Park Theatre

“The building in these 1986 photos look a lot like this theater.”

It is the same theater. Those photos are from the mid-1980s when it was the Allison Theater before it went belly up and was converted to a church.

Here’s what it looked like when it opened in 1921:

Here is a 1939 newspaper ad:
http://tinyurl.com/mk63zk

I went past the theatre the other day and I don’t think the church is there anymore. The facade looks whitewashed and there is brown wood paneling on the bottom of the front and over the previous poster holders. The once jutted out marquee remnants are boarded over and not blended in at all.

I was there on Thursday and the marquee is torn down in such a haphazard and sloppy way. There was no thought to at least cover it up with sheetrock or anything. Just a big hunk of metal jutting out.

1935 Hamilton Theatre flier ad: http://www.powimage.com/image/3891.jpeg

i guess they lied to you i passed by there the other day and the marquee is being torn down such a shame

For a theater of no particular architectural distinction, the Hamilton/Park has had quite an interesting history. While orginally an ordinary, first-run theater, by the mid 1960’s it was showing mostly foreign movies, what today would be known as an art house. Movies of that sort weren’t too popular in working-class Waterbury and the Hamilton soon became a porno house. It became enmeshed in a lengthy legal battle around 1970 when the police raided a showing of “Thar She Blows,” a movie which, its title notwithstanding, had nothing to do with the New England whaling industry :) Theater management took out a large advertisement in the local newspaper to celebrate the fact when the courts finally ruled that the movie wasn’t legally obscene.
In the early 1980’s the Hamilton became what must be one of the few theaters to return to showing “normal” movies after a period as a porno house. It was during that time I made my one and only visit there, seeing “Eye of the Needle” starring Donald Sutherland. While the auditorium wasn’t really decrepit, it certainly was in need of some TLC, as they say in real estate ads. By that time the name may have been changed to the Park, though my memory’s a bit hazy. In any event, its spell as a regular movie theater didn’t last long, and by the mid 1980’s the owners sold it to the Church of God.
One more controversy awaited. The Church of God congregation which bought the Hamilton/Park was mainly Spanish-speaking (“Iglesia de Dios.”) The surrounding neighborhood, at the time, was one of the declining number of white ethnic working-class areas that once accounted for much of Waterbury. Some community residents claimed that selling the theater to a Hispanic church would lead to white flight and the neighborhood’s becoming Hispanic itself. They had little legal standing to block the sale and the church soon took over. By the way, the neighborhood actually did become partly Hispanic over the next few years, though given Waterbury’s demographics this likely would have happened in any event.
One night in 1989 or 1990, the theater – now the Iglesia de Dios – showed that if nothing else, it was a real survivor. An apartment building known as the Honeymoon Apartments, which adjoined the south side of the theater building, literally burned to the ground in a truly ferocious fire. It was amazing that all of the residents were able to get out safely. As for the theater building, it suffered a little cosmetic damage but somehow managed to survive a raging fire just a few feet away.