Many buildings in Richwood were destroyed by a general conflagration on August 15, 1921, and the original Star Theatre was among them. The original Star was listed in the 1913-1914 Cahn-Leighton guide as a 500 seat, ground floor house, but the theater had been in operation since at least August, 1908, when it advertised in various issues of The Billboard that it was seeking a piano player.
Here’s an item from Exhibitors Trade Review of December 3, 1921: “RICHWOOD, W. VA.— Charles Halt will build to replace Star Theater recently burned.”
The NRHP registration form for the Downtown Richwood Historic District says that the New Star Theatre was designed by Huntington, West Virginia, architect Levi J. Dean.
Here is a a quick link to the photo page ksteinhoff posted. They show that the Vitrolite front has been removed, exposing the original brick facade of 1921. The Vitrolite front was probably of 1930s vintage, though perhaps 1940s, indicating a remodeling sometime during one of those decades.
At David and Noelle’s list of known Boller Brothers theaters, the entry for the Broadway has the notation “cooling only,” so the Bollers did not design the theater. As David and Noelle don’t mention any other work the Bollers did on the house, they probably didn’t design that later Vitrolite front, either.
One of ksteinhoff’s photos show the balcony soffit, and shows a column supporting the balcony. That’s rather surprising in a theater built in 1921, as by then most architects and engineers knew how to cantilever a balcony.
The Broadway Theatre was probably the project in this item from the May 21, 1921, issue of The American Contractor:
“Theatre (M. P. & vaudeville): $80,000.
“1 sty. & bas. balcony. 60 ft. front, 60x163. Cape Girardeau, Mo. Engr. C. A. Koerner Engr. Co.. Odd Fellows bldg.. St. Louis. Owner Company Composed of C. O. Hobbs, member, Cape Girardeau. Brk. frpf., brk. re. cone. Owner builds. C. W. Boutin will supt. const, on site. Owner taking bids on sep. contracts.”
As the item names only an engineer, and not an architect, I would imagine that the interiors were designed by the decorators, which the opening day ad section of the loacl newspaper Mike Rivest linked to earlier says was Blore Brothers of Cape Girardeau.
The Engineer, C. A. Koerner, apparently moved his company to Louisville, as the only other reference to him I can find on the Internet places the company there in 1924, when they acted as general contractors on the Kosair Temple.
The photo currently displayed at the top of this page depicts not the Galard Theatre, but the Carman Theatre, across the street. If Irving Glazer, author of Philadelphia Theatres, A-Z, is correct (and I see no reason to doubt him), the house that became the Galard also opened as the Carman, not the Carmen. The new Carman Theatre built across the street in 1928 was its replacement, and occasioned the name change to Galard Theatre. There never was a Carmen Theatre in Philadelphia, though more than a few periodicals over the years used the erroneous spelling when referring to the Carman.
Here is an item about the Central Theatre from the April 21, 1921, issue of Engineering News-Record:
“Newark—Theatre— H. Kappalon. c/o F. Grad, archt. and engrs.. 245 Springfield Ave., having plans prepared for brick and stone, brick foundation, at 505 Central Ave. About $150,000.”
An item in a later issue noted that Grad was revising the plans, and that the projected cost of the theater was now $100,000. Architect Frank Grad also designed Newark’s Stanley Theatre and collaborated on the design of Symphony Hall.
The May, 1921, issue of The Bridgemen’s Magazine has an item which is surely about the Rivoli:
“Theatre— F. Grad, architect and engineer, 245 Springfield avenue, opens bids March 18, building brick and stone, brick foundation, on Ferry street and Wilson avenue, for Mate Bros., Farley avenue. About $200,000.”
Frank Grad and Henry Baechlin collaborated on the design of Newark’s Symphony Hall, and on at least two other projects in Newark that I’ve found references to: an (apparently unbuilt) exhibition hall in 1922, and an office building in 1927. It’s possible that there were more.
Although the text of the pages about this theater in the Hofstra collection (the last two links in Ed Solero’s previous comment) gives the opening date of the house as April 3, 1926, a notice that plans were being drawn for the project was published in the April 28, 1921, issue of Engineering News-Record:
“N. Y., Hempstead—Theater and Stores— Rivoli Theater Corp., c/o Reilley & Hall, archts. and engrs., 405 Lexington Ave.. New York City, having sketches made for 2 story, 80 x 200 ft., brick and stone, concrete foundation, here. About $250,000.”
