The May 15, 1913, issue of Engineering News had this item about the Colonial Theater:
“The contract has been awarded to FLEISCHMAN BROTHERS & CO., New York, for the construction of Nixon-Nirdlinger-Loew Theater and hall at Germantown and Maplewood Aves.; the hall and lobby entrance to the theater will occupy the Germantown Ave. front, and the theater will stand on the rear of the lot. The entire lot is 75 ft. on Germantown Ave., with a depth of 240 ft., and a frontage of 125 ft. on Maplewood Ave. The estimated cost is $250,000. Thomas W. Lamb, Philadelphia, is Arch.”
The May 14, 1913, issue of American Architect and Architecture had a brief item which must have been about this house:
“Los Angeles—Architects Train & Williams, Exchange Bldg., have prepared plans for a 2-story brick store and theater building to be erected on Broadway between Eighth and Ninth Sts., for F. W. Woodley, manager of the Optic Theater. Cost, $25,000.”
Train & Williams also designed Tally’s Broadway Theatre across the street, opened in 1909, and the Hyman (Garrick) Theatre, up the block at the corner of 8th Street. All three of the theaters on this block that the firm designed had been demolished by the end of the 1920s.
The timing and location are right for the following announcement in the “Building News” section of the January 8, 1913, issue of The American Architect to have been about the Alcazar Theatre:
“Naugatuck.—Plans are being prepared by Architects Clark and Beckwith for a new moving picture theater to be erected on North Main St. by Julius Barbario. The new theater will be erected on the east side of North Main St.”
wolfgirl500: Of the theaters you listed, the only one I’ve been able to find any details about is the Rex, which is mentioned in a footnote in Richard Abel’s book “Americanizing the Movies and "Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910-1914.“ (This book has numerous references to Youngstown, but I don’t have a copy and the Google Books scan has only limited preview available.) The note says that Harry Warner built the Rex in partnership with local grocer David Robbins. This happened after the Warners returned to Youngstown from Pittsburgh.
Abel’s book also cites the “Correspondence: Youngstown, O.” section of The Moving Picture World, pages 650-51 of the issue of November 25, 1911, which Abel says has an extensive summary of vaudeville and movie theaters in Youngstown. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find that issue of MPW on the Internet, so I don’t know if any of the theaters you listed are mentioned in it.
There is one passing mention of the Bijou in the book “Haunted Hollywood: Tinseltown Terrors, Filmdom Phantoms, and Movieland Mayhem,” by Tom Ogden. It says that the Bijou was the second movie house opened by the Warner brothers, not long after they opened their first house in New Castle. This was before they went to Pittsburgh, so it must have been in 1907.
Also, it has occurred to me that the increased seating capacity of the Grand Opera House in 1898, noted by Ron Salters, might have been the result of whatever alterations were made to the theater by Lempert & Son. That project might also have resulted in the change of color of the facade, as shown in the vintage postcard you posted.
Plympton Ross Berry was presumably the principal architect of the Grand Opera House, as well as its builder, but this is one of the theaters with which the Rochester, New York firm of Leon H. Lempert & Son was involved, as it was listed in the advertisements that firm placed in various publications of the late 19th and early 20th century.
I’ve been unable to discover when Lempert & Sons worked on the Youngstown project, or what the extent of it was, but I think it must have been alterations of some sort. The theater was built in 1872, and I’ve found no references indicating that Leon Lempert senior was active as an architect that early, and Lempert junior was born sometime around 1868.
In fact, in the early 1870s the elder Lempert was the scenic artist and stage designer at the opera house in Rochester, and for a while became its manager. In 1878, he was busy cajoling Rochester’s well-to-do to replace their aging theater with something more modern, according to an interview he gave to a Rochester newspaper that year. He expressed some very definite opinions about how he thought theaters should be designed.
When the city’s Lyceum Theatre was finally built in 1887, Lempert oversaw its decoration, and additionally designed 36 complete sets of scenery for use in the house.
It’s possible that Lempert senior did not become directly involved in archtiecture until Leon Lempert junior became a licensed architect, and the firm of Lempert & Son was formed, sometime in the late 1880s or early 1890s (if anybody can come up with the founding date of the firm, please let me know. There’s very little about the Lemperts on the Internet, despite the large number of theaters attributed to their firm.)
