A comment made by kencmcintyre back in 2009 says that the architects of the World Theatre were Roth & Fleisher. Gabriel Blum Roth and Elizabeth R. Hirsh Fleisher established their firm in 1941. Hirsh Fleisher was one of the first women licensed to practice architecture in Pennsylvania, and the first to establish a practice in Philadelphia.
Google Maps is currently putting the pin icon and street view for this theater in the wrong place (again!) But this time there is something very weird about the address itself. This accurate view at Google Maps displays the peculiar address 240 West E. Roper Rd., which suggests that whoever was responsible for assigning addresses in Nogales might have been eating the peyote.
I did not know Mr. Perkins, and merely found a few references to him on the Internet. I always lived in California myself, but I’ve never been directly connected with the movie industry.
Jack Coursey’s link is dead, but I did find this page with photos and some drawings and floor plans of the gutted and drastically rebuilt house. Plans for the rebuild were made by the firm Manuelle Gautrand Architecture.
Oasis Cinema 9 was designed by cinema specialists The Henry Architects. Construction began March 1, 2005. The house has 1,486 fixed seats and 36 wheelchair spaces.
To belatedly answer dickwpierce’s question, the Internet says that Morris “Dooley” Perkins died on February 12, 1990, and had been born December 19, 1904, which would have made him 85 at the time of his death.
I haven’t found out when the Ace was twinned, but the owner, John Eickhof (who commented on this thread earlier and was operating the house at the time it closed) might know.
This web page has many photos and newspaper clippings about the second Majestic Theatre, though the primary focus is Harry Houdini, who made an appearance at the house in 1916. The Majestic was demolished in 1966, one of many buildings over several blocks razed to make way for the enormous Tarrant County Convention Center.
Many photos of the Majestic, including some taken shortly before and during its 1966 demolition, are linked from this web page about Fort Worth’s theaters.
This web pageis primarily about the second Majestic, with a focus on Harry Houdini’s appearance there in 1916, but there are three images about a third of the way down that pertain to the first Majestic. Most useful is the map, which shows the dormitories of St. Ignatius Academy, still standing across Jennings Avenue from the Savoy’s site. A line drawn through the axis of that building also passes through the Savoy building, allowing us to see that the theater stood just where the realigned Texas Street connects with the west side of Jennings Avenue.
This web page has four photos, and the one at upper right shows the side of the Savoy, probably around 1920. The wall has a sign, partly obscured, that appears to say “Professional Stock” indicating that for at least part of its history the Savoy operated as a legitimate house.
This web page with part of an article about the Isis Theatre says that the house opened on May 21, 1914, and was designed by architect Louis B. Weinman.
The subsequent page of the article reveals that the original Isis was a reverse theater, with the screen at the street end of the small auditorium and the projection booth at the rear, next to an alley. The building of the New Isis was occasioned by a fire which destroyed the original house in 1935.
The New Isis Theatre, with a footprint considerably larger than the original Isis, opened on March 27, 1936. The architect for the rebuilding is as yet unidentified.
The Majestic that opened in 1905 was a different house, located either on Jennings Avenue or on Throckmorton Street. The second Majestic, on Commerce Street, opened in 1911. The first Majestic was then renamed the Savoy Theatre, but had been gutted and converted into a garage by the end of the 1920s. It is not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.
Although I’ve never found any photos of the interior of the Burbank from its later years, and I was never inside the theater myself, friends who did go there in the early 1960s told me that the interior was still very old fashioned. I don’t think that the 1930s remodeling, or any later remodeling, made any significant stylistic change to the interior of the theater. Essentially all that was done was to slap a streamline modern facade onto the old building and clean up the lobby a bit.
A bit of the original interior style is revealed in the two photos I have found, both from 1898 (the proscenium and the men’s lounge) and though it’s possible that these were altered by one of the early 20th century remodelings, I’m quite sure that there was nothing particularly Art Deco about the place. Main Street was already in decline by the time the Art Deco style emerged in the 1920s, and nobody would have been spending money to update an old theater there with anything as costly as Art Deco. One advantage of Streamline Modern, emerging during the depression of the 1930s, was that it was simple and could be done on the cheap.
