AMC Classic Big Rapids 4

Joe Vogel on August 13, 2024 at 6:33 am

Sources differ on whether the Big Rapids was a new theater built on the site of the old Colonial in 1937 or was an extreme rebuilding of the earlier house. Water Winter Wonderland’s page of photos includes one with the Colonial gutted and its façade torn off but the side walls and roof trusses still in place. Because modern satellite views of the building show a pitched roof uncharacteristic of most theater construction in the 1930s, I’m inclined to go with the extreme rebuild belief.

The only mention of the project I’ve been able to find in trade publications is from the March 10, 1937 issue of Film Daily, which ran a brief item about three new Michigan houses to be built by the Butterfield chain, in Monroe, Manistee and Big Rapids. Of the Big Rapids project it said only “[a] 1,000-seat theater is to be built in Big Rapids on the present site of the Colonial. Pierra & Pierra [sic] of Chicago will probably be in charge of its construction.”

I haven’t found any other sources confirming William and Hal Pereira as architects of this house, but as they were designing one of the other Butterfield projects and the Big Rapids does strongly express their style of the period, they probably did design it.

As for the Colonial, it was a venerable house, dating from 1884, and despite some updating over the years it was a very old fashioned theater by the 1930s, as vintage photos show, and the interior was not well suited to the needs of a modern motion picture house. Cahn guides list it as a ground floor house with a total of about 700 seats arranged with only 319 in the orchestra and the rest in the balcony, gallery and boxes. It was not listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, which listed only a house called the Vaudette for movies at Big Rapids. The Colonial was still listed in the legitimate theaters section of the 1922 Cahn Guide, as a road show house, but it was being listed in the FDY by 1926, and had been mentioned in Moving Picture World at least as early as December, 1923.

fred1 on January 25, 2017 at 8:42 am

This theater was part of GKC theaters before they sold out to Carmike