo Revival style.
The Pueblo was located on Sudderth Drive, and I’ve been unable to track down the exact address, but it might have been 2340. Some time after the theater closed the building became the home of the Aspen Tree Book Shop, where future actor Neil Patrick Harris was first employed when he was very young.
It’s likely that the house mentioned in this item from the June 14, 1939 issue of Variety was the Castle:
“Leon Reichblum, indie exhibitor, has acquired the Castle Shannon here under lease from Dr. W. C. Frost, giving him three houses in this territory. Other two are the Menlo in Charleroi, Pa., and State in Wilkinsburg. Dean McClosky, manager of Castle Shannon under Dr. Frost, will remain there with Reichblum.”
The Menlo Theatre, then owned by Leon Reichblum, was mentioned in the July 1, 1940 issue of Film Daily, in an item about the opening of Reichblum’s new State Theatre in Charleroi. Reichblum also operated houses in Wilkinsburg and Castle Shannon, though the item didn’t give their names. However, the June 7, 1939 issue of Variety said that Reichblum’s house in Wilkinsburg was called the State. The Variety item also mentioned the Menlo.
The March 17, 1954 issue of the Monongahela Daily Republican said that the Manos family’s Monessen Amusement Company had acquired the State Theatre in Charleroi from Leon Reichblum.
The July 5, 1940 issue of Film Daily had news about the theater project underway at Lacon (it missed its opening date target by more than a month.)
“At Lacon, Ill., B. F. Shafer is installing Irwin Crusader chairs, Alexander Smith Crestwood carpets, Simplex projectors and sound, American Air Blower system and a porcelain enamel front. The Shafer house will open in September.”
Although the bank now on the theater’s site uses a Broad Street address, the vintage photo of the Shafer shows that its entrance was actually on Fifth Street, at the southwest corner of Broad.
1727 Larimer Street was the address of a house that was first listed in the FDY in 1930 as the Zaza Theatre. If it had an earlier name I haven’t found it. In 1942 it was renamed the Kiva Theatre. It was still listed as the Kiva in the 1947 FDY but by 1949 had become the Cactus. That name change most likely took place in 1947, though, as the Cactus is mentioned in the January 31, 1948 issue of Boxoffice as having been recently sold.
I was going to add the Zaza (which is sometimes styled ZaZa) several years ago but lost track of it. It is actually quite a famous theater, not for its own sake but because it was one of the childhood haunts of beat generation icon Neal Cassady, whose father worked in the ZaZa barber shop next door to the theater in the 1930s. Cassady mentions the theater several times in his autobiographical book The First Third. He also mentions the name change to Kiva Theatre in 1942, and is the source for the Zaza’s address being 1727 Larimer.
The Midway Theatre was in operation at least as early as 1912, when it advertised, along with the Annex Theatre, in the May 2 issue of The United Labor Bulletin using the tag lines “Our Moving Pictures cannot be surpassed anywhere. Program changed every day in both houses. Laboring men, bring your families.”
The Annex Theatre was listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The Annex also advertised in the May 2, 1912 issue of The United Labor Bulletin, sharing the space with the Midway Theatre, which was apparently under the same ownership. Though listed in the 1928 FDY, it was gone by 1929.
There appears to have been an earlier Alcott Theatre, when this house was still the Berkeley. An Alcott Theatre was listed at 41st and Tennyson in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The Berkeley was not listed, so might have been operating as a legitimate house at that time (or the Directory just failed to list it, which was not unknown.)
Now that the Zaza Theatre has been listed at Cinema Treasures (under its last known name, Cactus Theatre) I’m sure that the Zazza-Jazz/Jazz and the Zaza were different houses. It could be that the owners of the Zazza-Jazz had a falling out and one partner opened the Zaza down the block in 1929 or 1930. In any case, the Jazz continued to operate off and on for a few years, then vanished, and the Zaza succeeded and was renamed the Kiva Theatre in 1942 and then Cactus Theatre, probably in 1947. The name Zazza-Jazz should be added as an aka for this house, as that’s how it was listed in several editions of the FDY.
