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Uploaded on: May 9, 2025

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Photo courtesy of - Fred Hurlburt

Regina Ezzo writes - I worked there selling tickets or the concession stand many nights ….

K.E. Graham writes - Many good memories of the theater. Bucky Bennet ran the projector and Sam Tobin was the manager ….

Stephanie Farrell writes - I remember someone brought in a live leopard on a leash and had it on balcony looking at all us kids below! Lol …. Sheri Mott writes - I remember going every saturday or sunday. I would take my sister, i had to see “Smokey & the Bandit” 14 times because she loved that movie. It ran for quite awhile. My father took me to see “ True Grit” starring John Wayne. I wish the theatre could’ve been preserved. So many great movies & fun to go. Now there’s one big giant hole ….

Marty Wendell writes - I wrote a song about the State called Saturday Matinee. You can hear it on YouTube from my Rockabilly Heart album. Spent many hours in that theater as a boy ….

Holly Galemore writes - My uncle use to work there had so much fun I miss them both….

Gail Feliciano writes - It’s a shame they couldn’t save it, many memories growing up going to Saturday matinee. I worked the concession stand ….Jack Armstrong writes - I can remember way back in the 40’s or 50’s that my parents would go on certain nights they would have drawings and give-aways. Ma and Pa Kettle films were big back then …

Barbara Robb writes - I can still close my eyes and walk through the inside and see it all, loved going there.

The history - The State Theatre was opened in June 1937. It was very plain inside and I’d guess seated between 700 and 850 people including the balcony. It was located in downtown Ticonderoga. The exterior was Art Deco-ish but I don’t remember the interior well enough to label the style. The main floor auditorium was a work in progress. Memory tells me they were insulating it. The outside of the theatre was white tile with green trim – a combination quite often used by the Schine theatre chain.

Although I have no confirmation the State Theatre was originally part of the Schine chain, the theatre’s exterior was very similar to the Schine theatres located in Watertown, Potsdam, Amsterdam, and Auburn. Sometime before 1981, the theatre had been twinned between the balcony and the main auditorium.

The day we toured the State Theatre the heating wasn’t working but the balcony theatre was open. If possible I always try to see a movie in the theatres I visit, so we stayed for the screening of Barbara Hershey in “The Entity”. Memory tells me there were two other crazies besides us sitting in this 50 degree theatre watching this movie. Well, everyone was a lot younger in 1982, including Barbara Hershey who looked great as usual.

I haven’t been back to Ticonderoga since 1982, but I know the fort survived but the State Theatre did not. A new operator took over around 1994 and was in the process of de-twinning the theatre when it collapsed. The manager of another theatre told me the State Theatre is gone and the site is now an empty plot - Notes by Richard Grows

Contributed by Greg Lynch -