I worked as a projectionist briefly at the Graham c. 1971. There was no balcony. The projection room was accessed by a metal ladder at the rear of the orchestra. There was no toilet in the booth. One opened the roof access door seen in the 1940 photo and peed on the roof. Written on the door was the admonition, “do not piss on door, open door and piss on roof.”
The policy was triple feature flat-rate rentals. I remember running Arizona Bushwhackers and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.
The manager would go on the roof and peek through a vent into the ladies room whenever a babe went in there.
I was on the inaugural projection crew at its opening and for about a year. There were no 70 mm, or more accurately 35/70 MM projectors in the theatre, despite what the ad said. The opening attraction in the large house, #5, was “The Verdict.”
Subsequently, I worked across the street at the Fresh Meadows Theatre. When I started in ‘83, it was a side-by-side twin with 35 MM projectors.
After Cineplex took over, it was converted to a sevenplex, with 3 basement screens, 3 second-floor screens, one of which had a 35/70 MM projector and one ground floor “presentation house” with one 35/70 MM Simplex X-L machine and a 35/70 MM Potts Platter system. We ran just two 70 MM releases: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Far and Away in the 21 years I was a projectionist there.
Alas, 70 MM faded out and is brought back occasionally for “tent-pole” actioners.
DeDona Pizza was past Key Food. The one by PS 151 – cannot recall if it had a name beyond Pizza. I know there were price wars between the two when pizza was 15c a slice and soda was 5 cents for a 7oz. cup
The drugstore was “B&D” and the soda fountain was called “Eddie’s” when I arrived in ‘55 when my classmate Frank Eisenberg’s dad ran it before selling to Harry Lipshitz when it became known as Max & Herman’s. Remember DeDona Pizza with Silvio and Pop?
I remember mustachioed Pat Abrams and his protoge Dan Siegel. I used to get stamps there as it was an official US Postal Sub-station. How about one-armed Mr. Greene of Green’s Corner, later taken over by Herb and Sally Katz. That store broke through the wall of the Chinese Laundry and expanded in the 70’s, I think.
Correction: Benkert’s and Shamrock were on a triangle of land bordered by 51st St, Hobart St. and 31st Ave. Since their front entrances were on 51st St., which splits from Hobart Street at the apex of the triangle, they would be on 51st St (formerly Bowey Bay Road). Their back walls were on Hobart Street opposite PS 151. The triangular “strip mall” was on a hill. Every so often, a car would miss the turn at the Hobart-51st St fork and plow into Frandahl’s Stationery at the apex. We project kids stayed away from Frandahl’s (which everyone pronounced “Fran-DELL’S,”) as they watched us like hawks. Hobart Street runs just two blocks – from 31st Ave. to 28th Ave. where it becomes 50th St.
QUESTION FOR EXTRA CREDIT: which came first: Hobart Street or Hobart Theatre?
All before we moved from Kingsboro Houses in Crown Heights in 1955. Heard about the carnival. Chinese cemetery? You’re not referring to the Moore-Jackson Cemetery on the Hobart Bldg. block (still there)?
No, the corner saloon was Murphy’s Bar and Grill, barely readable in 1940 NYC Tax Photo above. Shamrock was kitty-corner on Hobart Street near Benkert’s Bakery.
The Hobart Theatre was a “77-hour house” – 11 hours a day from 1:00 PM until midnight in its last years ending in 1964. They ran kidder matineees on Saturdays, which were heavily promoted by distribution of multi-colored handbills.
On Saturday, if your handbill color matched the one taped to the box office window, you got in free. This was rigged – the winning color, usually dark maroon, was pre-selected and only a few of its clones were given out, usually to adults who were regulars.
For a while, they ran a kid show Comedy Race reel. The 7-min. Race had 10 competitors who wore numbered jerseys. One week it might be cars, the next week it might be bicycles or runners. Every kid got a numbered stub that, if it matched the winner on screen, got a small prize.
Wasn’t her mother a matron at the kiddie shows? Perhaps German? Can’t recall names. Elsie was candy attendant in the 60’s. Just noticed earlier post from Kenneth K about Frances, who I suspect is your beloved.
The only problem with that is that the Hobart was, with the exception of an occasional first run under Steinberg, a double-feature house and to what you described, you would have to sit through the second feature before the first came on again, by which time, who can even remember the first feature?