I just found the listing of the Fun Theatre in the 1929 FDY and it is listed there at 1617 Larimer, so it must have moved from its original location at 1624 sometime after 1914.
JackCoursey: The Empire was on the corner, and the Rose a few doors up the block. The Anacortes Museum has a web page with quite a bit of information about the Rose, which I’ll link to on the Rose page.
The permalinks in my previous comment are supposed to open directly to the parts of the pages with the articles on them, and be enlarged, but the links aren’t working properly, at least for me. All four articles are at the top of their respective pages, so you’ll have to scroll up and then enlarge using the bar at the upper left of the page (unless the scroll wheel on your mouse will enlarge it, as mine does.)
The Queen Theatre was mentioned in the February 2, 1922 issue of The Celina Record. A 1937 article about the theater’s operators, Mr. and Mrs. J. T. McClure and their son Richard, said that the Queen had been in the last building on the street running along the north side of the square. The article did not specify which of the two storefronts in that building housed the theater, but it would have been at either 301 or 303 West Pecan Street. When the first Ritz Theatre burned in 1946, the new Ritz was built in the former Queen building, but being larger it occupied both storefronts.
The first Ritz was down the block from the Queen’s location, probably at either 307 or 309 Pecan. The 1937 article said that the McClures had been in the theater business at Celina for most of the previous twenty years, and that their original theater (no name was given) had been on the south side of the square. It didn’t say how long that house had remained in operation, but did note that prior to the McClures arrival movies had been shown in the town’s old opera house, which had been upstairs over the old Post Office.
The opening of Celina’s first Ritz Theatre on September 2, 1932 (permalink) was announced in the previous day’s edition of The Celina Record. The opening feature was Paramount’s “Sky Bride” with Richard Arlen, Virginia Bruce, Jack Oakie, and child star Robert Coogan, younger brother of Jackie Coogan.
The destruction of the first Ritz by fire on January 29, 1946, was reported in the Record of January 31, (permalink) which said that theater owner J. T. McClure said that he would begin construction on a new Ritz in the former Queen Theatre building immediately. The opening of that house on June 15 was announced in the June 13 issue of the Record (permalink).
An article about McClure in the August 5, 1937 Record (permalink) said that “[f]or years, the last building on the street running across the north side of the square was the picture show building.” That building must have been the one at 301-303 West Pecan Street. From the article about the fire it appears that the intervening Ritz, from 1932 to 1946, was a couple of doors down the block from the Queen/second Ritz, probably at 307 or 309 West Pecan.
This April 26, 2020 article from Broadway World Dallas has about a dozen photos of the Fine Arts Theatre taken in March, 2018.
This web page from the Denton County Office of History and Culture has a few historic photos. It says that the theater building was built in 1890 on the site of an opera house built in 1877. The building was occupied by a funeral parlor and then a furniture store until being converted for the Texas Theatre in 1935.
The original restoration project’s Facebook page is still up, but hasn’t been updated since 2014. Likewise their Twitter page. The Facebook page is worth scrolling through, though, as it also has some vintage photos. I don’t think the current owners of the building have anything to do with those pages. I can’t find anything recent about them, so the whole project appears to be in limbo.
The renovation of the Fairborn Theatre is being managed by the Fairborn Phoenix Foundation, a local non-profit group. Here is their web site. It has a few recent photos, mostly on the “News & Updates” page. A couple of events have been held for fundraising (screenings of a locally-made movie and of The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and only one live event is scheduled (a Beatles tribute in June) so it’s not really open yet. The place is still pretty rough, as can be seen from the photos, and most of the renovation work remains to be done, but progress is being made, bit by bit.
