Montclair Theatre

I grew up in Montclair in the sixties, and just found a slightly different copy of this postcard at a yard sale in my little village in the Catskill Mountains. Mine was mailed in August of 1916.

The online collection of the Montclair Public Library has a a copy of this postcard. It’s so badly scanned that I can’t tell if it it is the same copy as the one linked above, but I think it is the same. They give the address as being 634 Bloomfield Avenue, Montclair. That puts it at the southeast corner of the intersection of Bloomfield Avenue and Valley Road. I think there may still be a parking lot there, or at least was until fairly recently.

What a wonderful reminiscence, Jay! You should send a copy of it to the Montclair Public Library to go with the postcard there, and to the Montclair Historical Society too.

Cohen’s finally closed a couple of years ago, I think. In an era of corner stores that are corporate clones, up until the end it was still the way it had been for decades.

ca 1930 photo:
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On this site was the Mansion House, renamed from the West Bloomfield Hotel after a remodelling the late 1800s. It was razed and the Montclair Theatre opened on the site in 1913. It was the town’s first theatre and held concerts, plays, silent movies and later talkies. The asbestos curtain portrayed a 1913 scene of Bloomfield Avenue. The theatre was razed in the early 1950s. The debris was used as fill for the basement space. A parking lot does indeed occupy this site. Settling of the theatre fill caused the lot to sink. During reconstruction in 1997 one could see remains of the theatre.
source – Images of America: Montclair, pages 77 & 84

Jay Phelan: I really loved your stories. You made all those actors come alive for us. Thanks!

Architected by William H. McElfatrick and opened in 1913