The March 4, 2018 issue of CCNJ Daily said that the Ocean City Tabenacle had closed the Moorlyn Theatre and listed it for sale. The March 13 issue said that the building had been sold to Sey West Realty Partners LLC of Ocean City. I haven’t found anything about the purchaser’s plans for the property, but there are no listings on the Internet so the theater remains closed. It was last operated by Ocean City Tabernacle under the name Moorlyn Family Theatre.
The calendar of the previous year’s theatrical events in the 1893 edition of The New York Clipper Annual said that the Opera House in Charleroi, Pennsylvania was dedicated on September 14, 1892. A play called “Killarney and the Rhine” was the first presentation.
Unless the Alessios were expecting full houses with all 800 seats filled by people who had driven to the theater alone, 25% of them towing an extra car behind them just in case the first one broke down, 1000 parking spaces seems like a bit of overkill. More likely the newspaper’s typesetter accidentally added an extra zero to the number.
Looking at this theater in aerial view there is no way it ever had parking for 1,000 cars. 800 seats on opening is certainly plausible though. The auditorium is about 50x120 feet.
buckguy’s observation is correct. The Sound of Music was released in 1965, and since it had a long roadshow run it is likely that it wouldn’t have reached Fairport Harbor until 1966, or even 1967. However, I’ve found another source saying that the Lyric closed in 1962. It’s possible, as buckguy pointed out, that someone just mis-remembered seeing that movie at the Lyric. It’s also possible that the Lyric, like hundreds of small town theaters during their final days, closed and then reopened for a time, perhaps more than once. Until conclusive information becomes available it’s probably best just to say that the house closed in the 1960s.
One possibility I can imagine, since there is the reference to 800 miners meeting at the Rivoli 1928, is that Baird renamed this house the Rivoli in or before 1928 and moved the name Pastime to another location, possibly the former Grand, which then became the Rex in 1931. The local newspaper’s files would surely be of help, but unfortunately I can’t find any Portage newspapers from that period online.
Okay, I have to rethink this again as I’ve found another reference to the Pastime in the August 23, 1931 issue of The Film Daily. As it was a report of the house closing, I don’t think the item is likely be using the wrong theater name. So we’re back to a house called the Pastime becoming a house called the Rex in 1931, but no closer to figuring out where it was.
It’s undoubtedly safe to assume that the Sanborn maps are a more reliable source of information than the theater industry trade journals, and that the Rex was never located on Gillespie Street, so we should look elsewhere for it.
I’ve found a source indicating that a house called the Rivoli was in operation at Portage at least as early as 1928 (The Daily Worker, oddly enough, which reported a meeting of 800 miners held at the Rivoli on April 12.)
The most likely source for the confusion about the Rex would be the October 25, 1931, Film Daily item saying that C. O. Baird had remodeled and reopened the old Pastime and renamed it the Rex. Trade journals often got their information about small town theaters from the guys who delivered films for the distribution companies, and those guys made a lot of mistakes.
It could be that it was the old Grand that Baird was reopening as the Rex. I’ve found no mentions of the Pastime in the trade journals from later than 1926, so it’s possible that the guy passing the information to Film Daily in 1931 knew that house only as the Rivoli, and simply conflated the name Pastime with the name Grand. Since the Grand had closed by 1926, someone who had been delivering movies to Portage for only a few years or less would have had no first-hand experience of that theater at all.
This is just speculation, of course, but it would fit the timeline of events in Portage during the 1910s and 1920s that we do have, and knowing how sloppy the trade journals often were makes it even more plausible.
This item is from the May 13, 1953 issue of The Exhibitor:
“Gus Notopolous, general manager, Altoona Publix Theatres, and George Wasko, owner, Rex and Rivoli, Portage, Pa., were in Pittsburgh.”
The next item is from the June 10 issue of the same publication:
“Portage
“George Wasko installed 3-D equipment at the Rivoli, which he recently acquired. He is closing the Rex five days a week.”
So in the 1950s, at least, we have a Rex and a Rivoli both operating at the same time. I haven’t found any other items mentioning both houses at the same time, but the May 1, 1937 issue of Motion Picture Herald has this item about the Rivoli:
“R. Allison has completely recarpeted his Rivoli theatre in Portage, Pa. The installation was made by Louis Weinger of the Hotel and Theatre Carpet Company of New York.”