Architects of the Majestic were Drach & Miller (Gustave W. Drach and William F. Miller) according to the plan rivest266 just posted. Drach appears to have been the lead architect in the firm, and gets an entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Cincinnati Architects, which Miller doesn’t.
The July 9, 1938 issue of Boxoffice said:
Vintage photos, including the one on our photo page, show that this Durand Theatre was not at 208 N. Saginaw Street, but at 204 N. Saginaw, which is on the ground floor of the Masonic Temple building.A photo on this Facebook post is dated ca 1917 and shows the same building, and the sign over the space later occupied by the Durand Theatre is marked by a sign saying Theatorium. The Theatorium is listed in the FDY from 1926 into the early 1930s with 298 seats. By 1936 the Durand Theatre is listed, also with 298 seats. So this house was the Theatorium from the late 1910s into the early 1930s, and then became the Durand Theatre. At this point things take a turn.
The photo on this Facebook post shows the same Durand Theatre marquee as the photo on our page, but it is on a different building, two doors up at 208-210 N. Saginaw. That’s the address given in the 1949 FDY, which gives the house a seating capacity of 422. The movie on the marquee in the Facebook photo came out in 1946, but the 1947 FDY still lists the Durand with 298 seats. The 1948 FDY doesn’t list theaters for some reason, so the new Durand doesn’t show up until 1949, but I suspect that it opened in 1947.
While the building that housed the first Durand Theatre is still standing, it looks like the new one from the 1940s is entirely or at least partly gone. The building there now is lower than the theater in the photo, and there is a parking lot behind it where the auditorium would have been. I haven’t been able to discover what became of the second Duran at 208-210 N. Saginaw, or when it closed, but the Theatorium/first Durand at 204 N. Saginaw looks to have operated for at least three decades.
The Theatorium is listed in a 1921 Polk directory, along with a house called the Star Theatre, but is not in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, which lists only a house called the Family Theatre. Family, of course, might have been an earlier name for the Theatorium, or the Star, or neither.
The 1931 closure was temporary. The North Birmingham reopened in 1932 and was in operation at least as late as 1951.
The Alameda first appears in the FDY in 1937 with 450 seats. !936 was the last year a 350-seat house called the Majestic, located on S. Pearl St., was listed. The Majestic was listed at Pearl and Alameda street in the 1929 FDY, with 466 seats. It’s possible that the Alameda was the old Majestic, remodeled and renamed, though it might have been a new theater built to replace the Majestic, or a new theater that put the Majestic out of business.
The FDY screwed up the listings in 1927 and 1928, with the entire state of Colorado left out of the 1927 edition and large numbers of Denver’s theaters left unlisted in 1928, but the 1926 FDY lists a house called the Mena Theatre at Pearl and Alameda. There’s a possibility that the Mena was an earlier name for the Majestic, and thus possibly of the Alameda as well. Someone would have to come up with addresses for the Mena and the Majestic to be sure, or course.
Camelot 1 & 2 Cinemas were at 101 Crown Drive, at the corner of Camelot Drive, in the Hollywood district of Ruidoso. The cinemas were open in the 1980s, though I’ve been unable to find the exact years of operation. The pseudo-castle-like building was the entrance of a planned community of some sort (Camelot Drive runs through the building.) After the movie theater closed the building was used for live community theater for a while, but currently it is part of a storage facility.
Google Street View of the building.
The April 7, 1947 issue of Motion Picture Daily said that “E. J. Blaylock has sold the Apache and Pueblo Theatres in Ruidoso, N. M., to Theatre Enterprises, Inc.” An item in The Ruidoso News about the same time said that Mr. and Mrs. Jennings Blaylock had built the Pueblo in 1940. A small, blurry photo I was unable to capture digitally was just clear enough to reveal that the Pueblo was designed, not surprisingly, in the Pueblo Revival style.
The Pueblo was located on Sudderth Drive, and I’ve been unable to track down the exact address, but it might have been 2340. Some time after the theater closed the building became the home of the Aspen Tree Book Shop, where future actor Neil Patrick Harris was first employed when he was very young.