Plympton Ross Berry appears to have had no formal architectural training, but there are many sources indicating that he did design the buildings that his company erected. Dreck Spurlock Wilson’s book “African-American Architects: A Biographical Dictionary, 1865-1945” attributes twenty major projects in Youngstown and New Castle to Berry, the Grand Opera House among them.
From the photo, it looks to me that the Opera House had a cast iron front. Cast iron facades in ornate styles were still very popular during the 1870s, and modules in various historic styles were available from catalogs published by their manufacturers. After being installed, they were usually painted, sometimes in rich polychrome schemes.
The Renaissance-Baroque facade of the Grand Opera House looks like it was painted white or ivory, with trim that might have been gold or black or some vivid color. I’d love to see a color picture of it, if one exists. Perhaps there is a tinted postcard of it somewhere.
This house opened as Saxe’s Orpheum Theatre. It was featured in the February 24, 1912, issue of The Moving Picture World. The article said that prior to its conversion into a movie theater the building had housed a beer garden operated by the Schlitz company. The theater opened on December 15, 1911.
An item in the January 13, 1912 issue of The Moving Picture World said that the operators of theaters at Waupun had leased the Ripon Theatre in Ripon and would convert it to a motion picture house. It gave the location of the theater as the “…west side of the public square….”
“Public square” refers to the extra wide block of Watson Street with the parkway down the center. The Campus Theatre is on the east side of that block, and has an odd number, so the Ripon Theatre of 1912 would have been on the even-numbered side of the 100 block.
The Ripon Theatre was probably the former Grand Opera House, seen in this early photo and in this later one which shows the whole west side of the square. I’ve been unable to discover when the Opera House was built, but it is mentioned as early as 1888. In the 1897 and 1900 Cahn guides it is listed as Stone’s Opera House. I don’t know what became of the Opera House, but there are no three storey buildings on that block today.
The postcard Don Lewis linked to shows the 200 block of Watson Street in the foreground, looking north toward the square.
The Ottumwa Theatre built on this site in 1941 to replace the earlier Ottumwa Theatre, which had been destroyed by a fire, was designed by the Des Moines architectural firm Wetherell & Harrison. There is a photo of the theater in this PDF of two forms the firm submitted to the AIA in the 1940s. The photo, which also shows part of the adjacent Capitol Theatre, is about 2/5 of the way down the unpaginated document.
The Tiger Theatre’s entrance building is still standing. 319 S. Main is now occupied by a pizza parlor. The auditorium was probably on what is now a parking lot on Lyon Street.
Unfortunately, the Google camera car didn’t drive along 3rd Street in Ironton, so the the only street views of the Ro-Na that are available are either from Washington Street, across a parking lot, or from 2nd Street, showing the back of the building. There are loads of photos of the theater on the web, though, easily found with an image search on Ro-Na Ironton Ohio.
As the Mansfield Theatre was less than 15 years old in 1941, but had been open for more than 10 years, it was possibly the theater mentioned in the July 8, 1927, issue of Film Daily:
“Mansfield, Mass.— E. L. & H. L. White will build a theater on Main St. from plans by Architect John E. Kelley of Randolph, Mass.”
I think the building must be gone. The only commercial area on South Main Street is in the block just south of West Street/East Street, and none of the buildings there now are big enough to have held a theater. I suspect that the theater was on the corner of East Street, where the Citgo gasoline station is now. Everything else on the block looks fairly old.
This web page has scans of newspaper ads for four of the five theaters that were operating in Salisbury in 1954. They are the Boulevard Theatre, the New Theatre, the Ritz Theatre, and the Wicomico Theatre. Missing is the Ulmans Theatre.
In addition, I’ve come across references to an Arcade Theatre operating in Salisbury by 1917, and still operating in the early 1930s. There are also references to the house as the New Arcade Theatre, so it might be an aka for the New Theatre in the 1954 ad.
The “New Theaters” section of Film Daily for July 1, 1927, mentions a theater to be built at Salisbury:
“Salisbury, Md.— A theater to seat 1,000 and costing $120,000 will be built here soon from plans by Edward C. May, architect of
Wilmington, Del.”
As the Ulmans Theatre was an old opera house and the Boulevard was built in 1947, if this project was completed it must have been one of the other three houses advertised in 1954.