As both sources name Reilly & Hall as the architects, one of two things must be true; either it took the Rivoli Theater Corporation five years to get this house built, or Hofstra got the year it opened wrong. Items in other trade journals from 1921 indicate that contracts for the Rivoli were let in July, and that construction was set to begin in August, but I can’t find anything later.
A bit more digging has unearthed additional information. There’s still no opening date for the Crystal Theatre, but the house was renamed Pantages Theatre in 1908, according to the Tacoma-Pierce County Buildings Index at the Tacoma Public Library. The same source reveals that the theater was remodeled by B. Marcus Priteca in 1913. It was renamed the Columbia Theatre in early 1918 and became the Victory late that same year.
In late 1924, the building was converted into a hall for the Tacoma post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. In later years it served a variety of purposes, including an athletic club, a night club, and a restaurant.
The building was still standing as late as the mid-1960s, and is depicted along with its next-door neighbor, the Capri Theatre, in this photo dated c.1966 by the Tacoma Public Library. There is also this photo dated only c.1920s, apparently taken after the theater had closed.
The Tacoma library web site has been having problems all night, so the links in my previous comment might not be displaying anything. If the library doesn’t fix its problems soon I’ll just repost the comment without links, and put the library on the list of web sites I never link to.
The Tacoma-Pierce County Buildings Index says that the Riviera Theatre was built on the site of the former Liberty Theatre. It was new construction, as the Liberty building had been erected as a commercial structure in 1884 and was obsolete. The Riviera was opened on July 7, 1929 in a building designed by architect Silas E. Nelsen.
This house was next door to the building which had housed the first Tacoma Pantages Theatre, which later became the Victory, but was closed by late 1924, five years before the Riviera replaced the Liberty.
This photo of the Capri Theatre from the Tacoma Public Library is dated c.1966. Another photo, dated c.1963 shows the house with the Riviera name still on its marquee. The Index says the name was changed in 1964, and the building was demolished as part of an urban renewal project in 1969.
This photo depicts the entrance to the Liberty Theatre in either 1926 or 1927 (the years of the two bouts between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney), so not too long before the house was demolished to make way for the Riviera.
The even-numbered side of the 900 block of Pacific Avenue is now occupied by half of a two-block long parking structure. The Victory Theatre has been demolished.
This house was in operation as the Pantages Theatre at least as early as 1908, when it was mentioned in the August 15 issue of The Billboard. I haven’t found the opening year for the first Tacoma Pantages, but according to Robert Grau’s The Stage in the Twentieth Century, this was the second house in the Pantages circuit, and was originally known as the Crystal Theatre:
“Next followed the taking over of a store building in Tacoma and its evolution into what is now known as the Pantages Theatre. Like the stepping-stone house in Seattle, this theatre was first known as the Crystal.”
As Alexander Pantages’s first theatre, in Seattle, opened in 1902, and Pantages built his circuit very rapidly, the first Tacoma house might have opened as early as 1903.
Also, the second Grand was in operation at least as late as the end of 1922, when the December 30 issue of the Daily Pioneer announced that the movie version of the popular play The Hottentot would be shown at the Grand the following day.
The Grand Theater on Third Street was definitely the second house of that name, and thus was the house that had originally been called the Brinkman Theatre. An item in the December 16, 1911, issue of the Bemidji Daily Pioneer gives the address of the first Grand, which was opening that night, as 317 Beltrami Avenue.
Before becoming the second Grand Theater in 1915, this house on Third Street was referred to in various newspaper items as the Brinkman Theater, the Family Theatre, and the Brinkman Family Theatre.
The Ben Franklin building doesn’t look at all like it would have been a lodge hall, and is not part of a corner building, which the Elk Lodge is. The Elko must have been a different theater, and not an aka for the Bemidji Theatre. It is one of several early theaters in Bemidji that are not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.
This PDF (1.3MB) about Fort Monroe National Monument includes this information about the Fort Monroe Theatre: “Right after WWI, Reeder Circle was designed for the Liberty Theater, which stood at the end of the circle. This theater was replaced in 1938 by the Fort Monroe Theatre, and the terminus is now a tennis court.”