I was the projectionist at the Community Theatre in Ocean Beach in the summer of 1966. The manager was Jean Dattner. The contract with Local 640 Projectionists included a room as there was no way off the island after the show ended at midnight except by expensive “water taxi” or small boat fir $35! I had Mondays off when the house was closed and would go back to Woodside where I lived.
There were two 35 mm Standard Simplex projectors with Strong carbon arc lamphouses.
At the end of the season, i had to cover all moving parts of the projectors with naval jelly to prevent corrosion from the salt air. Then the auditorium was rearranged for religious services for Rosh Hashannah. I was told to write my name on the booth wall’s pantheon of projectionists which I did. If the theatre is still there, would somebody take a picture and post it?
I remember screening “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” while it was still on Broadway first run because the remoteness and inaccessability of the Community took it out of the NY Metro market. What a movie! I also ran “The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming there which was about a small beach community invaded by Alan Arkin, "Emergency: everyone to get from STREET!”
I worked as a projectionist in late 1966 at the Nautilus Theatre which had a Beech Ave. address and was at the southwest corner of TENESSEE and Beech, not the Vermont Avenue adress erroneously listed. The door for the Projection Booth was on Tennessee Avenue and there was no access to the theatre except by going outside and entering the lobby’s Beech Ave. entrance.
I worked Mon-Thursday from 7-midnight and Sat-Sun from 1pm – midnight.
The pay was $3.25 per hour, or nearly three times my usher’s minimum wage of $1.25 per hour.
The owner at the time was Irwin Knohl, son of so-called Long Beach entrepreneur (& rumored gangster) Larry Knohl. I recall a man named Sydney Fuchs who may have co-owned the joint with a fellow named Cinetar before Knohl took over.
The booth had two 35 mm Super Simplex heads with RCA Soundheads and Brenkert Enarc carbon arc lamphouses. When I started working there a few weeks shy of my 18th birthday, I lived in Woodside, Queens and had no car so it was quite a schlep: GG from Northern Blvd. to Roosevelt, E or F to Sutphin, shoe leather to the LIRR Jamiaca Terminal for the Long Beach Line to the last stop. Finally the stick-shift piloted municipal bus to Tenessee Ave.
At night, i would hop a cab to the LIRR for the midnight train. Confession: sometimes if the show ran too close to midnight, I might cut 5-10 mins. out of a reel by making an early changeover in order to make that midnight train to Queens😉.
I had heard that the predecessor to the Nautilus, the West End, was moved to the Tennessee Av. location.
By 1967, Charlie Washburn, the Business Representative for Local 640 IATSE, the Nassau- Suffolk projectionist union, moved me out of the “shitcan,” as fellow projectionist Joseph Scherer dubbed the Nautilis, into the Ocean Beach Theater on Fire Island where a drunk was fired from the booth.
I first saw the “Mighty Meadows” in 1965 at a special Sneak Preview of “A Thousand Clowns.” I was 17 and worked at Century’s Prospect in Flushing. Whenever the Meadows had a big event, they would borrow ushers from the Prospect to augment their staff. This was in the days of single-screens, so two thousand + patrons would come pouring out at once.
The Prospect manager was Walter Leyendecker, who had replaced Mr. Mc Eachern or “Mac,” formerly of the Meadows. The first thing I noticed, was that the auditorium exit signs, instead of glowing red, glowed a sexy violet.
When I became 21, I became a projectionist with NYC Local 306 IATSE. Because of low seniority, I took a job at RKO Alden on Jamaica Avenue in the mid ‘70s. It was in decline in a dangerous neighborhood. In 1978, the Alden was converted from one screen to a quad. My pay went from $13 to $22 per hour as I had to run all 4 screens.
In 1983 after the Alden Quad closed because of poor business, I became eligible for “circuit seniority” and claimed the Meadows and got it over other older projectionists because I had lost my job through no fault of my own. The manager was Ed Bernhardt who was allowed to keep a small dog, named Charlie in the manager’s office. Charlie never barked and knew never to venture out into the lobby.
