The Palm Springs Theatre was featured in an article in Boxoffice of October 21, 1963. There are a few photos.
The full professional name of the architect of the Palm Springs Theatre was A. Herbert Mathes. He designed many theaters for Wometco during this period, and was also a well-known Miami hotel architect.
Though the Byron Carlyle Theatre was opened in 1968, it got an article in Boxoffice on October 19, 1970. The Byron had 590 seats and the Carlyle seated 993. Oddly, the larger house had only 35mm projection while the smaller was equipped with Century 70/35s.
The Boxoffice article said that the architect of the project, A. Herbert Mathes, was “…the architect responsible for many Wometco theatres….”
This theater opened as the Park East and Park West in 1965. Total seating at opening was 1,500, divided 600 and 900. It was operated by Wometco. A rendering of the proposed house, by architect A. Herbert Mathes, appeared in Boxoffice, December 31, 1964.
Though they placed it in nearby Dover, Delaware, Boxoffice did report the opening of the Smyrna Theatre in its issue of April 10, 1948. It said the house had opened “last week.”
A decade earlier, Boxoffice of February 26, 1938, said that the Roxy Theatre at Smyrna had escaped damage when a car parked in front of it caught fire.
Also, Commerce Street runs east and west. The building was still standing at 106 W. Commerce when the Google street view truck last went through town. It has lost its marquee to one of those absurd shingled mansardettes that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. It must have closed by then.
The building appears to be vacant in street view, but Internet directory sites list it as the location of Slaughter’s Plumbing & Heating. It’s a wholesale outfit so maybe it looks empty because they just don’t have window displays.
Boxoffice indicates a late 1941 or early 1942 opening for the Main Theatre. The issue of January 31, 1942, has this item datelined Coldwater, Michigan: “The new Main, owned by Robert H. Moore and William J. Schulte, has opened here. The old Crystal, owned and managed by Moore, has been closed. Moore will manage the new house.”
There’s an error in the first line of my comment above. Emma Cox did not become the operator of the Gem in 1921, but in either 1931 or 1933 (the Boxoffice article I cited gives both years, and context gives no clue as to which is most apt to be correct.) The dates regarding the Joy and Murr theaters are accurate.
The April 2, 1949, issue of Boxoffice reported that Moses Sliman had opened his 500-seat Murr Theatre at Osceola on March 25. The Murr Theatre became part of the Kerasotes circuit on New Year’s Day 1976, as reported in the January 5 issue of Boxoffice.
The September 23, 1939, issue of Boxoffice gives the opening date of the Joy Theatre as September 10 that year, and at the time the Murr opened the Joy Theatre was still operating. The Joy was in operation at least as late as 1953.
A brief item in Boxoffice of August 3, 1957, said the Gary was scheduled to open August 7. This was a week earlier than the tentative opening date given in a Boxoffice item of July 20, which had also said that “The Pride and the Passion” had been slated as the opening feature.
The August 3 item said: “Remodeling included air conditioning, installation of 1,350 foam rubber seats, new draperies, mosaics and murals, new carpeting and plumbing.” It was Benjamin Sack’s second Todd-AO-equipped theater, the Saxon having been the first.
The earlier Boxoffice item credited designer Louis Chiaramonte with both the design for the remodeling and the decoration of the theater, the same roles he had played for the conversion of the Majestic into the Saxon in Boston and the Lyric into the Saxon in Fitchburg.
The Lake had a fairly brief life as a theater. A 1949 anti-trust decree required the Schine circuit to divest a number of its theaters, and the Lake went to an independent operator in February, 1952. Schine retained control of its “A” house in Canandaigua, the Playhouse. The independent operator did not make a success of the Lake. The July 24, 1954, issue of Boxoffice reported that the theater was being converted for business use.
The Wisconsin Historical Society says the Greendale Theatre opened on April 29, 1939. Here’s their page about Greendale. There is a gallery of Greendale photos, and thumbnails of the front of the theater appear on the second and tenth pages of the thumbs. There’s also a thumb at the upper left corner of page 8 captioned “Commercial Buildings in Winter” which I’m pretty sure shows the theater auditorium from the other side— the big building with the chimney.
A few Boxoffice items mention the Greendale. One of December 21, 1940, gives the seating capacity as 650. The Library of Congress has a floor plan of the theater, also giving the seating capacity as 650.
The original Star Theatre was demolished and replaced by a new building designed for Dipson Theatres by Rochester architect Michael J. DeAngelis. There is an article with a couple of photos in Boxoffice of June 21, 1941.
