Historic York Theater demolished
YORK, ME — A sad followup to our story regarding their closing two months ago.
The York Beach Cinema was demolished on Tuesday, October 31st. The theater was originally built in the 1850s to house horses. It was converted to an opera house in the early 1900s. It switched to a silent-movie house in 1928, and has been showing films up to this summer. The theater was demolished so that a hotel can be built on the site.
Crews began knocking down the York Beach Cinema at 8 a.m. Tuesday.
By noon, construction manager Butch Mellette expected the 78-year-old movie theater to be a pile of rubble.
“It shouldn’t take more than four hours to get it down,” said Mellette. “We have to be careful though because of the adjacent building.”
For more information, see the Portsmouth Herald Maine news story.
Comments (1)
Another fine old theater demolished in the name of progress. Even if the structure did originally just house horses, another piece of history is now irreversibly lost. And this was originally from the 1850’s.