Tyler Theater
Main Street and Railway Street,
Whitney Point,
NY
13862
Main Street and Railway Street,
Whitney Point,
NY
13862
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The movie addition on the east side of Roger’s House was afterwards used as a miniture golf course and shortly after the 1935 flood was torn down. Roger’s House was run down and abandoned in its final years. It was condemned, demolished and debris burned by the fire company in July 1962. The movie house was never a great success.
The Point theatre over the old fire station had good years and bad. The old fire station was burned by arson on 1/17/1967.
Andrew Tyler bought Rogers House which was originally built as a big hotel that sat on the corner of Main and Railroad Street where the Advance Graphic is now (was old NAPA site.) in 1919. He left his farm on Cherry Hill Road and used the old hotel to run his insurance and real estate business. He built an addition on the east side to make an opera house. He leased the opera room to a guy named Gillette. Gillette with his brother managed the movies business with decent success. As movies were silent in the early days, they bought a super expensive $2000 movie piano (custom player piano) in June of 1922. Early movies also often included some stage acts and humor which required a lot of showmanship. Taylor ran a restaurant and hotel still and he turned his dining room into a dance floor. They offered dancing and sold ice cream after the movies to drum up more business. By December 1925, Gillette and Taylor almost gave up on the movie business at Roger’s House, but kept making attempts to show movies up until about early 1927 where it appeared they were done with movies in WP. Gillette went on and opened a theater in Greene, then Cinncinatus, and later Chenango Forks. Roger House was leased out in April 1930 to a man from Endicott, Vincent Davenport to be used as a Ford car showroom and repair shop. There was a nother movie house in town above the fire station operated from the 1924 to 1961 unrelated to Tyler. See Point Theatre for info on that which operated under differnt owners and names.
I have,also posted a much earlier photo of the Roger’s House with horse and carriage in front. In the 1950’s it was an apartment house. For a short while in the 1960’s it may have been an antique store. It was it was torn down as a derelict building in the 1960s.
I posted an image of the Binghamton Press article about the Tyler Theater being built. It is from this site: http://fultonhistory.com/
The Tyler Theatre is listed in the 1926 and 1928 editions of the Film Daily Yearbook with 300 seats. In the 1929 Yearbook, a 300-seat house called the People’s Theatre is listed. The Crescent Theatre also appears in the Yearbooks from 1926 through 1929, though only in 1929 is its seating capacity given (500.)
The next few years are a bit complicated. Whitney Point is not in the Yearbooks for 1930 or 1931, but in 1932 there are three theaters listed: The Crescent, with 390 seats, the Tyler, with 250 seats, and the People’s Theatre, with 225 seats. Only the People’s Theatre is listed as open. In 1933, the first two houses are still listed as closed, but the People’s Theatre is not listed at all. The interesting thing is that the closed Crescent Theatre is now listed with 225 seats.
It seems possible that the Crescent Theatre moved into the building formerly occupied by the People’s Theatre in 1932, but was closed before the information was gathered for the 1933 Yearbook. The Crescent was listed as closed in 1935 and 1937, too, and Whitney Point did not appear in either the 1934 or 1936 Yearbooks.
Then in 1938, the Point Theatre appears for the first time, open, with 225 seats. It’s possible that this was the 225-seat former People’s and/or Crescent Theatre reopened under a new name. It’s also possible that the original Crescent, with 500 and then 390 seats, was the old Opera House, and the owners might have moved their operation to the smaller house during the lean times of the early depression. All this is speculation, of course, based on the changing seating capacities reported for the various theaters. The actual course of events, whatever it was, would have to be confirmed by other sources such as newspaper reports.
Also, note that the fact that a theater is listed as closed in the Yearbook doesn’t mean that it was closed that entire year. The Yearbook listed the status of a theater as of January 1, and information for each edition must have been gathered in the later part of the year preceding the publication date. In some cases, a theater might have closed for the winter and reopened later in the year.