The Apache Theatre was at 1600 Sudderth Drive. The building is now used for retail services.
It’s likely that the house mentioned in this item from the June 14, 1939 issue of Variety was the Castle:
The Menlo Theatre, then owned by Leon Reichblum, was mentioned in the July 1, 1940 issue of Film Daily, in an item about the opening of Reichblum’s new State Theatre in Charleroi. Reichblum also operated houses in Wilkinsburg and Castle Shannon, though the item didn’t give their names. However, the June 7, 1939 issue of Variety said that Reichblum’s house in Wilkinsburg was called the State. The Variety item also mentioned the Menlo.
The March 17, 1954 issue of the Monongahela Daily Republican said that the Manos family’s Monessen Amusement Company had acquired the State Theatre in Charleroi from Leon Reichblum.
The July 5, 1940 issue of Film Daily had news about the theater project underway at Lacon (it missed its opening date target by more than a month.)
Although the bank now on the theater’s site uses a Broad Street address, the vintage photo of the Shafer shows that its entrance was actually on Fifth Street, at the southwest corner of Broad.1727 Larimer Street was the address of a house that was first listed in the FDY in 1930 as the Zaza Theatre. If it had an earlier name I haven’t found it. In 1942 it was renamed the Kiva Theatre. It was still listed as the Kiva in the 1947 FDY but by 1949 had become the Cactus. That name change most likely took place in 1947, though, as the Cactus is mentioned in the January 31, 1948 issue of Boxoffice as having been recently sold.
I was going to add the Zaza (which is sometimes styled ZaZa) several years ago but lost track of it. It is actually quite a famous theater, not for its own sake but because it was one of the childhood haunts of beat generation icon Neal Cassady, whose father worked in the ZaZa barber shop next door to the theater in the 1930s. Cassady mentions the theater several times in his autobiographical book The First Third. He also mentions the name change to Kiva Theatre in 1942, and is the source for the Zaza’s address being 1727 Larimer.
The Midway Theatre was in operation at least as early as 1912, when it advertised, along with the Annex Theatre, in the May 2 issue of The United Labor Bulletin using the tag lines “Our Moving Pictures cannot be surpassed anywhere. Program changed every day in both houses. Laboring men, bring your families.”
The Annex Theatre was listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The Annex also advertised in the May 2, 1912 issue of The United Labor Bulletin, sharing the space with the Midway Theatre, which was apparently under the same ownership. Though listed in the 1928 FDY, it was gone by 1929.
The Alpha Theatre was listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. Its last appearance in the Film Daily Yearbook was in 1929.
There appears to have been an earlier Alcott Theatre, when this house was still the Berkeley. An Alcott Theatre was listed at 41st and Tennyson in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The Berkeley was not listed, so might have been operating as a legitimate house at that time (or the Directory just failed to list it, which was not unknown.)
Now that the Zaza Theatre has been listed at Cinema Treasures (under its last known name, Cactus Theatre) I’m sure that the Zazza-Jazz/Jazz and the Zaza were different houses. It could be that the owners of the Zazza-Jazz had a falling out and one partner opened the Zaza down the block in 1929 or 1930. In any case, the Jazz continued to operate off and on for a few years, then vanished, and the Zaza succeeded and was renamed the Kiva Theatre in 1942 and then Cactus Theatre, probably in 1947. The name Zazza-Jazz should be added as an aka for this house, as that’s how it was listed in several editions of the FDY.
I just found the listing of the Fun Theatre in the 1929 FDY and it is listed there at 1617 Larimer, so it must have moved from its original location at 1624 sometime after 1914.
The Fun Theatre was at 1624 Larimer Street. It most likely opened in 1913, and is listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.
MichaelKilgore: The Cactus Theatre was at 1727 Larimer, so not the same house.