The original exterior was of course Romanesque Revival, but the early interior looks to have been that awkward Victorian pastiche of styles that, in America at least, often went by the misleading name Queen Anne, or sometimes the somewhat more appropriate name Eastlake, after the English architect and writer Charles Locke Eastlake, who promoted a somewhat similar style in Victorian Britain.
The Granada’s restored marquee in action. The house hosted a fashion show on May 26, but I know of no other events since then. The official web site has not been updated.
The L.A. County Assessor says that the Strand was built in 1928/1929.
Here is an item about the Strand’s owner Paul Swickard from the April 7, 1945 issue of Boxoffice:
“J. Paul Swickard, like most ‘native sons,’ has been a booster not only for California but for that state’s great industry, motion pictures. In 1917 he operated the University Theatre and 14 years later the Strand, Los Angeles, a 1,000-seat house, his present property. A resident of San Marino, Swickard is a member of the Masons and Rotary Club. Married, he has three sons, all in uniform: J. Paul jr., and Donald R. with the army, Ross H. aboard a submarine.”
This ca. 1938 photo of actress Bonita Granville at the Strand shows a bit of the mural decorating what appears to be the lobby wall.
The fourth photo on this web page is a view of Pine Avenue, probably from the late 1920s, with the Victory Theatre’s vertical sign prominently featured.
The Daily News-Journal of May 5, 2013, had a history of this theater. The original address of Murfreesboro’s second Princess Theatre was 132 W. College Street, though the Pinnacle Bank building on the site today (the northeast corner of College and Maple Street) uses the address 114 W. College. The house was built in 1902 as Fox’s Opera House, part of the Sam Davis Building. Later it was called the Sam Davis Opera House.
In 1923, Tony Sudekum’s Crescent Amusement Company bought the opera house and had it extensively renovated, with plans by the company’s usual architects of the period, Marr & Holman. The old theater was showing its age by 1936, and Crescent closed it for the better part of the year and had the building gutted and almost completely rebuilt, reopening as the New Princess late that year. Although I’ve found no documentation, it is likely that Marr & Holman designed this rebuild as well.
The exact address of the first Princess Theatre was 118 N. Church Street. It operated from 1915 until 1923, when Crescent Amusement renovated the Sam Davis Opera House (originally Fox’s Opera House) at 132 W. College Street and moved the Princess name there. I don’t know if the original Princess was closed at that time or was kept open for a while under a different name.
The Victory Theatre had been opened by March 13, 1926, when that date’s issue of The Moving Picture World provided this information about it:
“The new theatre is called the Victory and is owned and operated by Frank Davis and Wilford Williams. It represents an investment of $60,000, which includes land and fixtures, etc. It is of fireproof construction, brick and concrete, and is 37 ½ ft. wide by 140 ft. long and has two small store rooms in the front. Has a seating capacity of 524, upholstered seats.
“Has a stage for road shows. Booth equipment consists of two latest Powers 6B improved Projectors with Powerlite Reflector Lamps and Roth Brothers Actodector Generator. The theatre is equipped with good heating and ventilating system which assure good ventilation and proper heating at all times. The acoustics of the theatre are very good. It has all the modern conveniences.
“The Architect is D. D. Spani, Rock Springs, Wyo. The booth equipment, and the chairs which are Heywood-Wakefield, were sold and installed by Utah Theatre Supply Co., Earl D. Smith, Mgr., Salt Lake City.”
Davis and Williams had been operating the New Kemmerer Theatre, built in 1910, since 1922. The Victory’s architect, Daniel D. Spani, had been practicing in Rock Springs since moving there from St. Louis in 1911.
The Google fetches a bit information about this theater, but only if you search using the spelling Orphium. As an October 24, 2015 article in the Xenia Gazette notes, the original owner, Henry Binder “…spelled Orphium with the ‘I’ so it would not be confused with the Orpheum Vaudeville Circuit.”
The Orphium was located at the corner of E. Main and Whiteman Street, and was in operation by 1912. It was still being advertised as the Orphium in the mid-1940s, but it’s possible that when Chakeres took over (which I believe was in the late 1940s) they converted to the orthodox spelling Orpheum. I haven’t seen any ads from that period, though.
This article from the Xenia Gazette of October 24, 2015, reveals that the Bijou/Xenia Theatre was on Greene Street. It was twinned following a fire in 1977 and closed in 1987. The building is now occupied by county offices.
