The Empress Theatre in Medicine Hat was part of a circuit which was the subject of this item from the July 6, 1912 issue of Moving Picture World“
"K. J. McRae, one of the owners of the Empress Theater Circuit, in MacLeod and Medicine Hat, Alberta, and Vernon and Kamloops, B. C, was a visitor at the World office last week. He stated that his company will open up new houses in Nelson and Revelstoke, B. C, in August. Straight picture programs are run in nearly all these new houses, which have an average capacity of 550 people, some of them seating as many as 750. Good traveling dramatic attractions are shown in these theaters when they chance that way. Three reels of pictures constitute a program in any of the houses, and the admission is from 15 to 25 cents. A four-piece orchestra, with good spotlight singers, are also used. Two presentations in the afternoon and two at night are given. The best people are catered to and well-selected Licensed or Independent programs are used, according to the location of the town. The Western houses are booked from Vancouver, B. C, and the Eastern from Winnipeg. Mr. McRae stated that all the picture theaters in the Dominion of Canada, west of Winnipeg, are high-class structures. Mr. McRae spoke highly of the World and stated that every house on the circuit was a subscriber.”
The Monarch Theatre at Medicine Hat was mentioned in the September 11, 1915 issue of Moving Picture World. It was then being operated by William Findlay. Also mentioned in the same item was the rival Dreamland Theatre, operated Joseph Leonard.
The opening of the Towne Theatre was noted in the March 31, 1956 issue of Boxoffice. Owner Adolph Dederer had entered the theater business at Medicine Hat in 1941 (Boxoffice mistakenly says 1942) when he opened the Astra Theatre.
This house was still in operation by Durkee Theatres as The Playhouse at least as late as 1979, at which time a move was afoot to convert it into a live theater. This apparently failed to materialize, and the house appears to have closed soon after.
The Republic Theatre was listed in the 1927 Film Daily Yearbook. The 1926 Yearbook made a mess of Maryland listings and had no theater names for Annapolis, though the town itself was listed. I’ve come across references to a theater near the Republic called variously the Magnet, the Palace and the Garden, indicating that the Garden was in operation at the time the Republic opened, but was closed and dismantled in 1923, so the Republic was open by that year.
This item from the January 22, 1910 issue of Moving Picture World might have been about the house that became Keith’s: “Lowell, Mass.— Another moving picture theater is being erected here, at Bridge and Paige streets, for Alexandra Straus.”
I’ve been unable to find out anything about Alexandra Straus, but perhaps she lost control of the project before it was completed, or perhaps soon after it opened, as this page about the histories of some of Lowell’s movie theaters says that Keith’s operated at this location from 1911 to 1963. The page also says that the building was demolished in 1976.
Perhaps the the 1911 opening of the Gem was a reopening, or this item from the January 22, 1910 issue of Moving Picture World might have been about a different Gem Theatre: “Green Bay, Wis.— The Gem is the name of the latest moving picture theater opened here under the proprietorship of H. U. Cole.”
Here is an item about this theater from the January 22, 1910 issue of Moving Picture World: “Paterson, N. J.— The Paterson Show Company have purchased the moving picture theater at 136 Market street.” The Paterson Show is listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.
The Fairy Theatre is listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. It is also mentioned in the September 11, 1915 issue of Moving Picture World. The place might have been fairly new in 1914, as a history of Stark County published in 1915 contains the line “Mr. Whitson started his bank in a frame building on the east side of Main Street on a lot adjoining where the New Fairy Theatre is now located.”
Quite a few mentions of the Tivoli appear in trade journals through the 1920s. The house was operated by Earle J. Williams from at least as early as 1924. It’s likely that Williams was the person who later opened the Earl Theatre. Knoxville is represented in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory by two theaters: the Lyric, also located on the south side of the square, so possibly the same house as the Tivoli, and the Opera House, no location given. The earliest mention of Knoxville I’ve found in the trades is from 1910, when the January 22 issue of Moving Picture World said that “R. O. Farmer is to open a new moving picture theater here.”
The Earl most likely opened in 1942, when the April 10 issue of Film Daily reported it as being among theaters that had recently bought Super Simplex projectors and Crestwood carpeting from the National Theater Supply Company in Chicago. The Earl was probably built by Earle J. Williams, who had operated the Tivoli Theatre in Knoxville at least as early as 1924. Williams was still in the theater business at least as late as 1951, when he was mentioned in the June 9 issue of Boxoffice as the co-owner of the Macomb Drive-In at Carthage, Illinois along with a Mr. Allen.
