Aetna Theatre at the Wadsworth Atheneum

Oh yes, Warren, you are absolutely right and I rue that sad fact every time I come to the city from my Providence area residence. I was there on Sunday for an Italian movie at the Aetna. Right across from the Wadsworth Atheneum there used to be two great movie palaces, almost side by side, the Loew’s Poli and Loew’s Palace. Up a few blocks was the Strand. The Allyn and E.M. Loew’s were destroyed for the building of the misconceived and monstrous Civic Center. The Princess and Regal bit the dust in an orgy of “renewal.” I never went into those movie palaces or mini-palaces, but I remember driving by almost all of them on my way to other places in the early 1960s, when I wasn’t really interested in theatres per se, only in movies, which I generally saw near where I lived in Rhode Island. The only movie theatres I’ve visited in Hartford are the Rivoli when it was an art house, and the Art Cinema when it was indeed an art house. Both are on the outskirts. The Rivoli is gone; the Art remains as a porno house. The Lyric on Park Street, a few blocks from the state capitol building, does still stand, shuttered and decrepit. If one of the great movie palaces like the Poli or Strand had survived, it could have today been used for touring Broadway shows instead of the Bushnell Auditorium. The Bushnell is more properly a concert hall and I feel it should have been used exclusively for musical and operatic events. Never a movie theatre, the Bushnell has quite an eye-popping interior though. At least this survives, and the new smaller auditorium next to it is a pleasant concert venue. In Providence we have the magificent former Loew’s State, now the Providence Performing Arts Center. That was a real preservation success story, though most of our other palaces were razed or gutted. Hartford had no movie-palace success story, not even one.

The Aetna Theatre at the Wadsworth was previously known as the Avery Memorial Theatre.

At one time operated by CATE Enterprises Circuit.