The Lyric Theatre is first listed in the FDY in 1928, so the 1930 project I cited in an earlier comment must have been either a remodeling of the existing house or a project for a different theater nearby that fell through.
However, a thumbnail biography of Lewis Harry Warriner in the NRHP registration form for the Lincoln Street Historic District does attribute the design of the Lyric to him. As it is first listed in 1928, it most likely opened in 1927, unless it had operated earlier under a different name.
The Waymarking page for the Pickwick Theatre for which bluesneaky provided a link above (clickable version) has a gallery with several photos and other items. The most interesting is a rendering of the building as rebuilt in 1936, from the architect of the project, L. H. Warriner (Lewis Harry Warriner.)
While the gallery is quite useful, I don’t know how accurate the text on the page is. It claims that the late Victorian commercial building on the Pickwick’s site, also seen in other photos, was the home of the Theatorium, the town’s first movie theater, but I see no clear evidence in the photos themselves (despite a marquee-like structure on the front of the building very early on) that there was a theater in this earlier building. It also claims that the Theatorium and the Pickwick were “…in the same place, all the same size….”. a claim which is belied by listings on the Film Daily’s yearbooks.
The Theatorium is never listed in the FDY, but in 1927 the book lists a house called the Oakland Theatre, and in 1928 and 1929 there is a house called the Community Theatre. Syracuse does not appear in the 1930 FDY, but the Community Theatre reappears in 1931, its seating capacity listed for the first time (250) but there is an asterisk denoting that it has not been wired for sound. The Community continues to be listed through 1937, always with 250 seats, but always with the notation that it is closed.
The Pickwick first appears in the 1938 edition, with a seating capacity of 1,100. My guess would be that the front of the old two-story building was remodeled in 1937 and an entirely new auditorium was built behind that structure. The Dickensian name Pickwick was likely chosen to match the Tudor revival style of the new front, or vice versa.
There was a house called the Theatorium at Syracuse, mentioned in the October 13, 1917, issue of Motography, when the theater changed hands, but whether it was the same theater as the Oakland and the Community, and whether it (or they) were in the building behind which the 1937 Pickwick was most likely built, I don’t know. Any theater in that building would have been a storefront conversion. The Pickwick auditorium was clearly new in 1937, though I don’t doubt that the 1937 auditorium did indeed survive the 1945 fire and is the theater still in use today.
The January 17, 1936, issue of The Hammond Times said that the Hartley Theatre Company would remodel and reopen “…the long closed Lyric theater in East Chicago….” with a new name, no more than four letters long, to be chosen in a public contest. I guess that accounts for the non-standard spelling “Voge” that the house ended up with.
This house had fournames. This article posted to the web site of the Columbia Daily Tribune says that a movie house opened on October 16, 1913, as “… the Alamo Theatre, eventually became the Dickinson Theatre, then the Fayette Theatre and finally the Grand Theater.”
After this theater was demolished, an old commercial building down the block was converted into a theater also called the Grand. The site of the original Grand is occupied by an extension of the Commercial Trust Company.
The Grand Opera House at Bluffton, Indiana opened in 1903, according to a list of buildings designed by its architect, George Otis Garnsey (1840-1923.) Over the course of his long career, Garnsey designed some forty theaters and opera houses, mostly for smaller midwestern cities.
The 1913-1914 Cahn guide lists Bluffton’s Grand Opera House as a ground floor theater with 378 seats on the main floor, 216 in the balcony, 175 in the gallery, and 12 in boxes. The proscenium opening was 30x28 feet, the stage was 33 feet from the footlights to the back wall, and 52 feet between the side walls.
A partial list of works by Chicago architect George Otis Garnsey (1840-1923) lists an opera house built for Charles May at Piqua, Ohio, in 1902-1903 as one of his designs. Garnsey had about forty theaters and opera houses to his credit, most of them in small midwestern towns.
Eau Claire’s Grand Opera House, a ground-floor theater built in 1883, was one of some forty theaters and opera houses, mostly in smaller midwestern cities, designed by the Chicago architect George Otis Garnsey (1840-1923.)
The 1913-1914 Cahn guide listed the Grand with 508 seats on the main floor, 382 in the balcony, 300 in the gallery, and 12 in boxes. The stage was 32 feet deep feet from the footlights to the back wall, and 70 feet between the side walls. The proscenium opening was 32x32.