The article also features the smaller Lake Theatre at Canandaigua, New York, designed by DeAngelis for Schine Theatres at about the same time.
The original interior of the Pine Theatre can be seen in three photos in a June 21, 1941, Boxoffice article about the rebuilding of the ventilation system in the house.
The correct address for the Sunn Cinema is 113 E. Pine Street, which is currently the address of Heaven’s Beauty Salon. There’s been some confusion of theaters in Deming. The listing for the Cinema 3 gives it the aka El Rancho for that house, but that aka properly belongs to the Sunn.
I can’t find any Boxoffice items about a Deming Theatre, but there are plenty of references to the El Rancho, from the early 1940s until the late 1970s. The historic El Rancho photos and rendering I’ll link to below depict the same building in the Sunn Theatre photo of 1982. It did not open as the Deming Theatre.
The El Rancho was featured in this Boxoffice article of November 2, 1942, which also featured two of Jack Corgan’s other recent theater projects. The previous year, a rendering of the proposed El Rancho was included in the Just Off the Boards feature of Boxoffice’s June 21 issue.
Numerous comments about the El Rancho are currently found on the Cinema Treasures page for the Cinema 3, which was identified there as having been located in the former El Rancho building. This was apparently an error, as CT user Mr50s said that Cinema 3 had been located in a former Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. That plant was at the corner of Pine and Copper streets, about a block and half west of the Sunn/El Rancho.
It looks like we’ve got two different theaters conflated on this page. Mr50s said the Cinema 3 was in the former Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. If that’s the case then El Rancho was not an aka for Cinema 3. The address of 113 E. Pine Street given for this theater was indeed the address of R.E. Griffith’s El Rancho Theatre, which was the original name of the house currently listed at Cinema Treasures as the Sunn Cinema. It was the El Rancho from opening in 1942 until the late 1970s.
A .pdf of the minutes of a 2009 Luna County Board of Commissioners meeting includes a reference to a proposal for a Luna County Youth Arts Center, to be located in the former Pepsi-Cola bottling plant at 101 N. Copper Street, Deming. It doesn’t mention the building having been used as a theater, but if Mr50s is correct, that must have been the address of the Cinema 3.
If the Albuquerque Journal article cited in the intro was correct and the Cinema 3 was in the former El Rancho (Albuquerque is 233 miles from Deming, and I’m more inclined to trust Mr50s, who actually lived in Deming) then the pages for the two theaters need to be combined. Otherwise, the address on this page and the aka’s on both pages need to be changed.
Hughes-Franklin was the name of a theater chain formed around 1930 by Howard Hughes and Harold B. Franklin. It was an extensive chain and they had a number of theaters in the Los Angeles area, and based on what little I’ve been able to find out about it some of their houses appear to have been operated in association with local partners. Considering the two names connected with it, I wonder if this could have been one of them? I don’t think the chain lasted very long, though, so it might not have been around by the time the Franklin opened in 1936.
The Midtown Theatre was featured in an article in Boxoffice of December 6, 1941. It was built in a converted garage. The plans were by Dearborn architects Bennett & Straight.
The Castle opened in October, 1940, as the Russell Theatre. It rated an article in Boxoffice of January 4, 1941. The Russell was designed by Robert S. Harsh, of Columbus, Ohio.
In 1941, the Colonial got a complete Art Moderne makeover, inside and out, designed by architect Michael J. DeAngelis. There are photos in Boxoffice of February 21, 1942.
There are photos of the Fairfax in Boxoffice, February 21, 1942. The 555-seat house was designed in the Art Moderne style by architect Roy A. Benjamin.
Judging from Google Street View, kdinkcmo is right. The building at 2209 Main Street housing the Riviera Theatre is clearly of 1920s vintage— probably late 1920s— and clearly was designed as a theater. A thorough search of Boxoffice Magazine references to Emmetsburg turn up only the Iowa Theatre in town, from the earliest reference in 1940 until the last in 1977.
There is a single 1929 reference to Emmetsburg but the name of the theater, which had just bought Western Electric sound equipment, is not given. I’d say the Riviera is almost certainly the Iowa renamed.
The Riviera is operated by Fridley Theatres. Here is the Riviera page at the Fridley web site.
Oh, wait. Midnight Cowboy came out in 1969. The book was from 1965.
In any case, the 1970 article said that the theater had been closed for several years before reopening that year as the Harvard Theatre, and it wasn’t a cheap remodel. The Harvard was a first-run theater. What film got the shorts of the local police in a wad in 1972 I don’t know, but there were plenty of mainstream Hollywood movies then that could have had such an effect in a small town.
