Correction on the opening date: The Boxoffice item says it was opened on Christmas Night, not Christmas Eve, so that’s an opening date of December 25, 1960.
The photos in Boxoffice show that the auditorium was too small to have held 850 seats. The 600 seats cited in the article is probably the correct number. It was only a two-aisle theater (if you don’t count the dead-end center aisle which served only the loge smoking section), and it had only a few more than 20 rows.
Additional info: The January 16, 1961, issue of Boxoffice has a brief item saying that the Pequa Theatre was opened to the public for the first time on Christmas Eve, so that gives an opening date of December 24, 1960.
This house was open before 1964, and had a smaller seating capacity than is currently listed. The Pequa Theatre had recently opened when it was featured in an article in the May 8, 1961, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The architect was Maurice D. Sornik, and the seating capacity was 600. The Prudential Theatres house featured a glass-walled facade, a two story lobby and lounge, a stainless steel and plastic marquee, and terrazzo flooring in the entry and parts of the lobby.
The auditorium featured aluminum panels on the side walls, a wall-to-wall screen, and exposed ceiling joists to which tubular downlights were attached. The color scheme was red, green, and gold. There was a railed-in loge-smoking area at the rear of the center section of seats, accessed by a truncated center aisle.
One of the photos shows a spiral staircase rising from a planter in the indoor ticket foyer. Though this feature isn’t mentioned in the text, I’d presume that it led to the projection booth.
Here’s a puzzle for Islipers (Islipians? Islipites?) The January 19, 1946, issue of Boxoffice Magazine ran an article about a contretemps in Islip. Prudential Playhouses, a regional theater circuit, had broken ground for a movie theater on Main Street at Smith Avenue (which is the location of the Islip Theater.) A group of citizens protested the location, saying it was too close to churches and a school, and would generate too much traffic.
William Egelman, President of the Chamber of Commerce and spokesman for the theater’s opponents, denied that the opposition was motivated by the fact that James Poro, operator of the East Islip Theatre, was already building an 800 seat theater on Main Street a couple of blocks from the site of the proposed Prudential house, and it was scheduled to open in April.
Prudential said that they’d already gotten to go-ahead from the town authorities, that the town had originally approached them asking them to build in Islip, and that they had heard of no opposition from residents before breaking ground. Their spokesman added that they had been planning to build in Islip for four years, and that there was no ordinance prohibiting the construction of theaters near schools or churches.
So here’s the puzzle: As the Islip Theater is in the location Prudential wanted to build at (so they must have gone ahead with their project), what became of James Poro’s theater on Main Street? Did Islip support two theaters for a while? Did Poro decide to pull out of his theater project before Prudential’s house opened, and convert his building to some other use? Is the building he had under construction in 1946 still there, and can anybody identify its exact location?
The Google Maps satellite view of Islip shows only one building on Main Street about two blocks from this theater that looks large enough to have held an 800 seat theater, on the south side of the street opposite the end of Locust Avenue. Unfortunately, Google has no street view available for this location so I can’t check to see if the facade looks at all theater-like.
Now Marty’s peccadillo will be exposed among Google results when his name is searched. The guy was pretty well known. Here he is hanging out with actor Pat O'Brien, about 1940.
Such “jostlings” were doubtlessly common at the Art and other Main Street grind houses through much of their history, and probably only a small percentage of them ended with an arrest. There’s a whole secret history of these theaters that’s little discussed.
The Odeon Twin was the subject of an article in the American trade publication Boxoffice Magazine, October 25, 1965. It says that the plans for the 1964-65 rebuilding were made by the architectural firm of Harry W. Weedon and Partners, and the interior design consultants were Trevor Stone and Mavis Stone. Among the photos accompanying the article is one of the marquee displaying the announcement “Grand Opening July 12th.”
The Tyrone Square 6 and the Crossroads were different theaters, and it turns out that the AMC Crossroads 8 was yet another. I found a 1972 reference to the Crossroads Theatre being at 1900 Tyrone Boulevard, so the AMC Crossroads 8 at 2190 Tyrone doesn’t have a Cinema Treasures page yet either.
Movie Listings in The St. Petersburg Evening Independent, January 28, 1984, show AMC then operating five houses in the area: Tyrone Square 6; Countryside 6; Crossroads 2; Clearwater 4; Seminole 2.
Plans for construction of the 2200 seat AMC Crossroads 8 were announced in the St. Petersburg Times of August 8, 1986. The article said that the Crossroads 2 would be closed when the new house was opened in 1987, and would be converted to retail space.