The April 20, 1907, issue of the Chicago financial journal The Economist had this item:
“George 0. Garnsey has completed plans and will take figures for a three-story addition, 43x90, to the front of a theater in Urbana, Ohio, for the Clifford Amusement Company. The first floor will contain the main entrance, a store and restaurant, and the upper floors will contain an armory. It will cost $25,000.”
As George Otis Garnsey (1840-1923) was a fairly well-known theater architect (some forty theaters and opera houses, mostly in smaller midwestern cities), it’s possible that he also designed the Clifford Theatre as it was originally built in 1905.
The August 7, 1915, issue of The American Contractor said that contracts were being let for a 50'x135' theater building at East Chicago for Joseph Hartley. The project had been designed by architect L. Harry Warriner.
The October, 1907, issue of the trade journal Concrete had this item about the Princess Theatre:
“The Princess theater, just completed, enjoys the distinction of being the only theater structure in the city which is constructed entirely of reinforced concrete. It has a seating capacity of 1,600 and its total cost was in the neighborhood of $180,000.”
This web site has abstracts from early issues of the Richford Gazette. There is a gap between 1917 and 1925. The 1925 paper mentions theaters called the Park and the Colonial, but the 1917 paper mentions only the Colonial, so the Park must have opened sometime between 1918 and 1925.
The 1915 papers indicate that the Colonial was in the Town Hall, and showed its first movies in April that year. The August 14, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World also mentioned a theater in Richford, but it was called the Lyric.
Also, I’ve found the exact location of the Park Theatre, thanks to the two buildings behind it in the vintage photo, both of which are still standing at the west end of Church Street at the L-shaped corner of Elm Avenue, though the view of them from River Street is now blocked by trees.
The Park was on what is now a parking lot on the north side of River Street about midway between Town Street and North Avenue. It is in between an old grey house to the west and a small frame building occupied by the Wash-N-Save laundromat to the east. The United Methodist Church up the block to the west is at 86 River Street, so I’d estimate the theater’s address as approximately 62 River Street.
Brandt Studio Theatres planned to build fifteen new houses in 1970, according to a brief item in Boxoffice of January 26 that year, but I think the Nashua location might have been the only one completed. John J. McNamara was the architect for the projects.
All were to have been small houses of the automated type. The only other locations mentioned in the item were 350-seat single-screeners in Greenport and Plattsburgh, New York. The Nashua location was to be a twin. The Nashua Telegraph of June 11, 1970, said that the twin was nearing completion.
General Cinema was issued a permit to build two more screens at its Brockton Westgate complex on December 29, 1969, according to an article in Boxoffice of January 26, 1970. Construction (by L. E. Hogg Construction of Hartford, Connecticut) was slated to begin as soon as the weather permitted. Estimated cost of the project was $400,000.
The Four Seasons Cinemas were a fourplex being operated by Esquire Theaters of America in 1970, when the January 26 issue of Boxoffice reported that cinemas 5 and 6 were then under construction, slated for a March 5 opening date.
Esquire had two other projects underway; a second screen for the Paris Cinema in Providence, and a two-screen house for Boston, which ended up being the single screen Garden Theatre. The architect for the Garden was Burt W. Federman, and it seems likely that Esquire would have chosen the same architect for its other projects. Federman designed or remodeled theaters totaling over 1,000 screens between 1966 and 1983, according to a 1983 article in The New York Times.
Esquire Theaters of America was the original operator of the Paris Cinema, according to Boxoffice of January 26, 1970. The Paris Cinema 2 was under construction at that time, with a projected opening date of February 16.
It was one of three projects Esquire had underway, including an expansion of the chain’s multiplex in East Providence and the Garden Theatre in Boston. The Architect for the Garden Theatre was Burt W. Federman, so it seems likely Esquire would have had him design their other projects as well.
Boxoffice of January 26, 1970, said that Esquire Cinemas of America was building a twin cinema at 19 Arlington Street in Boston. Target dates for completion were March 15 for Cinema 1 and May 15 for Cinema 2, access for which was to be provided both by stairs and an elevator.
Although Boxoffice reported that a permit had been issued for a twin, it appears that only the one auditorium was completed. Bert Fedderman [sic] was the architect and decorator for the project, Boxoffice said. An article in The New York Times of November 7, 1983, quoted architect Burt Federman as saying that he had built more than 1,000 theaters, all of them multi-screen, since 1966. Maybe he forgot that the Garden Theatre ended up as a single-screen house.