I don’t think the theater was actually showing pornography in 1965. I think the charge was probably over one of the early X-rated movies, perhaps Midnight Cowboy. The local officials of this small town were most likely a bit overwrought.
The owners and operators of the Western Plaza throughout its history were apparently Mr. and Mrs. M. M. Weinig. The earliest mention I’ve found of the house in the trade journal Boxoffice is an item from 1942, and M. Weinig was mentioned in it, but a 1965 item about the closing implies that the Weinigs built the place.
The item in the Cincinnati news column of Boxoffice, December 6, 1965, says this: “Western Plaza, long a local theatre landmark, was closed by Mrs. M. M. Weinig. The Weinigs were among the pioneer exhibitors and Western Plaza was one of the early leading suburban houses. The theatre is to be torn down, the property having been bought in an expansion move by the Kroger Co.”
Boxoffice of October 25, 1965, said that the Gateway Theatre, then under construction, had been designed by Ted Rogvoy & Associates, with interiors by Sam Garfinkle. Provision was made in the original design for the later addition of a second auditorium, at right angles to the original auditorium and connected to it by an arcade. This planned second auditorium, which was to seat between 700 and 1000, was apparently never built.
The Gateway Theatre derived its name from a large wrought-iron gate designed by Louis Sullivan which had been salvaged from a Chicago skyscraper and was to be installed in the theater. I can’t find anything else about this on the Internet, but if a Sullivan artifact was installed in the Gateway I wonder what has become of it since?
A survey of new theater construction in the St. Louis area published in Boxoffice of October 16, 1937, lists Eddie Rosecan’s Rialto at Hannibal as one of the projects underway. Two other theaters Rosecan operated in small towns in the area were also called Rialto.
The Rialto was expanded and its front rebuilt in 1946, according to Boxoffice of February 6 that year. The item said the capacity would be enlarged by 50 percent.
If this house was ever called the Tom Sawyer, it must have been after Rosecan sold it to Frisina in 1955, but I’ve been unable to find any evidence that it was renamed. Frisina’s Orpheum was renamed the Tom Sawyer following a 1949 remodeling, according to Boxoffice of July 30 that year.
The Palm Springs Theatre was featured in an article in Boxoffice of October 21, 1963. There are a few photos.
The full professional name of the architect of the Palm Springs Theatre was A. Herbert Mathes. He designed many theaters for Wometco during this period, and was also a well-known Miami hotel architect.
Though the Byron Carlyle Theatre was opened in 1968, it got an article in Boxoffice on October 19, 1970. The Byron had 590 seats and the Carlyle seated 993. Oddly, the larger house had only 35mm projection while the smaller was equipped with Century 70/35s.
The Boxoffice article said that the architect of the project, A. Herbert Mathes, was “…the architect responsible for many Wometco theatres….”
This theater opened as the Park East and Park West in 1965. Total seating at opening was 1,500, divided 600 and 900. It was operated by Wometco. A rendering of the proposed house, by architect A. Herbert Mathes, appeared in Boxoffice, December 31, 1964.
Though they placed it in nearby Dover, Delaware, Boxoffice did report the opening of the Smyrna Theatre in its issue of April 10, 1948. It said the house had opened “last week.”
A decade earlier, Boxoffice of February 26, 1938, said that the Roxy Theatre at Smyrna had escaped damage when a car parked in front of it caught fire.
Also, Commerce Street runs east and west. The building was still standing at 106 W. Commerce when the Google street view truck last went through town. It has lost its marquee to one of those absurd shingled mansardettes that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. It must have closed by then.
The building appears to be vacant in street view, but Internet directory sites list it as the location of Slaughter’s Plumbing & Heating. It’s a wholesale outfit so maybe it looks empty because they just don’t have window displays.
Boxoffice indicates a late 1941 or early 1942 opening for the Main Theatre. The issue of January 31, 1942, has this item datelined Coldwater, Michigan: “The new Main, owned by Robert H. Moore and William J. Schulte, has opened here. The old Crystal, owned and managed by Moore, has been closed. Moore will manage the new house.”
There’s an error in the first line of my comment above. Emma Cox did not become the operator of the Gem in 1921, but in either 1931 or 1933 (the Boxoffice article I cited gives both years, and context gives no clue as to which is most apt to be correct.) The dates regarding the Joy and Murr theaters are accurate.
