Pentwater Theatre

Joe Vogel on June 16, 2012 at 12:13 pm

Items from The Luddington Daily News indicate that the Pentwater Theatre was indeed the same house as the Miracle Theatre, built in 1930 on the site of the Tower Theatre which had been destroyed by fire.

The Tower Theatre burned in 1928, and again in 1929, according to this article in The Ludington Daily News, May 13, 1929.

This article from the same newspaper’s issue of January 21, 1939, is about the remodeling of the Pentwater Theatre, formerly the Miracle Theatre.

The Miracle Theatre opened in July, 1930, and was closed as the Pentwater Theatre in 1986.

CSWalczak on December 16, 2010 at 5:32 pm

The Hart was in Hart and the Shelby was in Shelby, two small towns near Pentwater. It was not uncommon for small town theaters in the first half of the twentieth century to advertise in each other’s small town newspapers without specifying addresses because the locals “just knew” and the theater was always on or just off the town’s main street. In the days before multiplexes, it was how some variety in film offerings as achieved each week in more rural areas. Also, west Michigan in that era was home to a number of summer resorts and area entertainment venues would advertise somewhat broadly to attract the tourist trade. These were all small theaters and gone by the end of the 1950’s, victims of television for the most part.

CSWalczak on December 16, 2010 at 7:20 am

I was able to find and read some pdfs of some local local histories of Pentwater, and have been able to determine that they were two separate theaters. The Pentwater Theater was indeed housed in the Hancock Building which is pictured at the link I cited above.

The Miracle was an older theater that was built on the site of an even earlier Tower Theater which was destroyed by fire; it was next to a building called for many years called “The White Elephant.” This was supposed to be a hotel, but it never functioned as one for some reason. It is not clear when the Miracle Theater closed or what is on the site now.

Incredibly, for a town the size of Pentwater (I am rather familiar with it as I used to scuba dive around there years ago – it can’t be home to more than a thousand or so people), the place actually had a third theater at one time called the Janet which apparently ran mostly westerns and serials.