Correct, LM. Crazily enough, in Downtown Pittsburgh, Sixth Avenue takes a half turn when it crosses Liberty Avenhue and becomes Seventh Street. Sixth Avenue is a full city block from the start of Sixth Street.
Sixth Street is/was the location of the Byham (Fulton), former Gateway (previously J.P. Haris / before that the Alvin) and Heinz Hall (formerly Loew’s Penn).
It leads directlyy to what used to be called the Sixth Street Bridge, which officially had been renamed the Roberty Clemente Bridge.
It is called Federal Street when it reaches the North Side on the other side of the Allegheny River.
Warren, Your post (about the Hollywood/Mark Hellinger) AND my post in response to yours turned up on both “blogs” – the one for the theater in Dormont/Pittsburgh and the one you intended on West 51st Street in NYC. Interesting electronic glitch.
Warren, Excellent post, but it does not apply to the Hollywood in the Pittsburgh suburban boro of Dormont. I believe you intended to assign your remarks to the Mark Hellinger Theatre in New York, just around the corner from Broadway.
Postscript: Although it’s true that a silent called “The Baffled Burglar” was released in 1907 and a silent called “Poor But Honest” was released in 1923, most movies were so short (often a few seconds to a few minutes) in the first decade or so of the 20th Century that the titles are situations almost certainly were recycled repeatedly.
I suspect the records-keeping was casual at best. Titles, especially, may be used many times, even for major films that have no relationship to one another such as “The Enforcer,” “Crash” and “(The) Unforgiven.”
A Los Angeles-based showbiz attorney told me a few years ago he could not explain how and when certain titles acquire a “hands off” status (think “Gone With the Wind” and “The Sound of Music”) while others may be used again almost immediately.
Surely copyright laws did not govern the naming of seven-minute movies made back in 1905. But that’s just speculation.
I, too, found that the Nickelodeon, identified in 1905 as being at 433-435 Smithfield Street, somehow is 441 Smithfield Street today – and for the past many years.
Can anyone explain why the numbering of addresses on a single specific commercial block, such as one in Downtown Pittsburgh, would change?
For the record, in addition to the 96 seats, patrons on crowded days also occupied standing room.
I don’t want to overload the Cinema 4/South Hills Theatre line with comments about Maxi-Saver, but the word is that it had become dirty and scruffy. Older audiences are too discriminating to settle for that. It’s also what hurt the Denis Theatre’s attempts to appear to the art house crowd in the past decade or so. Middleage and older audiences require higher standards – not lower than average.
Thanks, guys. I’ve seldom had occasion to visit Downtown Coraopolis, but I had an uncle, now deceased, who maintained his accounting office there until he was in his 80s. His second-floor office was on a main street and was near a theater with a traditional marquee, which was still there in the 1980s, I believe. No idea what the street was. Maybe this was the 1970s. It seemed to me it might have been the last moviehouse of its kind still standing (if not functioning) in town.
Your logic is right, I believe, Susan, but historically, in the past fopur decades or so of prosperity, older people – today’s most reticent moviegoers – are the first to respond to economic downturns.
Young people are the last to change their habits. They’re the most eager spenders, which is why advertisers and film companies court them so eagerly. And young people overwhelming buy, buy, buy the moment as product becomes available, not two months later when it’s cheaper.
Associated Theatres opened the Fiesta in the summer of 1967 with “In the Heat of the Night,” which played for 11 weeks to the kind of good attendance required to help establish a moviehouse.
Its capacity was estimated at both 542 and 524.
Although it’s true that a parking garage occupied several levels above the nicely appointed basement moviehouse, the building’s street level space was occupied for decades by a restaurant.
Some notable films to open here were “In Cold Blood” (6 weeks), “Yours, Mine and Ours” (9), a moveover roadshow engagement of “Funny Girl” (weeks 11 through 52), “Cactus Flower” (11), “MAS*H” (11), “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” (8), “A New Leaf” (8), “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (8), “Dirty Harry” (13), “What’s Up, Doc?” (15), “Butterflies Are Free” (8), “Paper Moon” (11)“ and "Sleeper” (9), “Blazing Saddles” (7), “Murder on the Orient Express” (10) and “Murder by Death” (16).
About midway through the 14-week run of “Network,” the Fiesta off and on had to start sharing movies with at least one of the encroaching suburban houses. Despite the sharing, “Saturday Night Fever” held on for 18 weeks.
Although there may have been a horror film or two during the 1980s as Downtown’s other larger, dilapidated theaters closed for refurbishing or conversion into other uses, gory films were never the Fiesta’s forte. They did invade the Stanley, Warner, Gateway and Fulton, though.
The Pittsburgh-based Associated Theatres circuit opened the elegant 373-seat Forum (often spelled Forvm in advertising) in the early summer of 1963 in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, hub of the city’s art houses.
Its manager was one of the proudest and friendliest in the local film business, the dimuitive Bill Scott.
A distinctive feature of the theater is that the screen’s wall was against the sidewalk on Forbes Avenue. One entered the theater beside the screen and walked along a corridor to the left of the auditorium to reach the concession stand and the entrance to the auditorium.
A big hit from the first week, the Forum started with a seven-week run of “Mouse on the Moon” and soon played the exclusive first-run engagement of “Lilies of the Field” for 24 weeks. It ran “Dr. Strangelove” for 10,“ a re-release of "Lili” for eight, “Marriage, Italian Style” for 16 and “Zorba the Greek” for 13.