The April 2, 1949, issue of Boxoffice reported that Moses Sliman had opened his 500-seat Murr Theatre at Osceola on March 25. The Murr Theatre became part of the Kerasotes circuit on New Year’s Day 1976, as reported in the January 5 issue of Boxoffice.
The September 23, 1939, issue of Boxoffice gives the opening date of the Joy Theatre as September 10 that year, and at the time the Murr opened the Joy Theatre was still operating. The Joy was in operation at least as late as 1953.
A brief item in Boxoffice of August 3, 1957, said the Gary was scheduled to open August 7. This was a week earlier than the tentative opening date given in a Boxoffice item of July 20, which had also said that “The Pride and the Passion” had been slated as the opening feature.
The August 3 item said: “Remodeling included air conditioning, installation of 1,350 foam rubber seats, new draperies, mosaics and murals, new carpeting and plumbing.” It was Benjamin Sack’s second Todd-AO-equipped theater, the Saxon having been the first.
The earlier Boxoffice item credited designer Louis Chiaramonte with both the design for the remodeling and the decoration of the theater, the same roles he had played for the conversion of the Majestic into the Saxon in Boston and the Lyric into the Saxon in Fitchburg.
The Lake had a fairly brief life as a theater. A 1949 anti-trust decree required the Schine circuit to divest a number of its theaters, and the Lake went to an independent operator in February, 1952. Schine retained control of its “A” house in Canandaigua, the Playhouse. The independent operator did not make a success of the Lake. The July 24, 1954, issue of Boxoffice reported that the theater was being converted for business use.
The Wisconsin Historical Society says the Greendale Theatre opened on April 29, 1939. Here’s their page about Greendale. There is a gallery of Greendale photos, and thumbnails of the front of the theater appear on the second and tenth pages of the thumbs. There’s also a thumb at the upper left corner of page 8 captioned “Commercial Buildings in Winter” which I’m pretty sure shows the theater auditorium from the other side— the big building with the chimney.
A few Boxoffice items mention the Greendale. One of December 21, 1940, gives the seating capacity as 650. The Library of Congress has a floor plan of the theater, also giving the seating capacity as 650.
The original Star Theatre was demolished and replaced by a new building designed for Dipson Theatres by Rochester architect Michael J. DeAngelis. There is an article with a couple of photos in Boxoffice of June 21, 1941.
The article also features the smaller Lake Theatre at Canandaigua, New York, designed by DeAngelis for Schine Theatres at about the same time.
The original interior of the Pine Theatre can be seen in three photos in a June 21, 1941, Boxoffice article about the rebuilding of the ventilation system in the house.
The correct address for the Sunn Cinema is 113 E. Pine Street, which is currently the address of Heaven’s Beauty Salon. There’s been some confusion of theaters in Deming. The listing for the Cinema 3 gives it the aka El Rancho for that house, but that aka properly belongs to the Sunn.
I can’t find any Boxoffice items about a Deming Theatre, but there are plenty of references to the El Rancho, from the early 1940s until the late 1970s. The historic El Rancho photos and rendering I’ll link to below depict the same building in the Sunn Theatre photo of 1982. It did not open as the Deming Theatre.
The El Rancho was featured in this Boxoffice article of November 2, 1942, which also featured two of Jack Corgan’s other recent theater projects. The previous year, a rendering of the proposed El Rancho was included in the Just Off the Boards feature of Boxoffice’s June 21 issue.
Numerous comments about the El Rancho are currently found on the Cinema Treasures page for the Cinema 3, which was identified there as having been located in the former El Rancho building. This was apparently an error, as CT user Mr50s said that Cinema 3 had been located in a former Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. That plant was at the corner of Pine and Copper streets, about a block and half west of the Sunn/El Rancho.
It looks like we’ve got two different theaters conflated on this page. Mr50s said the Cinema 3 was in the former Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. If that’s the case then El Rancho was not an aka for Cinema 3. The address of 113 E. Pine Street given for this theater was indeed the address of R.E. Griffith’s El Rancho Theatre, which was the original name of the house currently listed at Cinema Treasures as the Sunn Cinema. It was the El Rancho from opening in 1942 until the late 1970s.
A .pdf of the minutes of a 2009 Luna County Board of Commissioners meeting includes a reference to a proposal for a Luna County Youth Arts Center, to be located in the former Pepsi-Cola bottling plant at 101 N. Copper Street, Deming. It doesn’t mention the building having been used as a theater, but if Mr50s is correct, that must have been the address of the Cinema 3.
