Point Theatre
2665 Main Street,
Whitney Point,
NY
13862
2665 Main Street,
Whitney Point,
NY
13862
2 people
favorited this theater
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In January 1967 an arsonist and member of the Whitney Point Fire Dept. burned the fire station to ruin along with the upstairs' movie theater. Both buildings used for movies in Whitney Point are gone. The theater built along the east side of Rogers House was a long skinny building that was later used for indoor mini-golf. In a bad flood of 1935 that structure was ruined and demolished. The Rogers House hotel was demolished in 1962 as a decaying structure.
Rogers House was vacant for many years before it was condemned and demolished in July 1962. The addition that housed movies was torn down some time shortly after the 1935 flood. It was used as a miniure golf course before the flood.
Whitney Point’s fire station is on the same site it occupied when it housed the Point Theatre upstairs, but it does not appear to be the historic building. The modern, 2-storey structure looks like it was probably built in the 1960s. The modern address is 2665 Main Street, though the historic address on a 1907 Sanborn map, which provided the evidence of the location, was 533 Main. The original building housed the fire station and a retail store on the ground floor, with the City Hall and Opera House occupying the upper floors.
WOW…6 years later and on the other side of the world I popped back onto the page to see if anyone had ever untangled the Whitney Point theater mysteries…and discovered WPGUY went above and beyond all expectations with the amazing historical research! Thanks for this amazing info!
Two questions: 1. Any idea when Rogers House was demolished? 2. Any idea about where the (probably briefly operating) theater in Maine run in tandem with the Point in the ‘30s might have been located?
Byron Gosh came to WP in 1934 and rented the movie house on the second floor of the fire station. He was listed as a former Barnum and Bailey circus clown. Gosh brought on sound equipment and showed the first movies in WP with real sound instead of piano music. As a true showman, Gosh pulled all sorts of stunts to get people into his theater including his, “Gosh’s Country Store” where he gave away about 20 gifts on movie night that included groceries among other things. He had a “bathing beauty” contest on a movie night that would offer young ladies in bathing attire to win prizes and compete for the title “Miss Whitney Point.” He had a dog show and contest that included an award for ugliest dog. The baby giveaway had to be his finest or perhaps most devious act where he claimed to have had a baby dropped off on his front steps that had a note to find it a good home. Gosh advertised he was giving away a baby on movie night. I am sure it was a hoax as nothing more was reported. I suppose a lucky movie-goer received a kitten, puppy or such animal. The trickery used by circus showmen was common and did not often build good feelings in a community. Gosh seems to have been in WP less that the whole year of 1934. Gosh started a small indoors circus and advertised along the east coast mostly in southern states. Later he bought tents and ran a small circus that popped up at local fairs and such. In 1942 it looks like Gosh had quit the circus business and became a movie house operator in Chilhowie, VA. with his “Your Theater.” During WWII he was paid by sponsors to drive around in a truck that had a steel box and housed a powerful projector. Another truck carried chairs. Gosh traveled to towns and showed outdoor movies at night including news reels of the war effort for no charge to the audiences. In 1945 Gosh took a contract with a radio station in Knoxville, TN and with four trucks and trailers took on tent shows all over the region exploiting the radio celebrities and showing films. This was a good attempt to improve the count of the radio audience.
Sometime after this, it appears Gosh started up another circus called the “All-American Circus.” In 1947 he had 3 trucks and a 60x160-foot tent that could hold 2000 people. He traveled about 30 miles between shows as he traveled Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama. This circus in 1958 listed 15 people and 10 shows. It was a small and well-received circus. Byron Gosh was a clown in it. They hosted a dog show, cycle and juggling acts, contortionist, animal shows with chimps and hippos plus various acrobatic acts and clown shows. In 1956 he even had a sea lion act. This was a small circus that traveled in the south eastern states. Gosh died in March 1965 and his wife Thelma, former costume designer ran the show. Byron Gosh was a special type person that was gifted to entertain and WP shared a time with him.
The history of Whitney Point’s Movie Theaters and the Baby Giveaway: Here is some history on the movie theaters in Whitney Point. The movie theater business was bumpy and nobody stayed at it long in town. The history is an exhausting thing to piece it all together to figure out who did what and when that was involved. So here is what I found: 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. About 1924 the Fire Station’s opera house upstairs was leased to Carl Paige and his wife who opened the Crescent Theater. The Crescent ran movies while Taylor’s movie house was struggling for viewers. The Crescent did a bit better. The Paiges moved away in June 1924. For the next year or so only a handful of movies were shown by special arrangement. In October 1926 Herman Joslin took over the Crescent. Apparently a man from Cortland, Harry Still took over the Crescent movies from Joslin in December 1926. Of Russian descent, Harry was a go-getter that ran a top-shelf theater in Cortland. On July 11, 1927 Harry Still died from Typhoid. It seems like the Crescent was done shortly after this to be reopened later by others. Starting by early 1929 there was a “People’s Theater” in town I think was in the fire station. This was run by Alax Dribnock from Endicott. These were movies with sound.