Mr. Google says that the Greene County general offices are at 69 Greene Street. The extensively remodeled building looks like it has been expanded beyond its original footprint, but at least some parts of the walls of the original theater are likely still intact.
The article also says that the Bijou was built around 1917. The Bijou is listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, but at 10 Green [sic] Street, so it likely did move into a new building around that time.
The Picture Theatre, Roberts & Goodrich proprietors, was listed at 545 S. Main Street in the 1907 Los Angeles city directory.
A comment made by kencmcintyre back in 2009 says that the architects of the World Theatre were Roth & Fleisher. Gabriel Blum Roth and Elizabeth R. Hirsh Fleisher established their firm in 1941. Hirsh Fleisher was one of the first women licensed to practice architecture in Pennsylvania, and the first to establish a practice in Philadelphia.
Ah, there we go.
Well, crap, the link doesn’t work. Google can’t find the map it just showed me! Maybe Google is eating the peyote.
Let’s try this one.
Google Maps is currently putting the pin icon and street view for this theater in the wrong place (again!) But this time there is something very weird about the address itself. This accurate view at Google Maps displays the peculiar address 240 West E. Roper Rd., which suggests that whoever was responsible for assigning addresses in Nogales might have been eating the peyote.
I did not know Mr. Perkins, and merely found a few references to him on the Internet. I always lived in California myself, but I’ve never been directly connected with the movie industry.
Jack Coursey’s link is dead, but I did find this page with photos and some drawings and floor plans of the gutted and drastically rebuilt house. Plans for the rebuild were made by the firm Manuelle Gautrand Architecture.
The Signature Cinemas in Placerville was designed by The Henry Architects.
Oasis Cinema 9 was designed by cinema specialists The Henry Architects. Construction began March 1, 2005. The house has 1,486 fixed seats and 36 wheelchair spaces.
To belatedly answer dickwpierce’s question, the Internet says that Morris “Dooley” Perkins died on February 12, 1990, and had been born December 19, 1904, which would have made him 85 at the time of his death.
I haven’t found out when the Ace was twinned, but the owner, John Eickhof (who commented on this thread earlier and was operating the house at the time it closed) might know.
This web page has many photos and newspaper clippings about the second Majestic Theatre, though the primary focus is Harry Houdini, who made an appearance at the house in 1916. The Majestic was demolished in 1966, one of many buildings over several blocks razed to make way for the enormous Tarrant County Convention Center.
Many photos of the Majestic, including some taken shortly before and during its 1966 demolition, are linked from this web page about Fort Worth’s theaters.
This web pageis primarily about the second Majestic, with a focus on Harry Houdini’s appearance there in 1916, but there are three images about a third of the way down that pertain to the first Majestic. Most useful is the map, which shows the dormitories of St. Ignatius Academy, still standing across Jennings Avenue from the Savoy’s site. A line drawn through the axis of that building also passes through the Savoy building, allowing us to see that the theater stood just where the realigned Texas Street connects with the west side of Jennings Avenue.
This web page has four photos, and the one at upper right shows the side of the Savoy, probably around 1920. The wall has a sign, partly obscured, that appears to say “Professional Stock” indicating that for at least part of its history the Savoy operated as a legitimate house.
This web page with part of an article about the Isis Theatre says that the house opened on May 21, 1914, and was designed by architect Louis B. Weinman.
The subsequent page of the article reveals that the original Isis was a reverse theater, with the screen at the street end of the small auditorium and the projection booth at the rear, next to an alley. The building of the New Isis was occasioned by a fire which destroyed the original house in 1935.
The New Isis Theatre, with a footprint considerably larger than the original Isis, opened on March 27, 1936. The architect for the rebuilding is as yet unidentified.
The Majestic that opened in 1905 was a different house, located either on Jennings Avenue or on Throckmorton Street. The second Majestic, on Commerce Street, opened in 1911. The first Majestic was then renamed the Savoy Theatre, but had been gutted and converted into a garage by the end of the 1920s. It is not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.
Although I’ve never found any photos of the interior of the Burbank from its later years, and I was never inside the theater myself, friends who did go there in the early 1960s told me that the interior was still very old fashioned. I don’t think that the 1930s remodeling, or any later remodeling, made any significant stylistic change to the interior of the theater. Essentially all that was done was to slap a streamline modern facade onto the old building and clean up the lobby a bit.