The address of the Fort Monroe Theatre is 42 Tidball Road. The theater has been used for some of the public meetings of the Fort Monroe Authority, the public agency charged with overseeing the conversion of the facility to civilian use. As recently as March 15, the theater was also the venue for a Town Hall meeting held by local Congressional Representative Scott Rigell.
One proposal for the part of the fort that includes the theater is that it be used as a public residential high school. This article from dailypress.com discusses the proposal. Under this plan, the theater might be used as a performance space and lecture hall.
Rollich: The Midtown has its own page at Cinema Treasures, and is listed under its final name, New Metro Twin. It has about ten times as many comments as the Carlton page, so many more people must remember it. And according to an earlier comment about the Carlton by DougDouglas (click the View All Comments link above) the Carlton was converted into a supermarket in 1980, but had closed as a theater some time earlier.
Here is a clickable form of the link to the 1933 photo that iatse311 posted in an earlier comment.
Hotel: I’ve been unable to find anything about the Granada Hotel, but I think you might have the wrong spelling for the original owners' surname. I can’t find any references to a Remage family in San Luis Obispo on the Internet, but there are multiple results for a search using the terms Ramage and Obispo. This page at Find A Grave lists 13 people with the surname Ramage buried in San Luis Obispo County.
There are probably still members of the Ramage family in and around San Luis Obispo. This web page, for example says that a Tim Ramage competed in the 2011 San Luis Obispo Triathlon. A Ramage Drilling and Construction Company is headquartered in nearby Paso Robles.
If, as I suspect, the spelling Remage was the result of a typo in your original source, then the Granada was probably owned by members of the Ramage family, and it’s likely that at least one of the living members of the family in the area will know something about the hotel.
Warren’s links are dead, but I’ve found this weblog post which begins with four photos of La Pagode and its garden.
This web page has photos of theaters around the world taken from the book Architectures de Cinémas, by Francis Lacloche, and includes a more expansive view of the auditorium of La Pagode (found a bit less than halfway down the page.)
This web page has a general view of the theater’s unobtrusive entrance. Clicking the “view all images” link reveals only one more photo, depicting the garden.
It was the upper floors of the merry-go-round building that were only half built in the ca.1905 view I linked to (I was thrown off by the caption that says Hotel Poinsettia.) In the ca.1905 photo, there’s a gap between them and the Dunlop, but in the ca.1915 photo the gap has been filled by new construction.
The merry-go-round building is a bit of a puzzle. If you go to Bing Maps and use the search terms Ripley Museum Atlantic City (the museum is three blocks south of Ocean Avenue, but the map includes the whole neighborhood), then select the bird’s eye option and zoom in you can get a very good view of the existing structure from all four angles. On looking at it again, what looks like a stage house might only be a surviving section of a second floor, the rest of which has been demolished. I now believe this building was always an ordinary commercial structure and never had a theater in it. It might actually be what’s left of the 1915 building, minus its upper floors, and with the facade remodeled at some point.
The Savoy had to have been on what is now the parking lot behind the building on the Hotel Dunlop site. There’s no telling how long the theater has been gone, but there no doubt that it is indeed gone.
Ed is right about the building in the photo not being the Dunlop Hotel, but the building next door to it, on the corner of Boardwalk and South Carolina Avenue.
However, the satellite view at Google Maps doesn’t show that building very well, so I checked the bird’s eye view at Bing Maps, and the building does have what looks like a stage house, and a central section that could have held a theater. But if there was a theater in that building, it isn’t listed at Cinema Treasures yet.
I suppose the building could have held a ballroom with stage facilities. I don’t think it’s the same building that housed the Hotel Poinsettia in the ca.1915 photo Ed linked to. The current building looks like it dates from the 1920s.
As for the Savoy, here’s another big photo from Shorpy showing the Dunlop Hotel from another angle. Shorpy dates it ca.1905, so it doesn’t clear up the mystery of the Savoy’s opening year. The only part of the Hotel Poinsettia building that had been built when this photo was taken was the section on the corner of South Carolina Avenue.
The Arcadia Publishing company’s book Atlantic City, by James D. Ristine and Allen Pergament, gives a different opening year for the Savoy than Andrew Craig Morrison’s book, cited in my previous comment, which gives the opening year as 1907. Ristine and Pergament say the house opened in 1903. Neither book cites a source.