The Moving Picture World items from 1924 I cited in my earlier comment say that W. G. Maute, owner of the new Maute Theatre, also owned the Grand, so they were two separate houses. No mergers needed.
The June, 1925 issue of The Architectural Forum has two pages about the Maute Theatre, including a floor plan, exterior view and two interior photos.
I see that the 1940 Lake Theatre grand opening ad credits the local firm of Fetzer & Fetzer as architects of that year’s remodeling. Multiple generations of Fetzers were active in the firm over the years, but as of 1940 it appears that John Peter Fetzer Sr. and Henry Peter Fetzer were the principals.
New information about Central City has cropped up, and there were houses called the Empress operating outside the 1922-1924 time frame we have for this theater. A 320-seat Empress is listed at Central City in Gus Hill’s 1914-1915 Theatrical Directory, and the records of an anti-trust case making its way through the courts in the early 1940s reveal that a Guy D. Martin and Mr. F. M. Pittman had converted a store building into a house called the Empress Theatre in early 1937. Also, an item in the Central City newspaper, The Times-Argus, on December 2, 1938, said that the Empress Theatre would reopen on December 4, repairs having been completed following a fire on Thanksgiving Day.
The Empress Theatre at 112 N. First Street was in operation by 1915, and is seen in this photo from the Darren Snow collection at CinemaTour, dated 1921. I’m not sure when it closed, or if it later operated under any other names. The Empress building that was converted into an electronics store in 1954 (not 1924) must have been the second Empress, which had opened in 1937.
I don’t know if the Empress opened in 1937 by Martin and Pittman was in the same location as the earlier Empress, which might have been converted into a store building, though I don’t know when. The 1926 FDY lists four theaters at Central City: The Corbin, the Hippodrome, the Selba and the Union. Any of those other than the Selba might have been the old Empress under a new name. I also now believe that the theater designed by Joseph & Joseph in 1921 was in fact the Selba, which in 1937 was renamed the State Theatre after being acquired by the Crescent Amusement Company. At this time we don’t have a page for it yet.
In any case, quite a bit of research still needs to be done on Central City’s theaters. We have only the sketchiest outlines so far.
While there is a Luverne, Minnesota, the town in Iowa styles its name as Lu Verne.
I don’t know if these are earlier akas for this house or not (the town is so small I doubt it has ever had two theaters at once), but Film Daily of October 4, 1937 reported that the former Roxy Theatre in Luverne [sic] was now called the Time Theatre.
This house probably opened as the Palace. The October 4, 1937 issue of Film Daily noted that the former Palace Theatre in Waverly had been renamed Waverly Theatre.
The Norka Theatre got a CinemaScope upgrade, as noted in this item from Motion Picture Herald of January 7, 1956: “Clifford Shearon has reopened his Norka theatre in Akron, Ohio, following a remodeling program, which included a new wide-screen and new projectors.”
This house became the Gorham Theatre in 1956. This item is from the January 7, 1956 issue of Motion Picture Herald:
“New Heywood-Wakefield auditorium seats have been installed in the Gorham theatre in Gorham, N. H., formerly known as the Ritz and renamed following extensive alterations. The latter also included installations for reproducing four-track magnetic stereophonic sound, air-conditioning and new carpets.”
A Facebook post from the Gorham Historical Society says that the theater was located on Androscoggin Street, and that it burned down, though it doesn’t give a date for that event.
The line added to the description is badly phrased. The new zoning code was not aimed at the Chinese Theatre, but is simply a provision to allow housing to be built on land that was previously reserved exclusively for commercial use. Nobody is going to knock down one of the city’s most successful tourist attractions to put up apartments, especially when the same code change opens up many thousands of acres of lower value commercial properties (and their parking lots) for residential use.
In the 1948 article, Bodwell says that he opened the Paramount in “Harty’s Hall” which had been a dance hall, so the place at 109-111 might be most likely.
Another puzzle in Wyoming is the Lyceum Theatre, which is where Bodwell began working at the age of ten, in 1914. That year the AMPD listed the Lyceum at 101 Main Street (Main Avenue on modern maps), but a 1916 Moving Picture World item notes the opening of a new Lyceum. One possibility I haven’t been able to either confirm or eliminate is that the Lyceum moved into the Star’s former location that year, since it was already set up as a theater. The Lyceum is the only house mentioned in the trades until the Paramount appears in 1924.