The September 26, 1941, issue of The Film Daily lists the Rex, Portage, as one of several houses having new carpeting installed. It would be unlikely that the same theater would get new carpeting twice in four years.
An obituary for George J. Wasko, who died in 1995, said that he acquired the Rex Theatre in 1950 and the Rivoli in 1953. He operated the Bar Ann Drive-In from 1954 to 1994, and the Dale Theatre in Johnstown from 1960 to 1965.
If this theater was converted into a bowling alley by 1938, why do we have a photo with a couple of circa 1950 cars out front, and the theater’s attraction board advertising the 1946 Mexican movie Campeón sin corona with David Silva? I’m thinking perhaps a typo was involved, and it was actually converted to a bowling alley in 1958, as I’ve come across two sources saying that the conversion did take place in the 1950s.
Portage is puzzling. The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists four theaters at Portage, but none are called the Pastime, Rivoli, or Rex. They were the Colonial, Globe, Grand, and Lyric, the last of which was located on Main Street. I’m looking for more information, but have an appointment so I’ll have to get back to the search later.
What I’ve been able to piece together from various sources is that the Prince Theatre closed in the mid-1960s, was donated by its owners to the City of Pahhokee in 1976, was repaired and reopened by a citizen-led group for live events and movies in 1980, but closed again a few years later. The vacant building’s roof was badly damaged by Tropical Storm Fay in 2008, and the city decided it was beyond repair.
A deal was made by the city to sell the land to the owner of an adjacent filling station in 2010, with the condition that the filling station owner have the theatre demolished. Instead, he began repairs on the building, and the city sued him. I’ve been unable to find details about what happened next, but the building was not demolished and there were reports about attempts to renovate and reopen it in 2015, 2016 and 2017.
The Prince Theatre is currently listed in the portfolio of Jones-Phillips Associates, LLC, which describes itself as “… a full-service consulting firm specializing in performance facility planning and architectural lighting design.” Their web site provides no details about the Prince Theatre project, but the fact that it is listed indicates that such a project is, at the very least, in the planning stage.
Floyd Theatres took over the Park in 1940 and made some changes to the house, according to this item from The Film Daily, July 3, 1941:
“The Floyd Theaters, owners of the Park, Avon, Fla., are celebrating first anniversary of their entrance into the film industry in this part of the state. In addition to having made many improvements to the old building which they acquired, they have started work on a new theater in the nearby town of Sebring. Bill O'Neill is manager.”
Here is an item from the July 3, 1941 issue of The Film Daily about the Brentwood Theatre:
“Construction is going rapidly along on the new 700-seat theater being erected on Brentwood Blvd., Brentwood, Mo. The Stamm Construction Co. of St. Louis are the general contractors. The house will be ready by Dec. 1. It is the first theater to locate in Brentwood.”
An update on the Ridgecrest Cinemas' Facebook page this afternoon says that due to the collapse of the roof of theater 1 in the earthquake last Friday, building inspectors have red-tagged the entire structure. The cinemas are closed until further notice, though the owners do intend to open the undamaged section of the multiplex as soon as the safety of customers and staff can be guaranteed and official permission can be secured. Repairs will be made on the damaged parts of the building as soon as possible.
A brief video showing some of the damage can be seen at this link.
The correct address of the Lee Theatre is 3162 Williamson Road, at the southeast corner of Haffen Street. The building was not demolished, but converted for offices on the ground floor with apartments on a new second floor.
DavidZorning: I found a photo of an Allison Theatre in Piedmont, Alabama (not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.) Perhaps your photo’s caption got the town wrong. Does it look like this theater?
davidcoppock: Scottsdale long billed itself as “The West’s Most Western Town,” so when local businessman Martin White opened the town’s first movie theater in 1948 he gave it a very western name. It suggested a cattle brand (“T bar T”) and the original marquee was styled just that way, featuring a horizontal bar (with the word “BAR” on it) flanked by two capital T’s.
The name Kiva was a bit of cultural appropriation, it being the Pueblo Indian name for an underground or semi-underground chamber used primarily for communal rites and rituals. Traditionally only men were allowed in the Kiva, so perhaps the theater’s conversion to a porn house, patronized primarily by men, was unintentionally prophesied by the name. Watch out for those Kachinas!
