Star Theatre
203 N. Main Street,
Buffalo Center,
IA
50424
203 N. Main Street,
Buffalo Center,
IA
50424
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700 might have been a mistake by the FDYs. The 1908 Polk Iowa Gazetteer lists the Buffalo Center Opera House with 400 seats. I’ve been unable to re-find the web page that said the museum was in the old Opera House. I didn’t check for a date on it, so the source might have been obsolete.
I’m not sure where this opera house would have been. 700 is enormous for a town that was just under 800 in 1920. The only auditorium anywhere near that large would have been in the high school. The museum is in a dumpy modern thing south of where the railroad used to be. If there was anything downtown, I would have a picture of it, but most of town is pretty nondescript, and almost everything is one story.
Tiny Buffalo Center had no fewer than four movie theaters listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory: the Dreamland Theatre, the Lyric Theatre, the Opera House, and the Star Theatre.
The Opera House building is still standing and now houses a museum. It operated as a movie house in the late 1920s, listed as the 700-seat Opera House in the 1926 FDY and as the 700-seat Community Theatre by 1929. The Community was listed as late as 1931, with an asterisk denoting it as a silent house, but in 1932 it is gone.