A 1926 article in the Press refers to “the” theater in Whitney Point, which may give credence to my vague childhood memory of finding an article about one the theaters being forced to close in 1925. Was the Carl Bird theater that went bust in 1931 a reopening of the Tyler? There are continuous references in the Press to an “opera house at Whitney Point” (only one of them apparently referring to the Tyler) from 1899 through 1936.
We have a name! Per 1922 and 1924 issues of the Binghamton Press, this was named the Tyler Theater.
Interestingly, there is also mention of a Crescent Theater in Whitney Point in 1924, only one month after mention of the Tyler in the same newspaper. So presumably (though by no means certain) this was a short-term name for the opera house.
And more confusing information: an item from a November 1931 DeRuyter paper states: “Carl Bird’s movie house at Whitney Point has gone out of business.” No idea where that fits, but chances are that is the same theater as this one.
Hold the phone…further research reveals Whitney Point had an opera house that was in operation during this same period, and my recollection is further confirmed by a survey of the area from 1924 that states Whitney Point had “two opera houses” at that time. It makes more sense that the village fathers would ask the newer business to shut down.
As an addendum to the above, a recollection of research done 35 years ago just popped into my head, that in 1925 the town fathers ordered one of the two operating movie theaters in Whitney Point to close on the idea that the village could only sustain one. Without access to the old Whitney Point Reporter archives I cannot confirm this recollection, but I think this may have been the theater that was ordered to close, and the later Point Theater (whose location is still unknown) being the beneficiary of this decision.
I have finally found a clue to explain the above photograph. It comes from a small item in the August 26, 1920 issue of the Binghamton Press.
“Andy Tyler started work on his new moving picture last week. It is being built on the lot just east of the Rogers house.”
This appears to confirm the theory that the building next to the Rogers House (to the left, or east towards the village) was Whitney Point’s first theater. It may possibly have been called a Hippodrome (based on a vague memory of research I did many years ago, which suggested the existence of two theaters in Whitney Point early on).
After looking at the picture carefully, I believe the sign reads “Gas 27” (cents). If so, it would date the picture to the early days of automobiling and thus movies.
If the legend (as it reads on the eBay listing) originally read The Movies, Rogers House, Whitney Point" it might indicate the movie theatre was indeed the building next door. Another possibility is they were showing films in the ballroom of the hotel (assuming there was one). It does seem they were diversifying, but it looks like the sign was advertising gas, not film,and there’s no other outside indicator of where “the movies” were that I can discern.
I wrote a comment yesterday on this photo, not sure why it was deleted. But I got very curious about the above picture and did some research and believe I have some answers.
I went online and looked through various Whitney Point historic postcards; they all made clear that the main business district of Whitney Point was brick (after a fire in 1897) and that this photo was not among them. But an e-Bay listing for this particular postcard also contained the legend “Rogers House” and that gave me the clue.
The picture is of an old hotel called Rogers House that used to stand on Main Street near the railroad station on the west end of town. It is listed in a business directory from 1872 and was still standing in 1898. I found one other postcard on the ‘net that had more detail (it appeared to be older than the one you uploaded) which confirmed the building’s identity. “Rogers House” is what is faintly written on the sign visible at the front of the photo.
Now, why the legend says “The Movies” is really a mystery. It seems unlikely a movie theatre was put into a 19th century inn, though there is a poster out front (the one on which the number “27” is visible) that could be a placard holder for a movie, and which is not present on the older postcard photo. (More plausibly it could also be a railroad schedule)
One other possibility is the “movies” refers to the building shown BEHIND the Rogers House, which is not in the older postcard and is thus newer. I remember from research done in the ‘70s that there were actually two theatres in Whitney Point, one open and closed in the '20s that may have been called “The Hippodrome” and another that may have been open simultaneously with the other one and which closed no later than 1961 called The Point Theatre. I was told that the latter was on Main Street, possibly in one of the demolished brick buildings next to the old Reporter building, but old postcards suggest that is unlikely. Could it be the theatre (one of them, anyway) was next to the old Rogers house and away from the main business district? Or was it actually in the hotel? The other postcard shows there is a wing extending back from the hotel, but converting a 19th century hotel to a nickelodeon must have been a daunting task.
I will keep digging.