There was a theater called the Savoy operating in Atlantic City by 1904. The biographical sketch of an actress named Edytha Ketchum, in the 1907 edition of Who’s Who in New York, lists among her credits an appearance at the Savoy Theatre in Atlantic City in 1904, but of course the name Savoy might have been used by a different house at that time.
The Dunlop Hotel, through which the theater’s entrance ran, was definitely in operation at least as early as 1904, but the theater might have been added behind the hotel building after the hotel had opened.
The Savoy was also listed in the 1906-1907 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide, copyrighted 1906. The guide gives the seating capacity as 1,450, pretty much the same size as the 1,500 given in Morrison’s book, so this could well have been the same house.
Here is a brief item about the Arlington Theatre in Riverside, with a small photo of its recently remodeled front, from the September 7, 1957, issue of Boxoffice.
The Academy of Music’s official web site gives a brief history of the theater, but fails to mention the name of the architect, William C. Brocklesby. Brocklesby (1848-1911) studied architecture in the offices of Richard Upjohn, who was one of the leading American architects of the early 19th century.
Brocklesby later established his own practice in Hartford, Connecticut, and designed many historically significant buildings in New England. His other works in Northampton include the Forbes Library and several buildings on the campus of Smith College.
The Academy of Music, formally opened in May, 1891, is an early example of the Renaissance Revival style which, after the World’s Columbian Exposition was held in Chicago in 1893, became the dominant style for public buildings in the United States for almost four decades.
In 1892 the builder of the Academy of Music, Edward H. R. Lyman, donated the building to the City of Northampton, making it the first municipally owned theater in the United States. From 1912 to 1919, the Academy was the home of the Northampton Players, the first municipally financed theater group in the United States.
The Academy of Music is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Facade and auditorium photos of the Oak Park Theatre illustrated an ad for the Kooler-Aire Engineering Corporation on this page of Boxoffice predecessor Exhibitors' Forum, issue of April 7, 1931.
In 1930, the architect of this theater, George E. Eichenlaub, wrote some articles about theater design and construction for Motion Picture Times. Eichenlaub called his projects “Standard Theaters.”
The article in the January 14 issue focused on an unnamed 500-seat theater in a small town some 18 miles from a major city, which fits Angola’s relationship to Buffalo. There is a drawing of the theater’s facade, which looks virtually identical to the 1985 American Classic Images photo of the Angola.
As the article never gives the theater’s name, and the design was intended to be somewhat generic, we can’t be sure that the theater described and pictured is the Angola, but there’s a good possibility that it is.
It’s also possible that there are other theaters built along the same lines scattered about the region, and some larger theaters designed along the lines of the 750-seat house described in Eichenlaub’s article in the February 11, 1930 issue of Motion Picture Times.
Many buildings in Richwood were destroyed by a general conflagration on August 15, 1921, and the original Star Theatre was among them. The original Star was listed in the 1913-1914 Cahn-Leighton guide as a 500 seat, ground floor house, but the theater had been in operation since at least August, 1908, when it advertised in various issues of The Billboard that it was seeking a piano player.
Here’s an item from Exhibitors Trade Review of December 3, 1921: “RICHWOOD, W. VA.— Charles Halt will build to replace Star Theater recently burned.”
The NRHP registration form for the Downtown Richwood Historic District says that the New Star Theatre was designed by Huntington, West Virginia, architect Levi J. Dean.
It does make sense that the 62 Drive-In would be on Highway 62.
Here is a quick link toozarknature’s map.
Here is a a quick link to the photo page ksteinhoff posted. They show that the Vitrolite front has been removed, exposing the original brick facade of 1921. The Vitrolite front was probably of 1930s vintage, though perhaps 1940s, indicating a remodeling sometime during one of those decades.
At David and Noelle’s list of known Boller Brothers theaters, the entry for the Broadway has the notation “cooling only,” so the Bollers did not design the theater. As David and Noelle don’t mention any other work the Bollers did on the house, they probably didn’t design that later Vitrolite front, either.
One of ksteinhoff’s photos show the balcony soffit, and shows a column supporting the balcony. That’s rather surprising in a theater built in 1921, as by then most architects and engineers knew how to cantilever a balcony.