The Star Theatre originally operated in another location, and moved in 1912. The July 13 issue of Moving Picture World said “[t]he Star Theater, larger, more comfortable and more modern, is now housed in the Patterson Building, at Wyoming, Ill.” If the Star is at this location on the 1913 map, this must have been the Patterson Building. The Star is not listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, though that publication is known not to have been exhaustive, so the Star could have been still in operation then. Still, I haven’t found it mentioned in the trade journals.
This Paramount Theatre did open in 1934, but owner Marion Bodwell was operating a house of that name from 1923 on. It was mentioned in the March 29, 1924 issue of Exhibitors Herald. In that issue, Bodwell says that his theater was an upstairs house, so it must not have occupied the same space as the old Star. An article about Bodwell appeared in Boxoffice of November 6, 1948, commemorating his 25th anniversary in the theater business, and it was in that article that he said he moved the Paramount into the ground floor location in August, 1934.
One puzzle is that the Paramount is not listed in the Film Daily Yearbook until 1929, and Wyoming doesn’t appear in the book at all in 1927 and 1928. In 1926 the Lyceum is the only theater listed, though in the 1948 article Bodwell says that house closed within a year after he opened the Paramount on October 21, 1923. As usual, I think we can blame FDY for the inaccuracies.
However, if the original Paramount was an upstairs theater and didn’t open in this location until 1934, and was the only theater in town for several years prior to that, the space it moved into where the old Star had once been must have been used for something other than a theater in the interim. That could have been for as long as two decades, if the Star did in fact close before the 1914 Directory was published.
The Princess Theatre is listed (without an address) in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. I haven’t found the Princess mentioned in the trade journals, though two other houses in Wyoming, the Lyceum and the Paramount, were. The Lyceum last appears in 1923, but Marion Bodwell’s Paramount is still appearing in Boxoffice in the 1960s. I suspect that the Princess was a very short-lived theater.
Coate and NightHawk1 were probably right about this house opening as a single screener, probably in 1971. The May 31, 1971 issue of Boxoffice had a brief article headed “Schneider-Merl’s 9th Theatre is Announced” and it was about a project for a 600-seat single screen house at the Plaza shopping center in Roanoke Rapids. It was one of at least four projects the rapidly expanding Schneider-Merl chain had underway at the time, three of which (that I’ve found so far) rated articles in Boxoffice that year. The other two were at Durham and at Boone, North Carolina. All three articles cited Tom Hutchins of Spartanburg as the architect of the theaters.
Along with its new name, the Dowd Center Theatre has a new web site.
The Empress Theatre in Medicine Hat was part of a circuit which was the subject of this item from the July 6, 1912 issue of Moving Picture World“
The Monarch Theatre at Medicine Hat was mentioned in the September 11, 1915 issue of Moving Picture World. It was then being operated by William Findlay. Also mentioned in the same item was the rival Dreamland Theatre, operated Joseph Leonard.
The opening of the Towne Theatre was noted in the March 31, 1956 issue of Boxoffice. Owner Adolph Dederer had entered the theater business at Medicine Hat in 1941 (Boxoffice mistakenly says 1942) when he opened the Astra Theatre.
The Star Theatre was Annapolis’s African American movie house. It was listed in the City Directory by 1925, and closed in 1965.
This house was still in operation by Durkee Theatres as The Playhouse at least as late as 1979, at which time a move was afoot to convert it into a live theater. This apparently failed to materialize, and the house appears to have closed soon after.
The Republic Theatre was listed in the 1927 Film Daily Yearbook. The 1926 Yearbook made a mess of Maryland listings and had no theater names for Annapolis, though the town itself was listed. I’ve come across references to a theater near the Republic called variously the Magnet, the Palace and the Garden, indicating that the Garden was in operation at the time the Republic opened, but was closed and dismantled in 1923, so the Republic was open by that year.
This item from the January 22, 1910 issue of Moving Picture World might have been about the house that became Keith’s: “Lowell, Mass.— Another moving picture theater is being erected here, at Bridge and Paige streets, for Alexandra Straus.”
