Pastime Vaudeville Theater
1437 Main Street,
Columbia,
SC
29201
1437 Main Street,
Columbia,
SC
29201
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Have we got the addresses of the Pastime and Palmetto reversed? The Capitol building is south of this block, and when you look south the odd numbers are on the right (west) side of the street and the even numbers are on the left (east) side, yet in the vintage photo, which looks south toward the Capitol, we see the vertical sign of the Pastime on the right, so shouldn’t it have an odd number, instead of 1438? And since the future Palmetto was on the opposite side of the street from the Pastime, shouldn’t it have an even number, instead of 1417? Something is screwy and it’s confusing the hell out of me.
The March 31, 1917 issue of The Dramatic Mirror had a brief item about Keith vaudeville coming to the Pastime Theater, which had until then been a movie house: “COLUMBIA. S. C. (Special). - The Pastime Theater owned by Rawls Brothers, who are also managers, which has been successfully operating here for the past two years as one of the leading moving picture theaters, began Feb. 19 with Keith’s vaudeville. This is a new venture, as Columbia has never before had a high class vaudeville house. There has been a constant growing demand for this class of entertainment and there is every reason to believe that the Messers Rawls will have a great success.”
This house undoubtedly opened as the Pastime Theatre, a movie house, in 1915, and became the Pastime Vaudeville Theatre in 1917 when it became Columbia’s first two-a-day vaudeville house. I’m not sure about the later history, but I think we’ve got some errors and some stuff missing. I’m still digging.
This opened on June 1st, 1915. Grand opening ad in the photo section.
AKA the Rialto Theatre in the 1920s. Was sued for copyright when it didn’t have rights for a tune emanating from its player piano in 1927.