The Broadway Theatre was probably the project in this item from the May 21, 1921, issue of The American Contractor:
As the item names only an engineer, and not an architect, I would imagine that the interiors were designed by the decorators, which the opening day ad section of the loacl newspaper Mike Rivest linked to earlier says was Blore Brothers of Cape Girardeau. The Engineer, C. A. Koerner, apparently moved his company to Louisville, as the only other reference to him I can find on the Internet places the company there in 1924, when they acted as general contractors on the Kosair Temple.The photo currently displayed at the top of this page depicts not the Galard Theatre, but the Carman Theatre, across the street. If Irving Glazer, author of Philadelphia Theatres, A-Z, is correct (and I see no reason to doubt him), the house that became the Galard also opened as the Carman, not the Carmen. The new Carman Theatre built across the street in 1928 was its replacement, and occasioned the name change to Galard Theatre. There never was a Carmen Theatre in Philadelphia, though more than a few periodicals over the years used the erroneous spelling when referring to the Carman.
Here is an item about the Central Theatre from the April 21, 1921, issue of Engineering News-Record:
An item in a later issue noted that Grad was revising the plans, and that the projected cost of the theater was now $100,000. Architect Frank Grad also designed Newark’s Stanley Theatre and collaborated on the design of Symphony Hall.The May, 1921, issue of The Bridgemen’s Magazine has an item which is surely about the Rivoli:
Frank Grad and Henry Baechlin collaborated on the design of Newark’s Symphony Hall, and on at least two other projects in Newark that I’ve found references to: an (apparently unbuilt) exhibition hall in 1922, and an office building in 1927. It’s possible that there were more.Although the text of the pages about this theater in the Hofstra collection (the last two links in Ed Solero’s previous comment) gives the opening date of the house as April 3, 1926, a notice that plans were being drawn for the project was published in the April 28, 1921, issue of Engineering News-Record:
As both sources name Reilly & Hall as the architects, one of two things must be true; either it took the Rivoli Theater Corporation five years to get this house built, or Hofstra got the year it opened wrong. Items in other trade journals from 1921 indicate that contracts for the Rivoli were let in July, and that construction was set to begin in August, but I can’t find anything later.A bit more digging has unearthed additional information. There’s still no opening date for the Crystal Theatre, but the house was renamed Pantages Theatre in 1908, according to the Tacoma-Pierce County Buildings Index at the Tacoma Public Library. The same source reveals that the theater was remodeled by B. Marcus Priteca in 1913. It was renamed the Columbia Theatre in early 1918 and became the Victory late that same year.
In late 1924, the building was converted into a hall for the Tacoma post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. In later years it served a variety of purposes, including an athletic club, a night club, and a restaurant.
The building was still standing as late as the mid-1960s, and is depicted along with its next-door neighbor, the Capri Theatre, in this photo dated c.1966 by the Tacoma Public Library. There is also this photo dated only c.1920s, apparently taken after the theater had closed.
The Tacoma library web site has been having problems all night, so the links in my previous comment might not be displaying anything. If the library doesn’t fix its problems soon I’ll just repost the comment without links, and put the library on the list of web sites I never link to.
The Tacoma-Pierce County Buildings Index says that the Riviera Theatre was built on the site of the former Liberty Theatre. It was new construction, as the Liberty building had been erected as a commercial structure in 1884 and was obsolete. The Riviera was opened on July 7, 1929 in a building designed by architect Silas E. Nelsen.
This house was next door to the building which had housed the first Tacoma Pantages Theatre, which later became the Victory, but was closed by late 1924, five years before the Riviera replaced the Liberty.
This photo of the Capri Theatre from the Tacoma Public Library is dated c.1966. Another photo, dated c.1963 shows the house with the Riviera name still on its marquee. The Index says the name was changed in 1964, and the building was demolished as part of an urban renewal project in 1969.
This photo depicts the entrance to the Liberty Theatre in either 1926 or 1927 (the years of the two bouts between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney), so not too long before the house was demolished to make way for the Riviera.
The even-numbered side of the 900 block of Pacific Avenue is now occupied by half of a two-block long parking structure. The Victory Theatre has been demolished.