A bit of the original interior style is revealed in the two photos I have found, both from 1898 (the proscenium and the men’s lounge) and though it’s possible that these were altered by one of the early 20th century remodelings, I’m quite sure that there was nothing particularly Art Deco about the place. Main Street was already in decline by the time the Art Deco style emerged in the 1920s, and nobody would have been spending money to update an old theater there with anything as costly as Art Deco. One advantage of Streamline Modern, emerging during the depression of the 1930s, was that it was simple and could be done on the cheap.
The original exterior was of course Romanesque Revival, but the early interior looks to have been that awkward Victorian pastiche of styles that, in America at least, often went by the misleading name Queen Anne, or sometimes the somewhat more appropriate name Eastlake, after the English architect and writer Charles Locke Eastlake, who promoted a somewhat similar style in Victorian Britain.
The Granada’s restored marquee in action. The house hosted a fashion show on May 26, but I know of no other events since then. The official web site has not been updated.
The L.A. County Assessor says that the Strand was built in 1928/1929.
Here is an item about the Strand’s owner Paul Swickard from the April 7, 1945 issue of Boxoffice:
This ca. 1938 photo of actress Bonita Granville at the Strand shows a bit of the mural decorating what appears to be the lobby wall.The fourth photo on this web page is a view of Pine Avenue, probably from the late 1920s, with the Victory Theatre’s vertical sign prominently featured.
The Daily News-Journal of May 5, 2013, had a history of this theater. The original address of Murfreesboro’s second Princess Theatre was 132 W. College Street, though the Pinnacle Bank building on the site today (the northeast corner of College and Maple Street) uses the address 114 W. College. The house was built in 1902 as Fox’s Opera House, part of the Sam Davis Building. Later it was called the Sam Davis Opera House.
In 1923, Tony Sudekum’s Crescent Amusement Company bought the opera house and had it extensively renovated, with plans by the company’s usual architects of the period, Marr & Holman. The old theater was showing its age by 1936, and Crescent closed it for the better part of the year and had the building gutted and almost completely rebuilt, reopening as the New Princess late that year. Although I’ve found no documentation, it is likely that Marr & Holman designed this rebuild as well.
The exact address of the first Princess Theatre was 118 N. Church Street. It operated from 1915 until 1923, when Crescent Amusement renovated the Sam Davis Opera House (originally Fox’s Opera House) at 132 W. College Street and moved the Princess name there. I don’t know if the original Princess was closed at that time or was kept open for a while under a different name.
The Victory Theatre had been opened by March 13, 1926, when that date’s issue of The Moving Picture World provided this information about it:
Davis and Williams had been operating the New Kemmerer Theatre, built in 1910, since 1922. The Victory’s architect, Daniel D. Spani, had been practicing in Rock Springs since moving there from St. Louis in 1911.The Google fetches a bit information about this theater, but only if you search using the spelling Orphium. As an October 24, 2015 article in the Xenia Gazette notes, the original owner, Henry Binder “…spelled Orphium with the ‘I’ so it would not be confused with the Orpheum Vaudeville Circuit.”
The Orphium was located at the corner of E. Main and Whiteman Street, and was in operation by 1912. It was still being advertised as the Orphium in the mid-1940s, but it’s possible that when Chakeres took over (which I believe was in the late 1940s) they converted to the orthodox spelling Orpheum. I haven’t seen any ads from that period, though.
This article from the Xenia Gazette of October 24, 2015, reveals that the Bijou/Xenia Theatre was on Greene Street. It was twinned following a fire in 1977 and closed in 1987. The building is now occupied by county offices.
Mr. Google says that the Greene County general offices are at 69 Greene Street. The extensively remodeled building looks like it has been expanded beyond its original footprint, but at least some parts of the walls of the original theater are likely still intact.
The article also says that the Bijou was built around 1917. The Bijou is listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, but at 10 Green [sic] Street, so it likely did move into a new building around that time.
The Kaymar Theatre was around the corner from the Markay, at 222 Broadway. The building now houses a Sherwin-Williams paint store.
This article from 2016 says the Markay Theatre originally opened on October 20, 1930.