I’ve been unable to find out anything about Alexandra Straus, but perhaps she lost control of the project before it was completed, or perhaps soon after it opened, as this page about the histories of some of Lowell’s movie theaters says that Keith’s operated at this location from 1911 to 1963. The page also says that the building was demolished in 1976.
Perhaps the the 1911 opening of the Gem was a reopening, or this item from the January 22, 1910 issue of Moving Picture World might have been about a different Gem Theatre: “Green Bay, Wis.— The Gem is the name of the latest moving picture theater opened here under the proprietorship of H. U. Cole.”
Here is an item about this theater from the January 22, 1910 issue of Moving Picture World: “Paterson, N. J.— The Paterson Show Company have purchased the moving picture theater at 136 Market street.” The Paterson Show is listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.
The Fairy Theatre is listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. It is also mentioned in the September 11, 1915 issue of Moving Picture World. The place might have been fairly new in 1914, as a history of Stark County published in 1915 contains the line “Mr. Whitson started his bank in a frame building on the east side of Main Street on a lot adjoining where the New Fairy Theatre is now located.”
Quite a few mentions of the Tivoli appear in trade journals through the 1920s. The house was operated by Earle J. Williams from at least as early as 1924. It’s likely that Williams was the person who later opened the Earl Theatre. Knoxville is represented in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory by two theaters: the Lyric, also located on the south side of the square, so possibly the same house as the Tivoli, and the Opera House, no location given. The earliest mention of Knoxville I’ve found in the trades is from 1910, when the January 22 issue of Moving Picture World said that “R. O. Farmer is to open a new moving picture theater here.”
The Earl most likely opened in 1942, when the April 10 issue of Film Daily reported it as being among theaters that had recently bought Super Simplex projectors and Crestwood carpeting from the National Theater Supply Company in Chicago. The Earl was probably built by Earle J. Williams, who had operated the Tivoli Theatre in Knoxville at least as early as 1924. Williams was still in the theater business at least as late as 1951, when he was mentioned in the June 9 issue of Boxoffice as the co-owner of the Macomb Drive-In at Carthage, Illinois along with a Mr. Allen.
The Moving Picture World items from 1924 I cited in my earlier comment say that W. G. Maute, owner of the new Maute Theatre, also owned the Grand, so they were two separate houses. No mergers needed.
The June, 1925 issue of The Architectural Forum has two pages about the Maute Theatre, including a floor plan, exterior view and two interior photos.
I see that the 1940 Lake Theatre grand opening ad credits the local firm of Fetzer & Fetzer as architects of that year’s remodeling. Multiple generations of Fetzers were active in the firm over the years, but as of 1940 it appears that John Peter Fetzer Sr. and Henry Peter Fetzer were the principals.
New information about Central City has cropped up, and there were houses called the Empress operating outside the 1922-1924 time frame we have for this theater. A 320-seat Empress is listed at Central City in Gus Hill’s 1914-1915 Theatrical Directory, and the records of an anti-trust case making its way through the courts in the early 1940s reveal that a Guy D. Martin and Mr. F. M. Pittman had converted a store building into a house called the Empress Theatre in early 1937. Also, an item in the Central City newspaper, The Times-Argus, on December 2, 1938, said that the Empress Theatre would reopen on December 4, repairs having been completed following a fire on Thanksgiving Day.
The Empress Theatre at 112 N. First Street was in operation by 1915, and is seen in this photo from the Darren Snow collection at CinemaTour, dated 1921. I’m not sure when it closed, or if it later operated under any other names. The Empress building that was converted into an electronics store in 1954 (not 1924) must have been the second Empress, which had opened in 1937.
I don’t know if the Empress opened in 1937 by Martin and Pittman was in the same location as the earlier Empress, which might have been converted into a store building, though I don’t know when. The 1926 FDY lists four theaters at Central City: The Corbin, the Hippodrome, the Selba and the Union. Any of those other than the Selba might have been the old Empress under a new name. I also now believe that the theater designed by Joseph & Joseph in 1921 was in fact the Selba, which in 1937 was renamed the State Theatre after being acquired by the Crescent Amusement Company. At this time we don’t have a page for it yet.
In any case, quite a bit of research still needs to be done on Central City’s theaters. We have only the sketchiest outlines so far.
The October 4, 1937 issue of Film Daily listed the Fulton Theatre as a new house.
While there is a Luverne, Minnesota, the town in Iowa styles its name as Lu Verne.