The Meadows was a twin by that point with the huge original auditorium divided longitudinally by a wall and serviced from the original booth in the upper rear of the building. This booth was amazing! Very large with picture windows that had louvers beneath to get fresh air. The view was of the LIE, just yards away. There was a dumbwaiter at the north end for hoisting the heavy film shipping cases.
The old “preview magazines” that enabled double-system “work prints” to be screened for audience testing had been removed and were stored near the dumbwaiter. The equipment was 4 35 MM Simplex X-L with Ashcraft carbon arc lamphouses that had been retrofitted for Xenon bulbs. The soundheads were RCA. We spliced three 18-minute reels together and ran 6,000 foot hour-long reels with one changeover in the middle of the movie.
In the 90’s the Meadows was acquired by Cineplex Odeon and its CEO, Garth Drabinsky (he put real butter back on the popcorn) decided to make a sevenplex. Platters were brought in (see photos), and two new booths that ran the long way (east-west) were built. Six 35 MM and one 35/70 MM Simplexes were put in. Three cinemas (1,2&3) had small screens in the basement mounted along the long south wall.
Three medium screens were in Cinemas 5,6&7 on the upper level and Cinema 4, the “presentation” house with 35/70 was in the basement with a large screen near where the original 1949 screen was along the east wall.
In 2003 the union started allowing the managers to run the projectors on Mon, Tue & Weds, so I left the Meadows and “bid” for Regal’s Sheepshead Bay 14-plex, still 100% union. I retired in 2008. My final shift was the first day of a new cutback. The projectionist would go home after starting the last shows and the manager would shut down. I clocked out at 10:30 PM for the last time. I had just turned 60 and was eligible for early retirement, so I went to Boca Raton, FL.
Two years later, the Sheepshead Bay went digital and the projectionists were replaced by manager/projectionists. Now there are but a handful of theatres, mostly repertory, still union. Sad.
I worked at the Hobart from 1963-1964, its closing year. I used to go-fer coffee for the staff from the White Tower on Broadway. I started hanging out in the projection booth with the operators, Eddie Pearle, Nat Brody, Irwin “Smitty” Smith and others. The booth had 2 Motiograph 35MM projectors with Brenkert Enarc carbon arc lamphouses and RCA soundheads. I would run the show while the operators snoozed.
The address is definitely 51-06 as it was on the even side of the street and 60 feet from 51st St. (In Queens the number after the dash times 10 equals the approximate distance from the cross street. (So called “Philadelphia” system and, for my money the best of all the boroughs for ease of locating addresses). Note that Bryant HS, on the same side of the avenue as the Hobart is at 48-10 31Ave.
I recently looked at Wikipedia’s year by year list of movies in order to pinpoint when the Hobart closed. It would be 1964 as I remember Goldfinger played there. None of the 1965 movies were shown, so it closed in late 1964. At the time it was managed by Stanley Borushik, the step-son of mini-chain owner Philip Steinberg. Before Stanley took over, Steinberg’s right hand man, Eddie Bigelper(?), “Mr. B” ran it. Steinberg owned several other dumps, the Olympia on Steinway Street and a few in Brooklyn, including the Boro Park. I ran into Steinberg at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, NY at Frank Zappa Concer in 1970. Apparently he had a piece of that.
Steinberg would come every night to pick up the day’s receipts after box-office closing at 10 PM. He would park his big white Caddy right in front of the marquee (illegally).
The entrance was definitely a “tunnel” consisting of an outer lobby, inner lobby with concession and stairway to the 2nd floor toilets. As noted by a previous poster, the entrance was to the crosswalk separately the stadium-style balcony from the orchestra. There were just under 600 seats, a threshhold set by the Projectionist Union, Local 306, which I joined in 1969 after turning 21 and passing a fairly stringent NYC Dept. of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity written and 3-part practical exam in the sub-basement of the Treasury Building in which a mock booth with one working projector was set up.
After the Hobart closed, it was gutted so that the sloping floor could be repoured as a flat one in preparation for the Associated Supermarket that took over the space. Its entrance was on 51st St. Where the two exit doors that straddled the screen was. After watching a matinee, some kids would crash out through theses doors which would flood the theatre with ugly daylight until the matron closed it.
