Gayety Theatre
Youngstown,
OH
44501
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In going through all the Youngstown Vindicators, I could locate no Gayety Theater in Youngstown in 1942. In 1942, the only Burlesque theater was the Grand, and in 1948 or 9, the owners of the Grand purchased the Park Theater and moved their Burlesque over there.
I also searched the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for 1907, but could not locate the Gayety. If it did seat 1500 Sanborn would have labled it.
I’ll ask my contact at our public library if they can give me an address, but I doubt that they will have much of anything in their files for the theater.
The Gayety was a fairly large theater. The 1907 annual report of the Ohio Department of Inspection listed it with 1,500 seats, the same capacity the report listed for the Park Theatre.
A Youngstown burlesque house called the Gayety was mentioned in the September 19, 1942, issue of The Billboard, but without an address there’s no way of telling if it was the same Gayety that was operating in 1906-07.
The Gayety of 1942 was on the Empire Burlesque Circuit. Earlier, the Grand had been on that circuit, and returned to it in 1943, so the circuit might have been using the Gayety to get some leverage over the owners of the Grand. The Gayety was mentioned in Billboard in both 1946 and 1950 as part of Johnny (or Jack) Kane’s Ohio Circuit, which also booked burlesque. By 1953, the Park was on the Kane circuit.