Also, the August 16, 1965, issue of Boxoffice has a list of theaters recently opened in shopping centers, and one of them is a 1000 seat house called the Tyrone Theatre, located in the Tyrone Shopping Center, St. Petersburg. There’s a photo of the front, and it shows a typical, nondescript shopping center theater of the era. An ad for the Tyrone Theatre in the August 14, 1965, issue of The St. Petersburg Evening Independent includes the line “Wurlitzer Concert on our stage, 8:00PM.” The feature film, “Lord Jim,” was also scheduled at 8:00PM. That must have produced quite a cacophony.
Roger: Issuu has some issues of Boxoffice available online. I find them easier to search via Google than through the site’s own search feature. Use Google’s advanced search and use issuu.com as the domain, and put boxoffice (single word) in the top box of the form, along with words specific to the subject you’re searching for. Fewer words are usually better than more.
A photograph of a handsome art moderne stairway in the Belle Meade Theatre was published in the February 22, 1941, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The caption attributes the design of the house to the noted Nashville architectural firm Marr & Holman, also the architects of Nashville’s Tennessee Theatre.
The May 18, 1946 issue of Boxoffice Magazine gives the date of the fire which destroyed this theater as July 12, 1945. An earlier mention of the fire in the July 21, 1945, issue of Boxoffice calls it the Livingston Theatre, at Livingston, operated by Stanly Court. A few even earlier issues of Boxoffice also call it the Livingston Theatre. That have been the name of the house during the early 1940s, or the copy writer at Boxoffice might have just been careless. Local newspaper ads or a directory listing for the theater during that period could provide an answer, if somebody has access to either.
Here’s still more information about the Vogue, from the February 22, 1941, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The caption of a photograph of the Vogue’s art moderne foyer lounge area attributes the design of the house to architect Vincent G Raney.
Raney also designed the Rodeo Theatre (later the Plaza Theatre) in the same city.
Here’s a brief item from the October 13, 1945, issue of Boxoffice Magazine: “Construction has begun on the new Court Theatre on Third near C. by the A.R. Liner Co. of Merced. Stanley Court, owner, offers no guess as to when the building will be completed.”
And then from the May 18, 1946 issue of Boxoffice comes this item:
“LIVINGSTON, CALIF.— Without motion pictures almost a year, this town welcomed the recent opening of the new Court Theatre. It replaces a theatre destroyed by fire last July 12 and was built by Mayor Stanley Court, who with his father, the late Albert Court, gave Livingston its first motion pictures in the old town hall in 1912, and who later built the original Court Theatre.”
(I can’t absolutely swear to the accuracy of the dates July 12 and 1912, as the scan of this issue of Boxoffice is pretty sketchy and hard to read, but I’m about 90% certain they’re right.)
Also of interest, earlier issues of Boxoffice, including that of July 21, 1945, which reported that the fire had occurred, invariably refer to Stanly Court as the operator of the Livingston Theatre in Livingston. The item about the fire says: “The Livingston Theatre, Livingston, was the scene of a fire the other evening. The amount of damage has not been reported. Owner of the house is Stanley Court, who also runs the Atwater at the town of the same name.”
A few other issues also mention Stanly Court as the operator of the Atwater Theatre, and issues from the mid 1950s add that he was by then also operating the Delhi Theatre at Delhi.
There was a Valley Theatre operating in Camarillo in 1946, according to an item in Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of May 18 that year: “CAMARILLO, CALIF.— S. and J.D. Burger, Operators of the Valley Theatre here, have commissioned Harold E. Burkett, Ventura architect, to draw plans for a 500-seat house to be erected on Ventura Blvd. here on a site which they acquired a year ago.”
Maybe the planned theater was a replacement for the original Valley Theatre? But if it didn’t open until 1956, the planning stage was awfully long.
The L.A. Library’s California Index has a card citing a theater catalog (no publication date given) which contains an illustration of the plans for the Rodeo Theatre in Salinas by architect Vincent G. Raney.
The September 2, 1963, issue of Boxoffice Magazine announced that a September 11 opening was planned for the Fox Northridge. The architect of the theater was Clarence Smale, with Carl G. Moeller, design partner. Boxoffice gave the seating capacity as 806.
The October 3, 1936, issue of Boxoffice ran an item about all three local movie houses in Salinas reopening after having been closed during riots related to a lettuce workers strike. The three theaters were the Crystal, the Fox, and the El Rey.