Stan Malone: Loew’s Astor Plaza was built in the basement of the Minskoff Theatre and replaced Loew’s State as the company’s Manhattan flagship
I worked as a projectionist briefly at the Graham c. 1971. There was no balcony. The projection room was accessed by a metal ladder at the rear of the orchestra. There was no toilet in the booth. One opened the roof access door seen in the 1940 photo and peed on the roof. Written on the door was the admonition, “do not piss on door, open door and piss on roof.”
The policy was triple feature flat-rate rentals. I remember running Arizona Bushwhackers and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.
The manager would go on the roof and peek through a vent into the ladies room whenever a babe went in there.
I was on the inaugural projection crew at its opening and for about a year. There were no 70 mm, or more accurately 35/70 MM projectors in the theatre, despite what the ad said. The opening attraction in the large house, #5, was “The Verdict.”
Subsequently, I worked across the street at the Fresh Meadows Theatre. When I started in ‘83, it was a side-by-side twin with 35 MM projectors.
After Cineplex took over, it was converted to a sevenplex, with 3 basement screens, 3 second-floor screens, one of which had a 35/70 MM projector and one ground floor “presentation house” with one 35/70 MM Simplex X-L machine and a 35/70 MM Potts Platter system. We ran just two 70 MM releases: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Far and Away in the 21 years I was a projectionist there.
Alas, 70 MM faded out and is brought back occasionally for “tent-pole” actioners.
DeDona Pizza was past Key Food. The one by PS 151 – cannot recall if it had a name beyond Pizza. I know there were price wars between the two when pizza was 15c a slice and soda was 5 cents for a 7oz. cup
The drugstore was “B&D” and the soda fountain was called “Eddie’s” when I arrived in ‘55 when my classmate Frank Eisenberg’s dad ran it before selling to Harry Lipshitz when it became known as Max & Herman’s. Remember DeDona Pizza with Silvio and Pop?
I remember mustachioed Pat Abrams and his protoge Dan Siegel. I used to get stamps there as it was an official US Postal Sub-station. How about one-armed Mr. Greene of Green’s Corner, later taken over by Herb and Sally Katz. That store broke through the wall of the Chinese Laundry and expanded in the 70’s, I think.
Correction: Benkert’s and Shamrock were on a triangle of land bordered by 51st St, Hobart St. and 31st Ave. Since their front entrances were on 51st St., which splits from Hobart Street at the apex of the triangle, they would be on 51st St (formerly Bowey Bay Road). Their back walls were on Hobart Street opposite PS 151. The triangular “strip mall” was on a hill. Every so often, a car would miss the turn at the Hobart-51st St fork and plow into Frandahl’s Stationery at the apex. We project kids stayed away from Frandahl’s (which everyone pronounced “Fran-DELL’S,”) as they watched us like hawks. Hobart Street runs just two blocks – from 31st Ave. to 28th Ave. where it becomes 50th St.
QUESTION FOR EXTRA CREDIT: which came first: Hobart Street or Hobart Theatre?
All before we moved from Kingsboro Houses in Crown Heights in 1955. Heard about the carnival. Chinese cemetery? You’re not referring to the Moore-Jackson Cemetery on the Hobart Bldg. block (still there)?
No, the corner saloon was Murphy’s Bar and Grill, barely readable in 1940 NYC Tax Photo above. Shamrock was kitty-corner on Hobart Street near Benkert’s Bakery.
The Hobart Theatre was a “77-hour house” – 11 hours a day from 1:00 PM until midnight in its last years ending in 1964. They ran kidder matineees on Saturdays, which were heavily promoted by distribution of multi-colored handbills.
On Saturday, if your handbill color matched the one taped to the box office window, you got in free. This was rigged – the winning color, usually dark maroon, was pre-selected and only a few of its clones were given out, usually to adults who were regulars.
For a while, they ran a kid show Comedy Race reel. The 7-min. Race had 10 competitors who wore numbered jerseys. One week it might be cars, the next week it might be bicycles or runners. Every kid got a numbered stub that, if it matched the winner on screen, got a small prize.
Those kid shows were always PACKED!
Wasn’t her mother a matron at the kiddie shows? Perhaps German? Can’t recall names. Elsie was candy attendant in the 60’s. Just noticed earlier post from Kenneth K about Frances, who I suspect is your beloved.
The only problem with that is that the Hobart was, with the exception of an occasional first run under Steinberg, a double-feature house and to what you described, you would have to sit through the second feature before the first came on again, by which time, who can even remember the first feature?