The July 8, 1927, issue of Film Daily says that O. C. Williams was indeed the architect of the theater being built at Pismo Beach for W. W. Ward. The location of the new theater was given as Dolliver and Pomeroy, so there can be no more doubt that the Central Coast/Pismo Theatre and the Ward Theatre of 1927 are the same house.
The “New Theaters” column of the July 1, 1927, issue of Film Daily mentions the Orpheum: “Kingston, N. Y. — Work has started on the
site for the Orpheum on lower Broadway.” It doesn’t clear up the mystery of the Two Orpheums. Possibly the 1927 project was a partial or complete rebuilding of the original Orpheum on the same, or an adjacent, site.
The Rialto has been demolished. It was located on the north side of the 400 block of Broadway Street, about mid-block. The site is now occupied by one end of a modern, two-story building housing an outfit called Four Rivers Behavioral Health.
The historic buildings to the east of the Rialto’s site are all still standing, though some have been considerably altered from the year (I’d guess around 1952) when this photo of Broadway Street, with the Rialto’s marquee at far left, appeared in Life magazine.
Here’s another mention of a theater in Kenedy from the trades, this time from the July 1, 1927, issue of Film Daily:
“Hall Industries Open Another
“Kennedy, Tex. — Hall Industries,
operating a chain in this section, has
opened the Kentex, its second local
house.”
I’ve been unable to discover if the Kentex Theatre was the house that later became the Rialto, or if the Rialto was the other theater Hall was already operating in Kenedy in 1927, or if it was a third theater.
The October 13, 1917, issue of The American Contractor said that the Colonial Theatre on Broad Street in Columbus was being remodeled, and that the work was about 1/3 complete. The architect for the project was Fred W. Elliot.
Here is a web page that is mostly about the original Fairmont Theatre. It says that the house opened on June 4, 1923, and was destroyed by fire in February, 1945. The architect of the original Fairmont Theatre was Fred W. Elliot, of Columbus, Ohio.
seanjung: Thanks for the update. Since I posted my earlier comment, a page for the Olympia has been added to Cinema Treasures. It is listed under the name Roxy Theatre.
Originally the Mann 12 Theatres, this multiplex was designed by Behr Browers Architects, who feature a slide show on their web site. The theaters originally had standard raked floors, but a subsequent remodeling has converted them to stadium seating. The exterior and the lobby of the building were designed in a sort of Palladian Revival style (which the architects' web site inexplicably calls “early American,”) but there were only hints of the style in the auditoriums.
The May 15, 1913, issue of Engineering News had this item about the Colonial Theater:
The May 14, 1913, issue of American Architect and Architecture had a brief item which must have been about this house:
Train & Williams also designed Tally’s Broadway Theatre across the street, opened in 1909, and the Hyman (Garrick) Theatre, up the block at the corner of 8th Street. All three of the theaters on this block that the firm designed had been demolished by the end of the 1920s.The timing and location are right for the following announcement in the “Building News” section of the January 8, 1913, issue of The American Architect to have been about the Alcazar Theatre:
The office of Ohio’s Secretary of State included on its list of new corporations formed in 1919 the Norval Theatre Company, of Cleveland.
The Isis Theatre was mentioned in the October 18, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World.
wolfgirl500: Of the theaters you listed, the only one I’ve been able to find any details about is the Rex, which is mentioned in a footnote in Richard Abel’s book “Americanizing the Movies and "Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910-1914.“ (This book has numerous references to Youngstown, but I don’t have a copy and the Google Books scan has only limited preview available.) The note says that Harry Warner built the Rex in partnership with local grocer David Robbins. This happened after the Warners returned to Youngstown from Pittsburgh.
Abel’s book also cites the “Correspondence: Youngstown, O.” section of The Moving Picture World, pages 650-51 of the issue of November 25, 1911, which Abel says has an extensive summary of vaudeville and movie theaters in Youngstown. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find that issue of MPW on the Internet, so I don’t know if any of the theaters you listed are mentioned in it.
There is one passing mention of the Bijou in the book “Haunted Hollywood: Tinseltown Terrors, Filmdom Phantoms, and Movieland Mayhem,” by Tom Ogden. It says that the Bijou was the second movie house opened by the Warner brothers, not long after they opened their first house in New Castle. This was before they went to Pittsburgh, so it must have been in 1907.