The theater at the fire station later opened as the “Whitney Point Theater” under Byron Gosh on April 21, 1934 and seems to have gone away in about one year. Byron worked hard to bribe people to see movies and offered snacks, candy, and even had routine “bathing beauty” contests where girls in bathing suits competed for prizes. I expect this drew in a lot of young men. Byron rented a bottom floor apartment on Liberty Street. On one day, he announced in the newspaper that he found someone left a baby on his doorstep with a note wanting someone to care for it. Byron was not in a position himself, but put word out that he was giving away a free baby on movie night on July 18th, 1934. . Now that is the biggest giveaway in the town I expect. I find no further mention of where the baby went. I may assume it was not such a big deal in those times or more likely it was a kitten or puppy. On December 24,1936 the fire station site was opened as the Point Theatre under Mr. Pearlman from Binghamton who ordered new upholstered seats and seems to have quit in 1958. He claimed attendance was low as young people were rowdy and loud, others wouldn’t attend. The village supplied heat and rented the area for $400 per year so they offered the space to Mr, S. Warthmore from Greene was running movies in his home town and appears to have taken on the Point Theater until early 1961. In March of that year the Department of Labor declared the space unsafe for use as a movie theater. The village did not feel it was worth the money to upgrade the space to meet code. Leonard Kaufmann who was involved in the management of the movies declared the theater closed. Warthmore was listing the seats for sale right after it shut it down. This was the sad end of movie theaters in Whitney Point.
A while back an E-bay seller offered a postcard that was an invitation to the Whitney Point High School Alumni Banquet, held at the Opera House on June 23, 1905. I don’t know when the building that later housed the Point Theatre was built, but if it was the same one that was there in 1905 then, to accommodate banquets, the Opera House must have been one of those multi-purpose halls with a flat floor. It might later have been remodeled with a raked floor when it became a full-time movie house.
As Joe said, it would be a great thing for somebody (who doesn’t live in California as I do), to head over to the library and go through the old microfilms of the Reporter, as I did in the ‘70s when I first researched this. Perhaps my recollection from that time that it closed prior to 1967 is mistaken. The one thing I can say with certainty is that the Press articles in '67 about the building burning down make no mention of the theater.
Regardless, there’s simply no question that the Whitney Point Opera House existed (a simple search of the Binghamton Press archives will confirm this), and that given they both were in the municipal building, that it and the Point Theater (and probably the Crescent, and perhaps the Peoples') were one and the same. No controversy. Peace.
People have memories of attending the theater right up until the building burned down. Also, the lack of recolection about an opera house is based on the fact that most businesses were owned by locals and in Whitney Point almost every original family still has decendents living in the area. If a family had owned an opera house that knowledge would have been passed down in generations, regardless of the age of the family member at the time of the venue operating.
When you use the word “hall” are you talking about the Municipal building? It has already been established that the building that housed the fire station, government offices, and the theater was called the Municipal building.
A good starting point would be to search the specific search string “Whitney Point Opera House” into the database of old Binghamton Press issues that you found on the Fulton Postcards site. That should assure you that such an opera house did, indeed, exist (and as Joe and I have suggested, was very probably the same hall that later housed the Point Theater).
Sigh The 1961 closing date was a possibly inaccurate memory from 30 years ago. I said as much, above. That said, I am pretty sure the recollection of the 1967 closing date (the date of the fire) is not correct. The reasons are that the Binghamton Press article about the building burning down does not mention a theater at all, and I am clear that when I did the research in ‘78, the Greene theater, which closed in late spring '67, was the last small town theater around. Having said that, all the rest of the stuff I have posted is easily confirmed by searching online. It is from primary sources; a gazeteer from the era, the Whitney Point Reporter special edition from after the fire, and the Binghamton Press database which you have already found (which also has listings for the other area papers, which also has information about the theaters in Whitney Point. I did multiple searches on the internet to gather this information. Meaning no disrespect to your research team, but none of them were alive (or at least past infancy) during the period in question, pre-1931 or so. Do the same searches I did, and you’ll find the same information. I think you have done a great job solving the mystery, but all the information I have posted above is easily verifiable. I recommend you check it all out, because you’ve done a terrific job completing the picture on this theater and the People’s Theater. If you are in the area, the Whitney Point Reporter archives should be searchable on microfilm in the local library. All the definitive answers lie there. Good luck!
It was one of those senior citizens who gave me the above photo of the theater no one else could find, and identified the original building for us. They also supplied the information about the new fire station building being erected on the same lot. I would say they have been pretty spot on so far.
I have a local history group for Whitney Point on Facebook and have been getting first hand information from life long “Pointers”. The closing date you posted for The Point has already been corrected by them and we are waiting on the daughter of the last owner to bring information on whom he bought the theater from. We have close to 600 members and I would say more than half are 70 years old, plus.
