Lyric Theatre

SethG on August 16, 2022 at 1:51 pm

I’m not sure about the address. 66 Franklin on the 1908 map is the Franklin House hotel, which was at the SW corner of the Public Square. By 1913 however, the hotel had become 126 W Franklin. East/West were abandoned sometime later, since the big ugly bank on top of where the hotel was is 50 Franklin.

That area of town, despite being the location of city hall, appears really marginal on old maps. Lots of vacant buildings, tenements, piles of junk large enough to be noted on the map, factories, a ‘Holiness Mission’, etc. Like Clarksville’s answer to the Bowery.

Assuming Jack was estimating east from the current bank at 50, the 1913 map shows junk storage, a ragpicker, a tenement, a newspaper (The Leaf Chronicle, possibly a tobacco industry newsletter), the Hurst-Baillin wholesale grocery warehouse, and a rail spur to the warehouse. Does not look like a promising location for a theater. The large set of buildings on the corner, which are still there, was the Elder-Conroy Hardware Co., and has always had an address in the 90s.

BTB on June 12, 2008 at 8:28 pm

i think it is not the Lyric theater—it is the Lillian theater