This house was in operation as the Pantages Theatre at least as early as 1908, when it was mentioned in the August 15 issue of The Billboard. I haven’t found the opening year for the first Tacoma Pantages, but according to Robert Grau’s The Stage in the Twentieth Century, this was the second house in the Pantages circuit, and was originally known as the Crystal Theatre:
As Alexander Pantages’s first theatre, in Seattle, opened in 1902, and Pantages built his circuit very rapidly, the first Tacoma house might have opened as early as 1903.Also, the second Grand was in operation at least as late as the end of 1922, when the December 30 issue of the Daily Pioneer announced that the movie version of the popular play The Hottentot would be shown at the Grand the following day.
The Grand Theater on Third Street was definitely the second house of that name, and thus was the house that had originally been called the Brinkman Theatre. An item in the December 16, 1911, issue of the Bemidji Daily Pioneer gives the address of the first Grand, which was opening that night, as 317 Beltrami Avenue.
Before becoming the second Grand Theater in 1915, this house on Third Street was referred to in various newspaper items as the Brinkman Theater, the Family Theatre, and the Brinkman Family Theatre.
The Ben Franklin building doesn’t look at all like it would have been a lodge hall, and is not part of a corner building, which the Elk Lodge is. The Elko must have been a different theater, and not an aka for the Bemidji Theatre. It is one of several early theaters in Bemidji that are not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.
This PDF (1.3MB) about Fort Monroe National Monument includes this information about the Fort Monroe Theatre: “Right after WWI, Reeder Circle was designed for the Liberty Theater, which stood at the end of the circle. This theater was replaced in 1938 by the Fort Monroe Theatre, and the terminus is now a tennis court.”
The address of the Fort Monroe Theatre is 42 Tidball Road. The theater has been used for some of the public meetings of the Fort Monroe Authority, the public agency charged with overseeing the conversion of the facility to civilian use. As recently as March 15, the theater was also the venue for a Town Hall meeting held by local Congressional Representative Scott Rigell.
One proposal for the part of the fort that includes the theater is that it be used as a public residential high school. This article from dailypress.com discusses the proposal. Under this plan, the theater might be used as a performance space and lecture hall.
Here is a photo of the Fort Monroe Theatre.
Rollich: The Midtown has its own page at Cinema Treasures, and is listed under its final name, New Metro Twin. It has about ten times as many comments as the Carlton page, so many more people must remember it. And according to an earlier comment about the Carlton by DougDouglas (click the View All Comments link above) the Carlton was converted into a supermarket in 1980, but had closed as a theater some time earlier.
Here is a clickable form of the link to the 1933 photo that iatse311 posted in an earlier comment.
Hotel: I’ve been unable to find anything about the Granada Hotel, but I think you might have the wrong spelling for the original owners' surname. I can’t find any references to a Remage family in San Luis Obispo on the Internet, but there are multiple results for a search using the terms Ramage and Obispo. This page at Find A Grave lists 13 people with the surname Ramage buried in San Luis Obispo County.
There are probably still members of the Ramage family in and around San Luis Obispo. This web page, for example says that a Tim Ramage competed in the 2011 San Luis Obispo Triathlon. A Ramage Drilling and Construction Company is headquartered in nearby Paso Robles.
If, as I suspect, the spelling Remage was the result of a typo in your original source, then the Granada was probably owned by members of the Ramage family, and it’s likely that at least one of the living members of the family in the area will know something about the hotel.
Warren’s links are dead, but I’ve found this weblog post which begins with four photos of La Pagode and its garden.
This web page has photos of theaters around the world taken from the book Architectures de Cinémas, by Francis Lacloche, and includes a more expansive view of the auditorium of La Pagode (found a bit less than halfway down the page.)
This web page has a general view of the theater’s unobtrusive entrance. Clicking the “view all images” link reveals only one more photo, depicting the garden.
Also, this article about Paris cinemas from The Guardian begins with an evocative nocturnal photo of La Pagode’s vertical sign.
It was the upper floors of the merry-go-round building that were only half built in the ca.1905 view I linked to (I was thrown off by the caption that says Hotel Poinsettia.) In the ca.1905 photo, there’s a gap between them and the Dunlop, but in the ca.1915 photo the gap has been filled by new construction.
The merry-go-round building is a bit of a puzzle. If you go to Bing Maps and use the search terms Ripley Museum Atlantic City (the museum is three blocks south of Ocean Avenue, but the map includes the whole neighborhood), then select the bird’s eye option and zoom in you can get a very good view of the existing structure from all four angles. On looking at it again, what looks like a stage house might only be a surviving section of a second floor, the rest of which has been demolished. I now believe this building was always an ordinary commercial structure and never had a theater in it. It might actually be what’s left of the 1915 building, minus its upper floors, and with the facade remodeled at some point.