I was the projectionist at the Community Theatre in Ocean Beach in the summer of 1966. The manager was Jean Dattner. The contract with Local 640 Projectionists included a room as there was no way off the island after the show ended at midnight except by expensive “water taxi” or small boat fir $35! I had Mondays off when the house was closed and would go back to Woodside where I lived.
There were two 35 mm Standard Simplex projectors with Strong carbon arc lamphouses.
At the end of the season, i had to cover all moving parts of the projectors with naval jelly to prevent corrosion from the salt air. Then the auditorium was rearranged for religious services for Rosh Hashannah. I was told to write my name on the booth wall’s pantheon of projectionists which I did. If the theatre is still there, would somebody take a picture and post it?
I remember screening “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” while it was still on Broadway first run because the remoteness and inaccessability of the Community took it out of the NY Metro market. What a movie! I also ran “The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming there which was about a small beach community invaded by Alan Arkin, "Emergency: everyone to get from STREET!”
Contact fredhadley@yahoo.com.
I worked as a projectionist in late 1966 at the Nautilus Theatre which had a Beech Ave. address and was at the southwest corner of TENESSEE and Beech, not the Vermont Avenue adress erroneously listed. The door for the Projection Booth was on Tennessee Avenue and there was no access to the theatre except by going outside and entering the lobby’s Beech Ave. entrance.
I worked Mon-Thursday from 7-midnight and Sat-Sun from 1pm – midnight.
The pay was $3.25 per hour, or nearly three times my usher’s minimum wage of $1.25 per hour.
The owner at the time was Irwin Knohl, son of so-called Long Beach entrepreneur (& rumored gangster) Larry Knohl. I recall a man named Sydney Fuchs who may have co-owned the joint with a fellow named Cinetar before Knohl took over.
The booth had two 35 mm Super Simplex heads with RCA Soundheads and Brenkert Enarc carbon arc lamphouses. When I started working there a few weeks shy of my 18th birthday, I lived in Woodside, Queens and had no car so it was quite a schlep: GG from Northern Blvd. to Roosevelt, E or F to Sutphin, shoe leather to the LIRR Jamiaca Terminal for the Long Beach Line to the last stop. Finally the stick-shift piloted municipal bus to Tenessee Ave.
At night, i would hop a cab to the LIRR for the midnight train. Confession: sometimes if the show ran too close to midnight, I might cut 5-10 mins. out of a reel by making an early changeover in order to make that midnight train to Queens😉.
I had heard that the predecessor to the Nautilus, the West End, was moved to the Tennessee Av. location.
By 1967, Charlie Washburn, the Business Representative for Local 640 IATSE, the Nassau- Suffolk projectionist union, moved me out of the “shitcan,” as fellow projectionist Joseph Scherer dubbed the Nautilis, into the Ocean Beach Theater on Fire Island where a drunk was fired from the booth.
Contact fredhadley@yahoo.com
Meadows 2
I first saw the “Mighty Meadows” in 1965 at a special Sneak Preview of “A Thousand Clowns.” I was 17 and worked at Century’s Prospect in Flushing. Whenever the Meadows had a big event, they would borrow ushers from the Prospect to augment their staff. This was in the days of single-screens, so two thousand + patrons would come pouring out at once.
The Prospect manager was Walter Leyendecker, who had replaced Mr. Mc Eachern or “Mac,” formerly of the Meadows. The first thing I noticed, was that the auditorium exit signs, instead of glowing red, glowed a sexy violet.
When I became 21, I became a projectionist with NYC Local 306 IATSE. Because of low seniority, I took a job at RKO Alden on Jamaica Avenue in the mid ‘70s. It was in decline in a dangerous neighborhood. In 1978, the Alden was converted from one screen to a quad. My pay went from $13 to $22 per hour as I had to run all 4 screens.
In 1983 after the Alden Quad closed because of poor business, I became eligible for “circuit seniority” and claimed the Meadows and got it over other older projectionists because I had lost my job through no fault of my own. The manager was Ed Bernhardt who was allowed to keep a small dog, named Charlie in the manager’s office. Charlie never barked and knew never to venture out into the lobby.
