AMC Classic South Hills Village 10

edblank on May 29, 2008 at 12:21 pm

The theater is in Bethel Park just yards from the border of Upper St. Clair in the South Hills suburbs near Pittsburgh.

(The nearby South Hills Village is part Bethel and part Upper St. Clair.)

The capacity of this theater was 1,303 when it opened in 1966 as the glorious, stylish one-screen Village.

When chopped up into five auditoriums and reopened in December 1982, the seats in some auditoriums were not re-aligned to conform to the installation/angles of the five new, smaller screens, and so patrons of Village 5 sat at slightly skewed angles in at least four of the five auditoriums.

The totally refurbished Carmike 10 (Spare us these dumb generic names!), which opened in July 1998, was a vast improvement on the five-screen version of the Village.

The original one-screen auditorium was for a few years the nicest second-run theater in Western Pennsylvania, I think.

A sign of the changing times occurred in 1970 when the first-run Chatham Cinema Downtown/Uptown did terrific business for 14 weeks with “Airport.” The picture was still doing major holdover business when Universal yanked it to give it to a few suburban theaters including the Village. When the Village outdrew the biggest of the 14 weeks at the Chatham, the writing was on the wall: Movies, even pictures that have been playing for 14 weeks Downtown, could do better in the posh new suburban houses. We all know how booking patterns shifted dramatically in the years that followed, sealing the fates of the Downtown first-run theaters and then closing them one by one.

Ironically, the rush to open more screens in the suburbs led to the chopping up of some of the nice houses, including the Village, that had made “Airport” so attractive there.

rpdgirl on March 3, 2009 at 9:32 pm

Carmike 10, that is.

edblank on March 30, 2009 at 6:44 pm

Renewing link.

rayman29 on April 5, 2017 at 5:45 pm

Now the AMC South Hills Village 10.