The overview is mistaken. Stanley Warner sold its southern California houses, including the Wiltern, to Pacific Theatres in 1968. In 1958 Pacific was still a drive-in chain and did not yet have any hardtops.
The “New Theatres” column of the January 7, 1922 issue of Exhibitors Trade Review said that “Mrs. W. J. Rezac has opened her Plaza” in Hibbing.
The March 4, 2018 issue of CCNJ Daily said that the Ocean City Tabenacle had closed the Moorlyn Theatre and listed it for sale. The March 13 issue said that the building had been sold to Sey West Realty Partners LLC of Ocean City. I haven’t found anything about the purchaser’s plans for the property, but there are no listings on the Internet so the theater remains closed. It was last operated by Ocean City Tabernacle under the name Moorlyn Family Theatre.
The calendar of the previous year’s theatrical events in the 1893 edition of The New York Clipper Annual said that the Opera House in Charleroi, Pennsylvania was dedicated on September 14, 1892. A play called “Killarney and the Rhine” was the first presentation.
Unless the Alessios were expecting full houses with all 800 seats filled by people who had driven to the theater alone, 25% of them towing an extra car behind them just in case the first one broke down, 1000 parking spaces seems like a bit of overkill. More likely the newspaper’s typesetter accidentally added an extra zero to the number.
Looking at this theater in aerial view there is no way it ever had parking for 1,000 cars. 800 seats on opening is certainly plausible though. The auditorium is about 50x120 feet.
buckguy’s observation is correct. The Sound of Music was released in 1965, and since it had a long roadshow run it is likely that it wouldn’t have reached Fairport Harbor until 1966, or even 1967. However, I’ve found another source saying that the Lyric closed in 1962. It’s possible, as buckguy pointed out, that someone just mis-remembered seeing that movie at the Lyric. It’s also possible that the Lyric, like hundreds of small town theaters during their final days, closed and then reopened for a time, perhaps more than once. Until conclusive information becomes available it’s probably best just to say that the house closed in the 1960s.
One possibility I can imagine, since there is the reference to 800 miners meeting at the Rivoli 1928, is that Baird renamed this house the Rivoli in or before 1928 and moved the name Pastime to another location, possibly the former Grand, which then became the Rex in 1931. The local newspaper’s files would surely be of help, but unfortunately I can’t find any Portage newspapers from that period online.
Okay, I have to rethink this again as I’ve found another reference to the Pastime in the August 23, 1931 issue of The Film Daily. As it was a report of the house closing, I don’t think the item is likely be using the wrong theater name. So we’re back to a house called the Pastime becoming a house called the Rex in 1931, but no closer to figuring out where it was.
It’s undoubtedly safe to assume that the Sanborn maps are a more reliable source of information than the theater industry trade journals, and that the Rex was never located on Gillespie Street, so we should look elsewhere for it.
I’ve found a source indicating that a house called the Rivoli was in operation at Portage at least as early as 1928 (The Daily Worker, oddly enough, which reported a meeting of 800 miners held at the Rivoli on April 12.)
The most likely source for the confusion about the Rex would be the October 25, 1931, Film Daily item saying that C. O. Baird had remodeled and reopened the old Pastime and renamed it the Rex. Trade journals often got their information about small town theaters from the guys who delivered films for the distribution companies, and those guys made a lot of mistakes.
It could be that it was the old Grand that Baird was reopening as the Rex. I’ve found no mentions of the Pastime in the trade journals from later than 1926, so it’s possible that the guy passing the information to Film Daily in 1931 knew that house only as the Rivoli, and simply conflated the name Pastime with the name Grand. Since the Grand had closed by 1926, someone who had been delivering movies to Portage for only a few years or less would have had no first-hand experience of that theater at all.
This is just speculation, of course, but it would fit the timeline of events in Portage during the 1910s and 1920s that we do have, and knowing how sloppy the trade journals often were makes it even more plausible.
This item is from the May 13, 1953 issue of The Exhibitor:
The next item is from the June 10 issue of the same publication:So in the 1950s, at least, we have a Rex and a Rivoli both operating at the same time. I haven’t found any other items mentioning both houses at the same time, but the May 1, 1937 issue of Motion Picture Herald has this item about the Rivoli:The September 26, 1941, issue of The Film Daily lists the Rex, Portage, as one of several houses having new carpeting installed. It would be unlikely that the same theater would get new carpeting twice in four years.An obituary for George J. Wasko, who died in 1995, said that he acquired the Rex Theatre in 1950 and the Rivoli in 1953. He operated the Bar Ann Drive-In from 1954 to 1994, and the Dale Theatre in Johnstown from 1960 to 1965.