The former Lisbon Playhouse reopened as the Lisbon Cinema on December 19, 1969, as noted in the January 26, 1970, issue of Boxoffice. The new lessee was long-time Massachusetts exhibitor Karl Doran. The theater had been bought by Anthony Corey in October, 1956, who had operated the house until 1963, after which it had been used only intermittently for community events.
Google’s street view shows a bowling alley at this intersection now. I wonder if it’s the same building, and it reverted to its earlier use after theater closed? Though perhaps the bowling alley’s old building became available for conversion to a theater in 1969 because that was when the bowling alley moved to the building it’s now in?
The Windsor is not listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The directory was not exhaustive, though, many small theaters being left out, so the Windsor might still have been in operation that late.
This twin had a brief life. It had already been closed when the October 20, 1985 issue of the Albuquerque Journal reported that it was to be removed to make way for a new 53,000 square foot shopping center to be built on its site at 4200 Wyoming Blvd. NE.
Rather than being slated for demolition, the article said, the theater building was to be moved to a site at Yale Blvd. SE and Southern Ave. SE. How the developer proposed to move a large precast concrete building more than seven miles I don’t know, unless perhaps it was dismantled and reassembled. I’ve checked Google street view of the area around Yale and Southern, and there are a couple of buildings that might have been built using the theater’s parts, but there’s no way to tell if one of them actually was.
The Tepee Theatre was mentioned in the August 17, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“Red Cloud, Neb. — Geo. J. Warren has again come into control of the Teepe [sic] theatre here, as well as the Orpheum.”
411 N. Webster is the address of the Red Cloud Opera House, so 413 must be either the storefront on the ground floor of the Opera House and to the right of its entrance, or the building immediately north of the Opera house. I can’t read the addresses in Google’s street view at this location.
A. J. Inks, who had the Crystal Theatre rebuilt in 1924, had taken over the house in 1909, as noted in the July 9 issue of The Moving Picture World that year:
“Ligonier, Ind. — A. J. Inks, of Toledo, has purchased the Crystal Theater here from Baum & Regula, and has taken possession.”
Albert John “Bert” Inks (misspelled as “Jinks” in the trade journal item I cited in my previous comment) was a native of Ligonier, and was a professional baseball player in the late 19th century. A couple of books with biographical sketches of early baseball players say that Inks operated the Crystal until his death in 1941.
The August 17, 1918 issue of The Moving Picture World said that Inks had also taken over the White Light Theatre in Ligonier, and planned to make improvements to the house.
The Lyric Theatre is first listed in the FDY in 1928, so the 1930 project I cited in an earlier comment must have been either a remodeling of the existing house or a project for a different theater nearby that fell through.
However, a thumbnail biography of Lewis Harry Warriner in the NRHP registration form for the Lincoln Street Historic District does attribute the design of the Lyric to him. As it is first listed in 1928, it most likely opened in 1927, unless it had operated earlier under a different name.
The Waymarking page for the Pickwick Theatre for which bluesneaky provided a link above (clickable version) has a gallery with several photos and other items. The most interesting is a rendering of the building as rebuilt in 1936, from the architect of the project, L. H. Warriner (Lewis Harry Warriner.)
While the gallery is quite useful, I don’t know how accurate the text on the page is. It claims that the late Victorian commercial building on the Pickwick’s site, also seen in other photos, was the home of the Theatorium, the town’s first movie theater, but I see no clear evidence in the photos themselves (despite a marquee-like structure on the front of the building very early on) that there was a theater in this earlier building. It also claims that the Theatorium and the Pickwick were “…in the same place, all the same size….”. a claim which is belied by listings on the Film Daily’s yearbooks.
The Theatorium is never listed in the FDY, but in 1927 the book lists a house called the Oakland Theatre, and in 1928 and 1929 there is a house called the Community Theatre. Syracuse does not appear in the 1930 FDY, but the Community Theatre reappears in 1931, its seating capacity listed for the first time (250) but there is an asterisk denoting that it has not been wired for sound. The Community continues to be listed through 1937, always with 250 seats, but always with the notation that it is closed.
The Pickwick first appears in the 1938 edition, with a seating capacity of 1,100. My guess would be that the front of the old two-story building was remodeled in 1937 and an entirely new auditorium was built behind that structure. The Dickensian name Pickwick was likely chosen to match the Tudor revival style of the new front, or vice versa.