The Meadows was a twin by that point with the huge original auditorium divided longitudinally by a wall and serviced from the original booth in the upper rear of the building. This booth was amazing! Very large with picture windows that had louvers beneath to get fresh air. The view was of the LIE, just yards away. There was a dumbwaiter at the north end for hoisting the heavy film shipping cases.
The old “preview magazines” that enabled double-system “work prints” to be screened for audience testing had been removed and were stored near the dumbwaiter. The equipment was 4 35 MM Simplex X-L with Ashcraft carbon arc lamphouses that had been retrofitted for Xenon bulbs. The soundheads were RCA. We spliced three 18-minute reels together and ran 6,000 foot hour-long reels with one changeover in the middle of the movie.
In the 90’s the Meadows was acquired by Cineplex Odeon and its CEO, Garth Drabinsky (he put real butter back on the popcorn) decided to make a sevenplex. Platters were brought in (see photos), and two new booths that ran the long way (east-west) were built. Six 35 MM and one 35/70 MM Simplexes were put in. Three cinemas (1,2&3) had small screens in the basement mounted along the long south wall.
Three medium screens were in Cinemas 5,6&7 on the upper level and Cinema 4, the “presentation” house with 35/70 was in the basement with a large screen near where the original 1949 screen was along the east wall.
In 2003 the union started allowing the managers to run the projectors on Mon, Tue & Weds, so I left the Meadows and “bid” for Regal’s Sheepshead Bay 14-plex, still 100% union. I retired in 2008. My final shift was the first day of a new cutback. The projectionist would go home after starting the last shows and the manager would shut down. I clocked out at 10:30 PM for the last time. I had just turned 60 and was eligible for early retirement, so I went to Boca Raton, FL.
Two years later, the Sheepshead Bay went digital and the projectionists were replaced by manager/projectionists. Now there are but a handful of theatres, mostly repertory, still union. Sad.
Contact: fredhadley@yahoo.com
I worked at the Hobart from 1963-1964, its closing year. I used to go-fer coffee for the staff from the White Tower on Broadway. I started hanging out in the projection booth with the operators, Eddie Pearle, Nat Brody, Irwin “Smitty” Smith and others. The booth had 2 Motiograph 35MM projectors with Brenkert Enarc carbon arc lamphouses and RCA soundheads. I would run the show while the operators snoozed.
The address is definitely 51-06 as it was on the even side of the street and 60 feet from 51st St. (In Queens the number after the dash times 10 equals the approximate distance from the cross street. (So called “Philadelphia” system and, for my money the best of all the boroughs for ease of locating addresses). Note that Bryant HS, on the same side of the avenue as the Hobart is at 48-10 31Ave.
I recently looked at Wikipedia’s year by year list of movies in order to pinpoint when the Hobart closed. It would be 1964 as I remember Goldfinger played there. None of the 1965 movies were shown, so it closed in late 1964. At the time it was managed by Stanley Borushik, the step-son of mini-chain owner Philip Steinberg. Before Stanley took over, Steinberg’s right hand man, Eddie Bigelper(?), “Mr. B” ran it. Steinberg owned several other dumps, the Olympia on Steinway Street and a few in Brooklyn, including the Boro Park. I ran into Steinberg at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, NY at Frank Zappa Concer in 1970. Apparently he had a piece of that.
Steinberg would come every night to pick up the day’s receipts after box-office closing at 10 PM. He would park his big white Caddy right in front of the marquee (illegally).
The entrance was definitely a “tunnel” consisting of an outer lobby, inner lobby with concession and stairway to the 2nd floor toilets. As noted by a previous poster, the entrance was to the crosswalk separately the stadium-style balcony from the orchestra. There were just under 600 seats, a threshhold set by the Projectionist Union, Local 306, which I joined in 1969 after turning 21 and passing a fairly stringent NYC Dept. of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity written and 3-part practical exam in the sub-basement of the Treasury Building in which a mock booth with one working projector was set up.
After the Hobart closed, it was gutted so that the sloping floor could be repoured as a flat one in preparation for the Associated Supermarket that took over the space. Its entrance was on 51st St. Where the two exit doors that straddled the screen was. After watching a matinee, some kids would crash out through theses doors which would flood the theatre with ugly daylight until the matron closed it.
Contact me at fredhadley@yahoo.com