I don’t know if these are earlier akas for this house or not (the town is so small I doubt it has ever had two theaters at once), but Film Daily of October 4, 1937 reported that the former Roxy Theatre in Luverne [sic] was now called the Time Theatre.
This house probably opened as the Palace. The October 4, 1937 issue of Film Daily noted that the former Palace Theatre in Waverly had been renamed Waverly Theatre.
The Norka Theatre got a CinemaScope upgrade, as noted in this item from Motion Picture Herald of January 7, 1956: “Clifford Shearon has reopened his Norka theatre in Akron, Ohio, following a remodeling program, which included a new wide-screen and new projectors.”
This house became the Gorham Theatre in 1956. This item is from the January 7, 1956 issue of Motion Picture Herald:
A Facebook post from the Gorham Historical Society says that the theater was located on Androscoggin Street, and that it burned down, though it doesn’t give a date for that event.The line added to the description is badly phrased. The new zoning code was not aimed at the Chinese Theatre, but is simply a provision to allow housing to be built on land that was previously reserved exclusively for commercial use. Nobody is going to knock down one of the city’s most successful tourist attractions to put up apartments, especially when the same code change opens up many thousands of acres of lower value commercial properties (and their parking lots) for residential use.
In the 1948 article, Bodwell says that he opened the Paramount in “Harty’s Hall” which had been a dance hall, so the place at 109-111 might be most likely.
Another puzzle in Wyoming is the Lyceum Theatre, which is where Bodwell began working at the age of ten, in 1914. That year the AMPD listed the Lyceum at 101 Main Street (Main Avenue on modern maps), but a 1916 Moving Picture World item notes the opening of a new Lyceum. One possibility I haven’t been able to either confirm or eliminate is that the Lyceum moved into the Star’s former location that year, since it was already set up as a theater. The Lyceum is the only house mentioned in the trades until the Paramount appears in 1924.
The Star Theatre originally operated in another location, and moved in 1912. The July 13 issue of Moving Picture World said “[t]he Star Theater, larger, more comfortable and more modern, is now housed in the Patterson Building, at Wyoming, Ill.” If the Star is at this location on the 1913 map, this must have been the Patterson Building. The Star is not listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, though that publication is known not to have been exhaustive, so the Star could have been still in operation then. Still, I haven’t found it mentioned in the trade journals.
This Paramount Theatre did open in 1934, but owner Marion Bodwell was operating a house of that name from 1923 on. It was mentioned in the March 29, 1924 issue of Exhibitors Herald. In that issue, Bodwell says that his theater was an upstairs house, so it must not have occupied the same space as the old Star. An article about Bodwell appeared in Boxoffice of November 6, 1948, commemorating his 25th anniversary in the theater business, and it was in that article that he said he moved the Paramount into the ground floor location in August, 1934.
One puzzle is that the Paramount is not listed in the Film Daily Yearbook until 1929, and Wyoming doesn’t appear in the book at all in 1927 and 1928. In 1926 the Lyceum is the only theater listed, though in the 1948 article Bodwell says that house closed within a year after he opened the Paramount on October 21, 1923. As usual, I think we can blame FDY for the inaccuracies.
However, if the original Paramount was an upstairs theater and didn’t open in this location until 1934, and was the only theater in town for several years prior to that, the space it moved into where the old Star had once been must have been used for something other than a theater in the interim. That could have been for as long as two decades, if the Star did in fact close before the 1914 Directory was published.
The Princess Theatre is listed (without an address) in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. I haven’t found the Princess mentioned in the trade journals, though two other houses in Wyoming, the Lyceum and the Paramount, were. The Lyceum last appears in 1923, but Marion Bodwell’s Paramount is still appearing in Boxoffice in the 1960s. I suspect that the Princess was a very short-lived theater.
Coate and NightHawk1 were probably right about this house opening as a single screener, probably in 1971. The May 31, 1971 issue of Boxoffice had a brief article headed “Schneider-Merl’s 9th Theatre is Announced” and it was about a project for a 600-seat single screen house at the Plaza shopping center in Roanoke Rapids. It was one of at least four projects the rapidly expanding Schneider-Merl chain had underway at the time, three of which (that I’ve found so far) rated articles in Boxoffice that year. The other two were at Durham and at Boone, North Carolina. All three articles cited Tom Hutchins of Spartanburg as the architect of the theaters.