Incidentally, my dad used to run the paper in Whitney Point, I grew up in Greene, and I made a study of old theaters when I was a kid…so I do know the area pretty well. :)
I don’t follow you; as I said above, the information about the opera houses was not derived from advertisements, and they were very specifically about opera houses in WHITNEY POINT. As I said before, all the sources are posted above in comments and you can check them yourself. I’m not sure about how the Peoples' Theater factors in but I know it well — because I posted a page for it some time ago. What I couldn’t find was the newspaper article about the opening, so I was glad to see you did and could add to the information. Nice job! But there was definitely an opera house in Whitney Point (actually, two, or three, depending on how you count…plus apparently opera houses in Lisle and Center Lisle as well)…and it most likely became the Point Theater.
Here is another possible bleed over from Binghamton. In researching someone’s comment about the Erie Canal in Binghamton on a Facebook group, I came across an article about a People’s Theater on Water Street in Binghamton. The block the theater was in even became known as the People’s block. I added a page for it and as soon as it is added I have images to post. Like I said before, some of those advertising records are deceiving until you look at them closer. Whitney Point has always been closely linked to Binghamton. It has always been known as part of the Binghamton agricultural area.
Sorry, should have said great FIRE in the comments above. It’s among the perils of posting on the phone and from memory! But all of the sources i just roughly synopsized are posted upthread in detail in this comments section…just click “view all comments” above.
Btw, the Binghamton Press references should be found on the same website we both found the Tyler Theater article you posted. Just use the search function.
Definitely not confusing with the Stone. I think I might have put the sources above, but you can double check as I found these all via google: 1. Binghamton Press has periodic references to “Whitney Point Opera House” from around 1900 to 1936. 2. Whitney Point Reporter special edition about the great flood rebuilding makes it clear there was an opera house destroyed in the flood and a new one has just been constructed. It was either there or in another article just afterward where they made reference to it being in the municipal building. 3, A gazetteer of the area from 1924 makes reference to “two opera houses” in Whitney Point. 4. There’s a postcard photo online of the village hall from the turn of the 20th century, and it’s the same building in this photo (except no outward indication of an opera house). It doesn’t surprise me no one remembers an opera house; if we have this right, it was known by another name from the 20s. Probably only old timers were calling it the opera house by 1936. Everyone living today would have known it as a movie theater. Incidentally, I’ve also found references to opera houses in Lisle and Upper Lisle! Smithville Flats had two!
I live in Binghamton, so I am very well aquainted with the Stone Opera House/Riviera. I was just wondering if that ad listing may have confused some researchers because the way it is printed makes it look like it is saying the opera house was in Whitney Point.
lalain: The construction of a balcony is always a possibility. It’s also possible that there was always a balcony or gallery of some sort, but the operator chose not to use it until business picked up, and then it was opened, or maybe a new operator took over the house and opened it. It’s also possible that Film Daily got the count wrong, and later adjusted it up or down. I don’t know where the Yearbooks got their seat counts, but I suspect that it was from either the theater operators or managers, or from the film distributors. I think some of them just didn’t bother to make an accurate count, or just didn’t report it correctly. I know that there were a lot of mistakes in the books.
There’s also a possible explanation for why a theater would drop out of the Yearbook’s reports even though movies were still being shown there. The Yearbooks only counted commercial theaters that got their movies from regular distributors. There used to be a company that rented 16mm prints of movies to individuals, schools, civic organizations, clubs, and towns without regular theaters. I went into their office on Hollywood Boulevard once in the early 1960s and picked up one of their catalogs, but I can’t remember the name of the company. There might have been other such companies in other parts of the country. It’s possible that after the Point Theatre was no longer viable as a commercial theater, some civic group began renting movies to show. They would not have been allowed to charge for admission (the company would rent films only to non-profit groups), but they could have accepted donations from the patrons.
Also, the Stone Opera House was definitely in Binghamton. It is listed at Cinema Treasures under its later name, the Riviera Theatre. But it’s also quite possible that the hall the Point Theatre was in was also called the Opera House when it was built. It might sound pretentious today, but in the 19th century every small town wanted an opera house, and when they built any sort of public hall that’s what they would call it, more often than not.
Joe Vogel: Do you think the 100 seat jump might have come from the addition of the balcony at some point? That maybe the balcony wasn’t an original fixture?
I am curious where you get the information about an opera house. Do you have an actual newspaper ad or village map? I ask this because not even the oldest members in my group, in their 90s, have any recollection of an opera house; and secondly in researching the existence of a witch hazel distillery in Whitney Point, I came across a listing in a business advertising publication for the Stone Opera House (which did show movies), that at first glance looks like it is saying it is in Whitney Point, but on closer inspection is actually talking about the opera house/theater in neighboring Binghamton; Whitney Point being in the same county and considered part of Binghamton’s metropolitan area. I am begining to think this is the opera house everyone has been trying to find. If I come across that publication again I will add that page to the images.
The Point Theater was still showing films until the building was burned down in 1967. Many of my former classmates who were 10-11 years old at the time have strong memories of this. Although it may have only been playing older disney moves at that time.