If this theater was converted into a bowling alley by 1938, why do we have a photo with a couple of circa 1950 cars out front, and the theater’s attraction board advertising the 1946 Mexican movie Campeón sin corona with David Silva? I’m thinking perhaps a typo was involved, and it was actually converted to a bowling alley in 1958, as I’ve come across two sources saying that the conversion did take place in the 1950s.
Portage is puzzling. The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists four theaters at Portage, but none are called the Pastime, Rivoli, or Rex. They were the Colonial, Globe, Grand, and Lyric, the last of which was located on Main Street. I’m looking for more information, but have an appointment so I’ll have to get back to the search later.
What I’ve been able to piece together from various sources is that the Prince Theatre closed in the mid-1960s, was donated by its owners to the City of Pahhokee in 1976, was repaired and reopened by a citizen-led group for live events and movies in 1980, but closed again a few years later. The vacant building’s roof was badly damaged by Tropical Storm Fay in 2008, and the city decided it was beyond repair.
A deal was made by the city to sell the land to the owner of an adjacent filling station in 2010, with the condition that the filling station owner have the theatre demolished. Instead, he began repairs on the building, and the city sued him. I’ve been unable to find details about what happened next, but the building was not demolished and there were reports about attempts to renovate and reopen it in 2015, 2016 and 2017.
The Prince Theatre is currently listed in the portfolio of Jones-Phillips Associates, LLC, which describes itself as “… a full-service consulting firm specializing in performance facility planning and architectural lighting design.” Their web site provides no details about the Prince Theatre project, but the fact that it is listed indicates that such a project is, at the very least, in the planning stage.
Here’s a brief item about the Ridge Theatre from The Film Daily of July 3, 1941:
An opening before the end of 1941 seems very likely.Floyd Theatres took over the Park in 1940 and made some changes to the house, according to this item from The Film Daily, July 3, 1941:
Here’s an item from the July 3, 1941 issue of The Film Daily:
Here is an item from the July 3, 1941 issue of The Film Daily about the Brentwood Theatre:
An update on the Ridgecrest Cinemas' Facebook page this afternoon says that due to the collapse of the roof of theater 1 in the earthquake last Friday, building inspectors have red-tagged the entire structure. The cinemas are closed until further notice, though the owners do intend to open the undamaged section of the multiplex as soon as the safety of customers and staff can be guaranteed and official permission can be secured. Repairs will be made on the damaged parts of the building as soon as possible.
A brief video showing some of the damage can be seen at this link.
Here is the official web site.
The correct address of the Lee Theatre is 3162 Williamson Road, at the southeast corner of Haffen Street. The building was not demolished, but converted for offices on the ground floor with apartments on a new second floor.
meheuck: Better later than never. The Fox Ritz wasn’t in Beverly Hills, though. It was on Wilshire between La Brea and Sycamore in Los Angeles.
DavidZorning: I found a photo of an Allison Theatre in Piedmont, Alabama (not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.) Perhaps your photo’s caption got the town wrong. Does it look like this theater?
davidcoppock: Scottsdale long billed itself as “The West’s Most Western Town,” so when local businessman Martin White opened the town’s first movie theater in 1948 he gave it a very western name. It suggested a cattle brand (“T bar T”) and the original marquee was styled just that way, featuring a horizontal bar (with the word “BAR” on it) flanked by two capital T’s.
The name Kiva was a bit of cultural appropriation, it being the Pueblo Indian name for an underground or semi-underground chamber used primarily for communal rites and rituals. Traditionally only men were allowed in the Kiva, so perhaps the theater’s conversion to a porn house, patronized primarily by men, was unintentionally prophesied by the name. Watch out for those Kachinas!
Laura La Shell was the widow of George La Shell, who died in 1928.
The overview is mistaken. Stanley Warner sold its southern California houses, including the Wiltern, to Pacific Theatres in 1968. In 1958 Pacific was still a drive-in chain and did not yet have any hardtops.