If the Albuquerque Journal article cited in the intro was correct and the Cinema 3 was in the former El Rancho (Albuquerque is 233 miles from Deming, and I’m more inclined to trust Mr50s, who actually lived in Deming) then the pages for the two theaters need to be combined. Otherwise, the address on this page and the aka’s on both pages need to be changed.
Hughes-Franklin was the name of a theater chain formed around 1930 by Howard Hughes and Harold B. Franklin. It was an extensive chain and they had a number of theaters in the Los Angeles area, and based on what little I’ve been able to find out about it some of their houses appear to have been operated in association with local partners. Considering the two names connected with it, I wonder if this could have been one of them? I don’t think the chain lasted very long, though, so it might not have been around by the time the Franklin opened in 1936.
The Midtown Theatre was featured in an article in Boxoffice of December 6, 1941. It was built in a converted garage. The plans were by Dearborn architects Bennett & Straight.
The Castle opened in October, 1940, as the Russell Theatre. It rated an article in Boxoffice of January 4, 1941. The Russell was designed by Robert S. Harsh, of Columbus, Ohio.
In 1941, the Colonial got a complete Art Moderne makeover, inside and out, designed by architect Michael J. DeAngelis. There are photos in Boxoffice of February 21, 1942.
There are photos of the Fairfax in Boxoffice, February 21, 1942. The 555-seat house was designed in the Art Moderne style by architect Roy A. Benjamin.
Judging from Google Street View, kdinkcmo is right. The building at 2209 Main Street housing the Riviera Theatre is clearly of 1920s vintage— probably late 1920s— and clearly was designed as a theater. A thorough search of Boxoffice Magazine references to Emmetsburg turn up only the Iowa Theatre in town, from the earliest reference in 1940 until the last in 1977.
There is a single 1929 reference to Emmetsburg but the name of the theater, which had just bought Western Electric sound equipment, is not given. I’d say the Riviera is almost certainly the Iowa renamed.
The Riviera is operated by Fridley Theatres. Here is the Riviera page at the Fridley web site.
Oh, wait. Midnight Cowboy came out in 1969. The book was from 1965.
In any case, the 1970 article said that the theater had been closed for several years before reopening that year as the Harvard Theatre, and it wasn’t a cheap remodel. The Harvard was a first-run theater. What film got the shorts of the local police in a wad in 1972 I don’t know, but there were plenty of mainstream Hollywood movies then that could have had such an effect in a small town.
I don’t think the theater was actually showing pornography in 1965. I think the charge was probably over one of the early X-rated movies, perhaps Midnight Cowboy. The local officials of this small town were most likely a bit overwrought.
The owners and operators of the Western Plaza throughout its history were apparently Mr. and Mrs. M. M. Weinig. The earliest mention I’ve found of the house in the trade journal Boxoffice is an item from 1942, and M. Weinig was mentioned in it, but a 1965 item about the closing implies that the Weinigs built the place.
The item in the Cincinnati news column of Boxoffice, December 6, 1965, says this: “Western Plaza, long a local theatre landmark, was closed by Mrs. M. M. Weinig. The Weinigs were among the pioneer exhibitors and Western Plaza was one of the early leading suburban houses. The theatre is to be torn down, the property having been bought in an expansion move by the Kroger Co.”
Boxoffice of October 25, 1965, said that the Gateway Theatre, then under construction, had been designed by Ted Rogvoy & Associates, with interiors by Sam Garfinkle. Provision was made in the original design for the later addition of a second auditorium, at right angles to the original auditorium and connected to it by an arcade. This planned second auditorium, which was to seat between 700 and 1000, was apparently never built.
The Gateway Theatre derived its name from a large wrought-iron gate designed by Louis Sullivan which had been salvaged from a Chicago skyscraper and was to be installed in the theater. I can’t find anything else about this on the Internet, but if a Sullivan artifact was installed in the Gateway I wonder what has become of it since?
A survey of new theater construction in the St. Louis area published in Boxoffice of October 16, 1937, lists Eddie Rosecan’s Rialto at Hannibal as one of the projects underway. Two other theaters Rosecan operated in small towns in the area were also called Rialto.
The Rialto was expanded and its front rebuilt in 1946, according to Boxoffice of February 6 that year. The item said the capacity would be enlarged by 50 percent.
If this house was ever called the Tom Sawyer, it must have been after Rosecan sold it to Frisina in 1955, but I’ve been unable to find any evidence that it was renamed. Frisina’s Orpheum was renamed the Tom Sawyer following a 1949 remodeling, according to Boxoffice of July 30 that year.