There was a house called the Theatorium at Syracuse, mentioned in the October 13, 1917, issue of Motography, when the theater changed hands, but whether it was the same theater as the Oakland and the Community, and whether it (or they) were in the building behind which the 1937 Pickwick was most likely built, I don’t know. Any theater in that building would have been a storefront conversion. The Pickwick auditorium was clearly new in 1937, though I don’t doubt that the 1937 auditorium did indeed survive the 1945 fire and is the theater still in use today.
The January 17, 1936, issue of The Hammond Times said that the Hartley Theatre Company would remodel and reopen “…the long closed Lyric theater in East Chicago….” with a new name, no more than four letters long, to be chosen in a public contest. I guess that accounts for the non-standard spelling “Voge” that the house ended up with.
The Grand’s building is currently occupied by a bar and restaurant called Miknan’s Main Street Pub.
This house had fournames. This article posted to the web site of the Columbia Daily Tribune says that a movie house opened on October 16, 1913, as “… the Alamo Theatre, eventually became the Dickinson Theatre, then the Fayette Theatre and finally the Grand Theater.”
After this theater was demolished, an old commercial building down the block was converted into a theater also called the Grand. The site of the original Grand is occupied by an extension of the Commercial Trust Company.
The Grand Theatre at 107 N. Main was opened in an old commercial building after the original Grand at 115 Main was demolished.
The Grand Opera House at Bluffton, Indiana opened in 1903, according to a list of buildings designed by its architect, George Otis Garnsey (1840-1923.) Over the course of his long career, Garnsey designed some forty theaters and opera houses, mostly for smaller midwestern cities.
The 1913-1914 Cahn guide lists Bluffton’s Grand Opera House as a ground floor theater with 378 seats on the main floor, 216 in the balcony, 175 in the gallery, and 12 in boxes. The proscenium opening was 30x28 feet, the stage was 33 feet from the footlights to the back wall, and 52 feet between the side walls.
A partial list of works by Chicago architect George Otis Garnsey (1840-1923) lists an opera house built for Charles May at Piqua, Ohio, in 1902-1903 as one of his designs. Garnsey had about forty theaters and opera houses to his credit, most of them in small midwestern towns.
Eau Claire’s Grand Opera House, a ground-floor theater built in 1883, was one of some forty theaters and opera houses, mostly in smaller midwestern cities, designed by the Chicago architect George Otis Garnsey (1840-1923.)
The 1913-1914 Cahn guide listed the Grand with 508 seats on the main floor, 382 in the balcony, 300 in the gallery, and 12 in boxes. The stage was 32 feet deep feet from the footlights to the back wall, and 70 feet between the side walls. The proscenium opening was 32x32.
The April 20, 1907, issue of the Chicago financial journal The Economist had this item:
As George Otis Garnsey (1840-1923) was a fairly well-known theater architect (some forty theaters and opera houses, mostly in smaller midwestern cities), it’s possible that he also designed the Clifford Theatre as it was originally built in 1905.The August 7, 1915, issue of The American Contractor said that contracts were being let for a 50'x135' theater building at East Chicago for Joseph Hartley. The project had been designed by architect L. Harry Warriner.
The October, 1907, issue of the trade journal Concrete had this item about the Princess Theatre:
It’s still a hotel and even has a web site.
This web site has abstracts from early issues of the Richford Gazette. There is a gap between 1917 and 1925. The 1925 paper mentions theaters called the Park and the Colonial, but the 1917 paper mentions only the Colonial, so the Park must have opened sometime between 1918 and 1925.
The 1915 papers indicate that the Colonial was in the Town Hall, and showed its first movies in April that year. The August 14, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World also mentioned a theater in Richford, but it was called the Lyric.
Also, I’ve found the exact location of the Park Theatre, thanks to the two buildings behind it in the vintage photo, both of which are still standing at the west end of Church Street at the L-shaped corner of Elm Avenue, though the view of them from River Street is now blocked by trees.
The Park was on what is now a parking lot on the north side of River Street about midway between Town Street and North Avenue. It is in between an old grey house to the west and a small frame building occupied by the Wash-N-Save laundromat to the east. The United Methodist Church up the block to the west is at 86 River Street, so I’d estimate the theater’s address as approximately 62 River Street.
Brandt Studio Theatres planned to build fifteen new houses in 1970, according to a brief item in Boxoffice of January 26 that year, but I think the Nashua location might have been the only one completed. John J. McNamara was the architect for the projects.