Also, it has occurred to me that the increased seating capacity of the Grand Opera House in 1898, noted by Ron Salters, might have been the result of whatever alterations were made to the theater by Lempert & Son. That project might also have resulted in the change of color of the facade, as shown in the vintage postcard you posted.
Plympton Ross Berry was presumably the principal architect of the Grand Opera House, as well as its builder, but this is one of the theaters with which the Rochester, New York firm of Leon H. Lempert & Son was involved, as it was listed in the advertisements that firm placed in various publications of the late 19th and early 20th century.
I’ve been unable to discover when Lempert & Sons worked on the Youngstown project, or what the extent of it was, but I think it must have been alterations of some sort. The theater was built in 1872, and I’ve found no references indicating that Leon Lempert senior was active as an architect that early, and Lempert junior was born sometime around 1868.
In fact, in the early 1870s the elder Lempert was the scenic artist and stage designer at the opera house in Rochester, and for a while became its manager. In 1878, he was busy cajoling Rochester’s well-to-do to replace their aging theater with something more modern, according to an interview he gave to a Rochester newspaper that year. He expressed some very definite opinions about how he thought theaters should be designed.
When the city’s Lyceum Theatre was finally built in 1887, Lempert oversaw its decoration, and additionally designed 36 complete sets of scenery for use in the house.
It’s possible that Lempert senior did not become directly involved in archtiecture until Leon Lempert junior became a licensed architect, and the firm of Lempert & Son was formed, sometime in the late 1880s or early 1890s (if anybody can come up with the founding date of the firm, please let me know. There’s very little about the Lemperts on the Internet, despite the large number of theaters attributed to their firm.)
Plympton Ross Berry appears to have had no formal architectural training, but there are many sources indicating that he did design the buildings that his company erected. Dreck Spurlock Wilson’s book “African-American Architects: A Biographical Dictionary, 1865-1945” attributes twenty major projects in Youngstown and New Castle to Berry, the Grand Opera House among them.
From the photo, it looks to me that the Opera House had a cast iron front. Cast iron facades in ornate styles were still very popular during the 1870s, and modules in various historic styles were available from catalogs published by their manufacturers. After being installed, they were usually painted, sometimes in rich polychrome schemes.
The Renaissance-Baroque facade of the Grand Opera House looks like it was painted white or ivory, with trim that might have been gold or black or some vivid color. I’d love to see a color picture of it, if one exists. Perhaps there is a tinted postcard of it somewhere.
This house opened as Saxe’s Orpheum Theatre. It was featured in the February 24, 1912, issue of The Moving Picture World. The article said that prior to its conversion into a movie theater the building had housed a beer garden operated by the Schlitz company. The theater opened on December 15, 1911.
An item in the January 13, 1912 issue of The Moving Picture World said that the operators of theaters at Waupun had leased the Ripon Theatre in Ripon and would convert it to a motion picture house. It gave the location of the theater as the “…west side of the public square….”
“Public square” refers to the extra wide block of Watson Street with the parkway down the center. The Campus Theatre is on the east side of that block, and has an odd number, so the Ripon Theatre of 1912 would have been on the even-numbered side of the 100 block.
The Ripon Theatre was probably the former Grand Opera House, seen in this early photo and in this later one which shows the whole west side of the square. I’ve been unable to discover when the Opera House was built, but it is mentioned as early as 1888. In the 1897 and 1900 Cahn guides it is listed as Stone’s Opera House. I don’t know what became of the Opera House, but there are no three storey buildings on that block today.
The postcard Don Lewis linked to shows the 200 block of Watson Street in the foreground, looking north toward the square.
The Ottumwa Theatre built on this site in 1941 to replace the earlier Ottumwa Theatre, which had been destroyed by a fire, was designed by the Des Moines architectural firm Wetherell & Harrison. There is a photo of the theater in this PDF of two forms the firm submitted to the AIA in the 1940s. The photo, which also shows part of the adjacent Capitol Theatre, is about 2/5 of the way down the unpaginated document.
The Tiger Theatre’s entrance building is still standing. 319 S. Main is now occupied by a pizza parlor. The auditorium was probably on what is now a parking lot on Lyon Street.