The Vogue opened three years later. The August 5, 1939, issue of Boxoffice carried this single-line item: “Homer Techmeyer’s new Vogue Theatre in Salinas was opened with many local trade figures present.”
So this was the Vogue Theatre from 1939 until (probably) 1959, the Globe International from its renovation in 1961 until about 1975 (and perhaps just Globe Theatre for part of that time), and Cinema 7 from then until closing in the 1980s.
The L.A. Library’s California Index contains a card citing an item in the May, 1935, issue of Architect & Engineer which said that architect Alexander A. Cantin had prepared the plans for remodeling the T&D Theatre in Salinas, and that the house would now be called the Fox Theatre.
I can’t find anything about who did the 1949 remodeling, but my guess would be that it was Charles Skouras’s favorite designer of the era, Carl G. Moeller.
Designed by Behr Browers Architects, as the renderings show.
2600 seats, as the Ventura newspaper reports.
Style: What is that? Neo-Deco Faux-Classical Art-Googied Postmoderne? I guess we’ll have to wait for the academic critics who usually name styles to stop reeling and catch up with what theater architects are doing these days.
Loew’s 1973 annual report said that the Troy Hills house was among those slated to be twinned.
A few photos of this theater were published in the May 16, 1966, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. One photo showed that it had a fairly typical curtain-wall auditorium. The caption gave the seating capacity on opening as 1200.
Mike and Lost: The Wometco house that opened in December 1965 was called the Crossroads Theatre. It was the subject of an article in the May 16, 1966 issue of Boxoffice. A first-run luxury house, and the Wometco circuit’s 39th theater in Florida, it was located in the Crossroads Shopping Center, just off of Tyrone Boulevard. It opened as a 1200 seat single screener, but provisions were made to add a second auditorium, to seat 600-800 patrons, and the article said that Wometco intended to add the second auditorium later that year. The architect of the Crossroads Theatre was A. Herbert Mathes of Miami.
Some sketchy results of Google searches suggest that the Crossroads Theatre was later replaced by, or altered into, the AMC Crossroads 8 Theatres, at 2190 Tyrone Blvd., which appears to have opened in 1987, and after closing in September, 2002, was demolished along with some other buildings in the shopping center to make way for a Home Depot.
Incidentally, A. Herbert Mathes was a noted Miami architect who designed a number of large buildings in that city and in Miami Beach, including the Versailles hotel tower and ballroom addition to the Fontainebleau Hotel.
pablo el sueco’s comment of Dec 21, 2005, is correct. The year after the theater opened, Boxoffice Magazine published an article about the Americana in its issue of May 16, 1966. It named Trans-Texas Theatres as the operating company, Earl Podolnick as the President of the company, and Joe Charles Dyer as the manager of the theater.
It also mentions that the theater’s decoration was designed by Earl Podolnick himself, and said that the architect of the house was William B. Saunders, of Austin. The seating capacity of the Americana was given as 783. The cost of the theater was $360,000.
The March 29, 1965, issue of Boxoffice Magazine said that Roy Metcalfe’s Times Theatre had been closed for extensive remodeling, and that it would reopen as the New Times 70 Theatre, with the first 70mm projection equipment in the Cedar Rapids area. The seating capacity was to be reduced, allowing for staggered seats in rows 40 inches apart, thus improving sight lines and increasing leg room.
The May 16, 1966, issue of Boxoffice published photos of the auditorium, lobby, and lounge of the New Times 70 Theatre. The auditorium, now with 523 seats, featured six abstract black light paintings on the side walls, satin drapes on the screen wall, and like the rest of the house had a color scheme predominantly of emerald and aqua.
The lobby boasted walnut paneling, contemporary furniture, and decorative panels of colored glass. The lounge, with black and white vinyl tile flooring that extended into the rest rooms, contained a low table and matching chairs of an ornate antique style which looked as though they might have been retained from the theater’s earlier period.
The earlier Boxoffice article mentions that Roy Metcalfe also operated the New World Playhouse in Cedar Rapids (by which they must have meant the World Theatre), and that he was President of a trade organization called the Allied Independent Theatre Owners of Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. It also mentions that he had been operating the Times Theatre for fifteen years, and had recently acquired a long term lease on the house.
In that case, the 1940 date on the Liebenberg and Kaplan papers web site might be a mistake, or perhaps a plan to build in 1940 ran into problems, and then the owner had to wait until after the war to get the project built.