All were to have been small houses of the automated type. The only other locations mentioned in the item were 350-seat single-screeners in Greenport and Plattsburgh, New York. The Nashua location was to be a twin. The Nashua Telegraph of June 11, 1970, said that the twin was nearing completion.
General Cinema was issued a permit to build two more screens at its Brockton Westgate complex on December 29, 1969, according to an article in Boxoffice of January 26, 1970. Construction (by L. E. Hogg Construction of Hartford, Connecticut) was slated to begin as soon as the weather permitted. Estimated cost of the project was $400,000.
The Four Seasons Cinemas were a fourplex being operated by Esquire Theaters of America in 1970, when the January 26 issue of Boxoffice reported that cinemas 5 and 6 were then under construction, slated for a March 5 opening date.
Esquire had two other projects underway; a second screen for the Paris Cinema in Providence, and a two-screen house for Boston, which ended up being the single screen Garden Theatre. The architect for the Garden was Burt W. Federman, and it seems likely that Esquire would have chosen the same architect for its other projects. Federman designed or remodeled theaters totaling over 1,000 screens between 1966 and 1983, according to a 1983 article in The New York Times.
Esquire Theaters of America was the original operator of the Paris Cinema, according to Boxoffice of January 26, 1970. The Paris Cinema 2 was under construction at that time, with a projected opening date of February 16.
It was one of three projects Esquire had underway, including an expansion of the chain’s multiplex in East Providence and the Garden Theatre in Boston. The Architect for the Garden Theatre was Burt W. Federman, so it seems likely Esquire would have had him design their other projects as well.
Boxoffice of January 26, 1970, said that Esquire Cinemas of America was building a twin cinema at 19 Arlington Street in Boston. Target dates for completion were March 15 for Cinema 1 and May 15 for Cinema 2, access for which was to be provided both by stairs and an elevator.
Although Boxoffice reported that a permit had been issued for a twin, it appears that only the one auditorium was completed. Bert Fedderman [sic] was the architect and decorator for the project, Boxoffice said. An article in The New York Times of November 7, 1983, quoted architect Burt Federman as saying that he had built more than 1,000 theaters, all of them multi-screen, since 1966. Maybe he forgot that the Garden Theatre ended up as a single-screen house.
The former Lisbon Playhouse reopened as the Lisbon Cinema on December 19, 1969, as noted in the January 26, 1970, issue of Boxoffice. The new lessee was long-time Massachusetts exhibitor Karl Doran. The theater had been bought by Anthony Corey in October, 1956, who had operated the house until 1963, after which it had been used only intermittently for community events.
Google’s street view shows a bowling alley at this intersection now. I wonder if it’s the same building, and it reverted to its earlier use after theater closed? Though perhaps the bowling alley’s old building became available for conversion to a theater in 1969 because that was when the bowling alley moved to the building it’s now in?
The Windsor is not listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The directory was not exhaustive, though, many small theaters being left out, so the Windsor might still have been in operation that late.
This twin had a brief life. It had already been closed when the October 20, 1985 issue of theAlbuquerque Journal reported that it was to be removed to make way for a new 53,000 square foot shopping center to be built on its site at 4200 Wyoming Blvd. NE.
Rather than being slated for demolition, the article said, the theater building was to be moved to a site at Yale Blvd. SE and Southern Ave. SE. How the developer proposed to move a large precast concrete building more than seven miles I don’t know, unless perhaps it was dismantled and reassembled. I’ve checked Google street view of the area around Yale and Southern, and there are a couple of buildings that might have been built using the theater’s parts, but there’s no way to tell if one of them actually was.
The Tepee Theatre was mentioned in the August 17, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World:
411 N. Webster is the address of the Red Cloud Opera House, so 413 must be either the storefront on the ground floor of the Opera House and to the right of its entrance, or the building immediately north of the Opera house. I can’t read the addresses in Google’s street view at this location.A. J. Inks, who had the Crystal Theatre rebuilt in 1924, had taken over the house in 1909, as noted in the July 9 issue of The Moving Picture World that year:
Albert John “Bert” Inks (misspelled as “Jinks” in the trade journal item I cited in my previous comment) was a native of Ligonier, and was a professional baseball player in the late 19th century. A couple of books with biographical sketches of early baseball players say that Inks operated the Crystal until his death in 1941.The August 17, 1918 issue of The Moving Picture World said that Inks had also taken over the White Light Theatre in Ligonier, and planned to make improvements to the house.