The Savoy had to have been on what is now the parking lot behind the building on the Hotel Dunlop site. There’s no telling how long the theater has been gone, but there no doubt that it is indeed gone.
Ed is right about the building in the photo not being the Dunlop Hotel, but the building next door to it, on the corner of Boardwalk and South Carolina Avenue.
However, the satellite view at Google Maps doesn’t show that building very well, so I checked the bird’s eye view at Bing Maps, and the building does have what looks like a stage house, and a central section that could have held a theater. But if there was a theater in that building, it isn’t listed at Cinema Treasures yet.
I suppose the building could have held a ballroom with stage facilities. I don’t think it’s the same building that housed the Hotel Poinsettia in the ca.1915 photo Ed linked to. The current building looks like it dates from the 1920s.
As for the Savoy, here’s another big photo from Shorpy showing the Dunlop Hotel from another angle. Shorpy dates it ca.1905, so it doesn’t clear up the mystery of the Savoy’s opening year. The only part of the Hotel Poinsettia building that had been built when this photo was taken was the section on the corner of South Carolina Avenue.
The Arcadia Publishing company’s book Atlantic City, by James D. Ristine and Allen Pergament, gives a different opening year for the Savoy than Andrew Craig Morrison’s book, cited in my previous comment, which gives the opening year as 1907. Ristine and Pergament say the house opened in 1903. Neither book cites a source.
There was a theater called the Savoy operating in Atlantic City by 1904. The biographical sketch of an actress named Edytha Ketchum, in the 1907 edition of Who’s Who in New York, lists among her credits an appearance at the Savoy Theatre in Atlantic City in 1904, but of course the name Savoy might have been used by a different house at that time.
The Dunlop Hotel, through which the theater’s entrance ran, was definitely in operation at least as early as 1904, but the theater might have been added behind the hotel building after the hotel had opened.
The Savoy was also listed in the 1906-1907 edition of Julius Cahn’s guide, copyrighted 1906. The guide gives the seating capacity as 1,450, pretty much the same size as the 1,500 given in Morrison’s book, so this could well have been the same house.
Here is a brief item about the Arlington Theatre in Riverside, with a small photo of its recently remodeled front, from the September 7, 1957, issue of Boxoffice.
The Academy of Music’s official web site gives a brief history of the theater, but fails to mention the name of the architect, William C. Brocklesby. Brocklesby (1848-1911) studied architecture in the offices of Richard Upjohn, who was one of the leading American architects of the early 19th century.
Brocklesby later established his own practice in Hartford, Connecticut, and designed many historically significant buildings in New England. His other works in Northampton include the Forbes Library and several buildings on the campus of Smith College.
The Academy of Music, formally opened in May, 1891, is an early example of the Renaissance Revival style which, after the World’s Columbian Exposition was held in Chicago in 1893, became the dominant style for public buildings in the United States for almost four decades.
In 1892 the builder of the Academy of Music, Edward H. R. Lyman, donated the building to the City of Northampton, making it the first municipally owned theater in the United States. From 1912 to 1919, the Academy was the home of the Northampton Players, the first municipally financed theater group in the United States.
The Academy of Music is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Facade and auditorium photos of the Oak Park Theatre illustrated an ad for the Kooler-Aire Engineering Corporation on this page of Boxoffice predecessor Exhibitors' Forum, issue of April 7, 1931.
In 1930, the architect of this theater, George E. Eichenlaub, wrote some articles about theater design and construction for Motion Picture Times. Eichenlaub called his projects “Standard Theaters.”
The article in the January 14 issue focused on an unnamed 500-seat theater in a small town some 18 miles from a major city, which fits Angola’s relationship to Buffalo. There is a drawing of the theater’s facade, which looks virtually identical to the 1985 American Classic Images photo of the Angola.
As the article never gives the theater’s name, and the design was intended to be somewhat generic, we can’t be sure that the theater described and pictured is the Angola, but there’s a good possibility that it is.
It’s also possible that there are other theaters built along the same lines scattered about the region, and some larger theaters designed along the lines of the 750-seat house described in Eichenlaub’s article in the February 11, 1930 issue of Motion Picture Times.