Correction on the opening date: The Boxoffice item says it was opened on Christmas Night, not Christmas Eve, so that’s an opening date of December 25, 1960.
The photos in Boxoffice show that the auditorium was too small to have held 850 seats. The 600 seats cited in the article is probably the correct number. It was only a two-aisle theater (if you don’t count the dead-end center aisle which served only the loge smoking section), and it had only a few more than 20 rows.
Additional info: The January 16, 1961, issue of Boxoffice has a brief item saying that the Pequa Theatre was opened to the public for the first time on Christmas Eve, so that gives an opening date of December 24, 1960.
This house was open before 1964, and had a smaller seating capacity than is currently listed. The Pequa Theatre had recently opened when it was featured in an article in the May 8, 1961, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The architect was Maurice D. Sornik, and the seating capacity was 600. The Prudential Theatres house featured a glass-walled facade, a two story lobby and lounge, a stainless steel and plastic marquee, and terrazzo flooring in the entry and parts of the lobby.
The auditorium featured aluminum panels on the side walls, a wall-to-wall screen, and exposed ceiling joists to which tubular downlights were attached. The color scheme was red, green, and gold. There was a railed-in loge-smoking area at the rear of the center section of seats, accessed by a truncated center aisle.
One of the photos shows a spiral staircase rising from a planter in the indoor ticket foyer. Though this feature isn’t mentioned in the text, I’d presume that it led to the projection booth.
Here’s a puzzle for Islipers (Islipians? Islipites?) The January 19, 1946, issue of Boxoffice Magazine ran an article about a contretemps in Islip. Prudential Playhouses, a regional theater circuit, had broken ground for a movie theater on Main Street at Smith Avenue (which is the location of the Islip Theater.) A group of citizens protested the location, saying it was too close to churches and a school, and would generate too much traffic.
William Egelman, President of the Chamber of Commerce and spokesman for the theater’s opponents, denied that the opposition was motivated by the fact that James Poro, operator of the East Islip Theatre, was already building an 800 seat theater on Main Street a couple of blocks from the site of the proposed Prudential house, and it was scheduled to open in April.
Prudential said that they’d already gotten to go-ahead from the town authorities, that the town had originally approached them asking them to build in Islip, and that they had heard of no opposition from residents before breaking ground. Their spokesman added that they had been planning to build in Islip for four years, and that there was no ordinance prohibiting the construction of theaters near schools or churches.
So here’s the puzzle: As the Islip Theater is in the location Prudential wanted to build at (so they must have gone ahead with their project), what became of James Poro’s theater on Main Street? Did Islip support two theaters for a while? Did Poro decide to pull out of his theater project before Prudential’s house opened, and convert his building to some other use? Is the building he had under construction in 1946 still there, and can anybody identify its exact location?
The Google Maps satellite view of Islip shows only one building on Main Street about two blocks from this theater that looks large enough to have held an 800 seat theater, on the south side of the street opposite the end of Locust Avenue. Unfortunately, Google has no street view available for this location so I can’t check to see if the facade looks at all theater-like.
Now Marty’s peccadillo will be exposed among Google results when his name is searched. The guy was pretty well known. Here he is hanging out with actor Pat O'Brien, about 1940.
Such “jostlings” were doubtlessly common at the Art and other Main Street grind houses through much of their history, and probably only a small percentage of them ended with an arrest. There’s a whole secret history of these theaters that’s little discussed.
The Odeon Twin was the subject of an article in the American trade publication Boxoffice Magazine, October 25, 1965. It says that the plans for the 1964-65 rebuilding were made by the architectural firm of Harry W. Weedon and Partners, and the interior design consultants were Trevor Stone and Mavis Stone. Among the photos accompanying the article is one of the marquee displaying the announcement “Grand Opening July 12th.”
The Tyrone Square 6 and the Crossroads were different theaters, and it turns out that the AMC Crossroads 8 was yet another. I found a 1972 reference to the Crossroads Theatre being at 1900 Tyrone Boulevard, so the AMC Crossroads 8 at 2190 Tyrone doesn’t have a Cinema Treasures page yet either.
Movie Listings in The St. Petersburg Evening Independent, January 28, 1984, show AMC then operating five houses in the area: Tyrone Square 6; Countryside 6; Crossroads 2; Clearwater 4; Seminole 2.
