Rialto Theater
303 Main Street,
Bedford,
IA
50833
303 Main Street,
Bedford,
IA
50833
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Additional Info
Previous Names: Clark Theater
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The Clark Theater was opened by 1918. It was renamed Rialto Theater by 1926. The Rialto Theater was destroyed in a fire on April 13, 1955.
It was rebuilt and opened in 1957 as the Hardin Theatre (It has its own page on Cinema Treasures).
Contributed by
Ken McIntyre
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Recent comments (view all 5 comments)
Here is a description of the fire from the Austin, MN Daily Herald:
BEDFORD, IA â€" Fire destroyed the Rialto Theater Building in Bedford today. Preliminary estimates placed the loss at $160,000. The fire was discovered at about 2 a.m. The building was burned out, along with the Ben Scane plumbing shop and the Wogan electric shop and tavern. Both shops also were located in the theater building.
Ben Scane, the Bedford fire chief, turned in the alarm when he was awakened by the barking of his dog. Scane and his wife live in an apartment at the rear of his plumbing shop in the theater. The Scanes escaped in their night clothes. All their possessions were lost.
It was not really ‘destroyed’. The front certainly was, and was replaced by the Hardin Building. The rear of this is definitely an auditorium, and the Rialto is listed in the 1957 yearbook. Later yearbooks are pretty useless, since they only list circuits.
The theater was likely built after 1914-15, and appears on the 1918 map as the Clark, with a capacity of 425. It originally had a very large opera house style balcony, which still appears on the 1933 map. The yearbook for that year lists a capacity of 400. I assume the balcony was greatly reduced at some point. The name was changed to Rialto by 1926 at the latest.
Could this theater, casually mentioned in the July 3, 1961 issue of Boxoffice, have something to do with the Hardin building?: “Wilbur Young of the Hardin Theatre at Bedford, Iowa, is spending his spare afternoons fishing….” A September 24, 1955 Boxoffice item had said that Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur Young, operators of the Rialto Theatre at Bedford for several years, had leased the new Hardin Theatre, under construction there, and hoped to have it open by mid-October. If the Hardin building was built in front of the Rialto’s burnt-out carcass then that carcass probably housed the new theater.
An announcement of the opening of the new Hardin finally appeared in Boxoffice of November 19, but the exact date of the event was not mentioned. The Hardin was apparently still in operation in 1977, when it was mentioned in the August 5 issue of the Bedford Times-Press.
The Clark Theatre was mentioned in Exhibitors Herald of October 2, 1920, and the earliest mention of the Rialto I’ve found is in Motion Picture News November 7, 1925.
So maybe it really was destroyed completely? In that case, the new Rialto/Hardin needs its own entry. Looking at the brickwork on the auditorium, it does seem to be newer than the 1910s.
There are photos on Facebook and it was pretty much nothing but rubble after the fire.