Unfortunately, the Google camera car didn’t drive along 3rd Street in Ironton, so the the only street views of the Ro-Na that are available are either from Washington Street, across a parking lot, or from 2nd Street, showing the back of the building. There are loads of photos of the theater on the web, though, easily found with an image search on Ro-Na Ironton Ohio.
David and Noelle Soren’s list of known Boller Brothers theaters includes the Varsity in Columbia.
As the Mansfield Theatre was less than 15 years old in 1941, but had been open for more than 10 years, it was possibly the theater mentioned in the July 8, 1927, issue of Film Daily:
I think the building must be gone. The only commercial area on South Main Street is in the block just south of West Street/East Street, and none of the buildings there now are big enough to have held a theater. I suspect that the theater was on the corner of East Street, where the Citgo gasoline station is now. Everything else on the block looks fairly old.Here are demolition photos of the Boulevard Theatre from 2009:
Part I
Part II
Part III
This web page has scans of newspaper ads for four of the five theaters that were operating in Salisbury in 1954. They are the Boulevard Theatre, the New Theatre, the Ritz Theatre, and the Wicomico Theatre. Missing is the Ulmans Theatre.
In addition, I’ve come across references to an Arcade Theatre operating in Salisbury by 1917, and still operating in the early 1930s. There are also references to the house as the New Arcade Theatre, so it might be an aka for the New Theatre in the 1954 ad.
The “New Theaters” section of Film Daily for July 1, 1927, mentions a theater to be built at Salisbury:
As the Ulmans Theatre was an old opera house and the Boulevard was built in 1947, if this project was completed it must have been one of the other three houses advertised in 1954.The July 8, 1927, issue of Film Daily says that O. C. Williams was indeed the architect of the theater being built at Pismo Beach for W. W. Ward. The location of the new theater was given as Dolliver and Pomeroy, so there can be no more doubt that the Central Coast/Pismo Theatre and the Ward Theatre of 1927 are the same house.
The “New Theaters” column of the July 1, 1927, issue of Film Daily mentions the Orpheum: “Kingston, N. Y. — Work has started on the site for the Orpheum on lower Broadway.” It doesn’t clear up the mystery of the Two Orpheums. Possibly the 1927 project was a partial or complete rebuilding of the original Orpheum on the same, or an adjacent, site.
The Rialto has been demolished. It was located on the north side of the 400 block of Broadway Street, about mid-block. The site is now occupied by one end of a modern, two-story building housing an outfit called Four Rivers Behavioral Health.
The historic buildings to the east of the Rialto’s site are all still standing, though some have been considerably altered from the year (I’d guess around 1952) when this photo of Broadway Street, with the Rialto’s marquee at far left, appeared in Life magazine.
Here’s another mention of a theater in Kenedy from the trades, this time from the July 1, 1927, issue of Film Daily:
I’ve been unable to discover if the Kentex Theatre was the house that later became the Rialto, or if the Rialto was the other theater Hall was already operating in Kenedy in 1927, or if it was a third theater.The 1952 Boxoffice Magazine item about the Plaza Theater cited in my earlier comment is now located at this link.
The October 13, 1917, issue of The American Contractor said that the Colonial Theatre on Broad Street in Columbus was being remodeled, and that the work was about 1/3 complete. The architect for the project was Fred W. Elliot.
Here is a web page that is mostly about the original Fairmont Theatre. It says that the house opened on June 4, 1923, and was destroyed by fire in February, 1945. The architect of the original Fairmont Theatre was Fred W. Elliot, of Columbus, Ohio.
The rebuilt Fairmont was opened on July 18, 1946.
seanjung: Thanks for the update. Since I posted my earlier comment, a page for the Olympia has been added to Cinema Treasures. It is listed under the name Roxy Theatre.
Behr Browers Architects provide a slide show of the Muvico theaters on their web site. The architectural firm is headquartered in Thousand Oaks.
Originally the Mann 12 Theatres, this multiplex was designed by Behr Browers Architects, who feature a slide show on their web site. The theaters originally had standard raked floors, but a subsequent remodeling has converted them to stadium seating. The exterior and the lobby of the building were designed in a sort of Palladian Revival style (which the architects' web site inexplicably calls “early American,”) but there were only hints of the style in the auditoriums.