Plans for construction of the 2200 seat AMC Crossroads 8 were announced in the St. Petersburg Times of August 8, 1986. The article said that the Crossroads 2 would be closed when the new house was opened in 1987, and would be converted to retail space.
Also, the August 16, 1965, issue of Boxoffice has a list of theaters recently opened in shopping centers, and one of them is a 1000 seat house called the Tyrone Theatre, located in the Tyrone Shopping Center, St. Petersburg. There’s a photo of the front, and it shows a typical, nondescript shopping center theater of the era. An ad for the Tyrone Theatre in the August 14, 1965, issue of The St. Petersburg Evening Independent includes the line “Wurlitzer Concert on our stage, 8:00PM.” The feature film, “Lord Jim,” was also scheduled at 8:00PM. That must have produced quite a cacophony.
Roger: Issuu has some issues of Boxoffice available online. I find them easier to search via Google than through the site’s own search feature. Use Google’s advanced search and use issuu.com as the domain, and put boxoffice (single word) in the top box of the form, along with words specific to the subject you’re searching for. Fewer words are usually better than more.
A photograph of a handsome art moderne stairway in the Belle Meade Theatre was published in the February 22, 1941, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The caption attributes the design of the house to the noted Nashville architectural firm Marr & Holman, also the architects of Nashville’s Tennessee Theatre.
Oh, “That might have been the name….”
Clearly, I’m careless enough to have been a copy writer at Boxoffice Magazine myself.
The May 18, 1946 issue of Boxoffice Magazine gives the date of the fire which destroyed this theater as July 12, 1945. An earlier mention of the fire in the July 21, 1945, issue of Boxoffice calls it the Livingston Theatre, at Livingston, operated by Stanly Court. A few even earlier issues of Boxoffice also call it the Livingston Theatre. That have been the name of the house during the early 1940s, or the copy writer at Boxoffice might have just been careless. Local newspaper ads or a directory listing for the theater during that period could provide an answer, if somebody has access to either.
Here’s still more information about the Vogue, from the February 22, 1941, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The caption of a photograph of the Vogue’s art moderne foyer lounge area attributes the design of the house to architect Vincent G Raney.
Raney also designed the Rodeo Theatre (later the Plaza Theatre) in the same city.
More news for members of the Court family:
Here’s a brief item from the October 13, 1945, issue of Boxoffice Magazine: “Construction has begun on the new Court Theatre on Third near C. by the A.R. Liner Co. of Merced. Stanley Court, owner, offers no guess as to when the building will be completed.”
And then from the May 18, 1946 issue of Boxoffice comes this item:
(I can’t absolutely swear to the accuracy of the dates July 12 and 1912, as the scan of this issue of Boxoffice is pretty sketchy and hard to read, but I’m about 90% certain they’re right.)Also of interest, earlier issues of Boxoffice, including that of July 21, 1945, which reported that the fire had occurred, invariably refer to Stanly Court as the operator of the Livingston Theatre in Livingston. The item about the fire says: “The Livingston Theatre, Livingston, was the scene of a fire the other evening. The amount of damage has not been reported. Owner of the house is Stanley Court, who also runs the Atwater at the town of the same name.”
A few other issues also mention Stanly Court as the operator of the Atwater Theatre, and issues from the mid 1950s add that he was by then also operating the Delhi Theatre at Delhi.
There was a Valley Theatre operating in Camarillo in 1946, according to an item in Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of May 18 that year: “CAMARILLO, CALIF.— S. and J.D. Burger, Operators of the Valley Theatre here, have commissioned Harold E. Burkett, Ventura architect, to draw plans for a 500-seat house to be erected on Ventura Blvd. here on a site which they acquired a year ago.”
Maybe the planned theater was a replacement for the original Valley Theatre? But if it didn’t open until 1956, the planning stage was awfully long.
The L.A. Library’s California Index has a card citing a theater catalog (no publication date given) which contains an illustration of the plans for the Rodeo Theatre in Salinas by architect Vincent G. Raney.
I noticed that it took quite a while for that comment to get posted. I wonder if other comments are replicating?
The September 2, 1963, issue of Boxoffice Magazine announced that a September 11 opening was planned for the Fox Northridge. The architect of the theater was Clarence Smale, with Carl G. Moeller, design partner. Boxoffice gave the seating capacity as 806.
The October 3, 1936, issue of Boxoffice ran an item about all three local movie houses in Salinas reopening after having been closed during riots related to a lettuce workers strike. The three theaters were the Crystal, the Fox, and the El Rey.
The Vogue opened three years later. The August 5, 1939, issue of Boxoffice carried this single-line item: “Homer Techmeyer’s new Vogue Theatre in Salinas was opened with many local trade figures present.”
So this was the Vogue Theatre from 1939 until (probably) 1959, the Globe International from its renovation in 1961 until about 1975 (and perhaps just Globe Theatre for part of that time), and Cinema 7 from then until closing in the 1980s.
The L.A. Library’s California Index contains a card citing an item in the May, 1935, issue of Architect & Engineer which said that architect Alexander A. Cantin had prepared the plans for remodeling the T&D Theatre in Salinas, and that the house would now be called the Fox Theatre.
I can’t find anything about who did the 1949 remodeling, but my guess would be that it was Charles Skouras’s favorite designer of the era, Carl G. Moeller.
Designed by Behr Browers Architects, as the renderings show.
2600 seats, as the Ventura newspaper reports.
Style: What is that? Neo-Deco Faux-Classical Art-Googied Postmoderne? I guess we’ll have to wait for the academic critics who usually name styles to stop reeling and catch up with what theater architects are doing these days.
Loew’s 1973 annual report said that the Troy Hills house was among those slated to be twinned.
A few photos of this theater were published in the May 16, 1966, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. One photo showed that it had a fairly typical curtain-wall auditorium. The caption gave the seating capacity on opening as 1200.
Mike and Lost: The Wometco house that opened in December 1965 was called the Crossroads Theatre. It was the subject of an article in the May 16, 1966 issue of Boxoffice. A first-run luxury house, and the Wometco circuit’s 39th theater in Florida, it was located in the Crossroads Shopping Center, just off of Tyrone Boulevard. It opened as a 1200 seat single screener, but provisions were made to add a second auditorium, to seat 600-800 patrons, and the article said that Wometco intended to add the second auditorium later that year. The architect of the Crossroads Theatre was A. Herbert Mathes of Miami.
Some sketchy results of Google searches suggest that the Crossroads Theatre was later replaced by, or altered into, the AMC Crossroads 8 Theatres, at 2190 Tyrone Blvd., which appears to have opened in 1987, and after closing in September, 2002, was demolished along with some other buildings in the shopping center to make way for a Home Depot.
Incidentally, A. Herbert Mathes was a noted Miami architect who designed a number of large buildings in that city and in Miami Beach, including the Versailles hotel tower and ballroom addition to the Fontainebleau Hotel.
pablo el sueco’s comment of Dec 21, 2005, is correct. The year after the theater opened, Boxoffice Magazine published an article about the Americana in its issue of May 16, 1966. It named Trans-Texas Theatres as the operating company, Earl Podolnick as the President of the company, and Joe Charles Dyer as the manager of the theater.
It also mentions that the theater’s decoration was designed by Earl Podolnick himself, and said that the architect of the house was William B. Saunders, of Austin. The seating capacity of the Americana was given as 783. The cost of the theater was $360,000.
The March 29, 1965, issue of Boxoffice Magazine said that Roy Metcalfe’s Times Theatre had been closed for extensive remodeling, and that it would reopen as the New Times 70 Theatre, with the first 70mm projection equipment in the Cedar Rapids area. The seating capacity was to be reduced, allowing for staggered seats in rows 40 inches apart, thus improving sight lines and increasing leg room.
The May 16, 1966, issue of Boxoffice published photos of the auditorium, lobby, and lounge of the New Times 70 Theatre. The auditorium, now with 523 seats, featured six abstract black light paintings on the side walls, satin drapes on the screen wall, and like the rest of the house had a color scheme predominantly of emerald and aqua.
The lobby boasted walnut paneling, contemporary furniture, and decorative panels of colored glass. The lounge, with black and white vinyl tile flooring that extended into the rest rooms, contained a low table and matching chairs of an ornate antique style which looked as though they might have been retained from the theater’s earlier period.
The earlier Boxoffice article mentions that Roy Metcalfe also operated the New World Playhouse in Cedar Rapids (by which they must have meant the World Theatre), and that he was President of a trade organization called the Allied Independent Theatre Owners of Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. It also mentions that he had been operating the Times Theatre for fifteen years, and had recently acquired a long term lease on the house.
In that case, the 1940 date on the Liebenberg and Kaplan papers web site might be a mistake, or perhaps a plan to build in 1940 ran into problems, and then the owner had to wait until after the war to get the project built.