Associated was having such success with choice bookings for its little jewel that it built a companion for the Forum about 15 miles away in a southwestern suburb of Pittsburgh called Mt. Lebanon.
The new 274-seat house was dubbed the Encore (or Denis Encore). The Forum and Encore thereafter almost always day-dated (played the same art house movies concurrently).
The Encore opened in the summer of 1965 and joined the Forum in presenting a spy spoof called “Agent 8 ¾,” which had been known in England as “Hot Enough for June.”
The film did not do well, but “Casanova ‘70” quickly became the first joint Forum/Encore hit, followed soon by “A Patch of Blue,” which lasted 16 weeks, and “To Sir, With Love,” which lasted 19.
All records then were broken during the 25-week run of “The Graduate.”
When the two theaters played the same film, the Forum consistently did better than the Encore by taking in 60-70 percent of the earnings.
A few of the biggest hits they shared were “Charly” (14 weeks), “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (12), “The 12 Chairs” (11), “Bananas” (9), “A Touch of Class” (18), “Harry and Tonto” (15), “The Return of the Pink Panther” (17) and “The Man Who Would Be King” (12).
After a three-week run of “Cat and Mouse,” the Forum closed in mid-December 1978.
The site has been used for a bagel shop and two different ice cream emporiums since. The structure is that of the theater, albeit barely identifiable as such.
The Stanley Warner-owned Enright Theatre, named in a contest for the first Pittsburgh area serviceman to die in World War I, was absolutely located at 5820 Penn Avenue in East Liberty. I grew up nearby.
I cannot account for the wildly incorrect use of the address 1806 Pennsylvania Avenue in the lawsuit link listed above, but I’ve come across such legal-document errors before.
Arkansas-born crooner-actor-director Dick Powell emceed shows here and at Pittsburgh’s Stanley Theatre around 1930. (He was making movies by 1932.)
The Enright famously showed Saturday kiddie shows in the 1930s and 1940s with serials.
Despite the fact it was the third largest moviehouse in Western Pennsylvania (the Stanley and Loew’s Penn had greater capacities but were both first-run deluxe Downtown theaters), the Enright was a third-to-fourth-run house (second or third neighborhood run), playing movies only after they made their East Liberty neighborhood debuts at the Sheridan Square, Liberty and Regent theaters.
The Enright played strictly double bills (even “Quo Vadis” opened on a double feature), with changes every three or four days.
It’s unclear why Stanley Warner downgraded the Enright to being such a late-run house and why they allowed it to deteriorate so markedly and without any renovation of note in the final several years.
It opened and closed off and on in the 1950s. I cannot say positively whether it was used for any live performances in the 1950s, save a minor rock ‘n’ show or two. The only boxing I can vouch took place there was when the theater booked an occasional closed-circuit TV-on-the-big screen of heavyweight championship fights, as three of four large theaters did periodically in the 1950s.
The Enright already had played its final movie program when it reopened for a single night to show one of these closed-circuit matches.
The theater was razed and the sizable property used for parking and for a small urban version of a strip mall, with downscale stores. I believe all of those little stores and offices have been razed in the past few years.
The 501 Butler Street address apparently was correct when the Etna Theatre opened (I, too, found it that way in old phone directories and newspaper ads), but the building’s address inexplicably became 435 Butler Street without moving.
It may have changed when the theater building was taken over by Tippins Machinery Company (also called Tippins, Inc.), which deals in steel mill equipment. The original structure is still there.
An unusual feature of the Etna was that, like the Strand in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, you entered the theater from behind the screen and walked toward the projection booth when selecting a seat.
Appealingly to old theater buffs, you can identify the structure’s original use by the appearance of its left side.
The Denis opened as a Harris theater in 1937 in Mt. Lebanon Township, a suburb southwest of Pittsburgh.
It played third run (second neighborhood run) commercial films after they had played Downtown and after, in a 50-50 ratio, one of nearby Dormont’s two theaters, the Hollywood and the South Hills. (The latter appears in Cinema Treasures as Cinema 4 in Dormont.)
The initial Denis capacity reportedly was, as Dave-Bronx notes, 1,152, part of which was in a balcony I never knew to be used.
Occasionally, thanks to the vagaries of booking, the Denis played a major second-run film before the Dormont theaters. Examples included “Porgy and Bess,” “Sons and Lovers” and “Experiment in Terror.”
Associated Theatres, which had taken over the Denis and many other Pittsburgh area theaters, had been having great success as the district’s leading purveyor of art films.
In order to have a South Hills area outlet for art films that could “daydate” (play concurrently) with their popular 374-seat Forvm Theatre in Squirrel Hill, Associated Theatres reconstructed part of the Denis property to put its new Encore (or Denis Encore) auditorium on what had been an upstairs lobby – long unusued – that had led to the main theater’s balcony.
The Denis charged regular neighborhood prices for the third-run commercial films in its larger main-floor theater and higher first-run prices for the art films shown upstairs in the 274-seat Encore.
The Encore opened in the summer of 1965 and joined the Forum in presenting a spy spoof called “Agent 8 ¾,” which had been known in England as “Hot Enough for June.”
The film did not do well, but “Casanova ‘70” quickly became the first joint Forvm/Encore hit, followed soon by “A Patch of Blue,” which lasted 16 weeks, and “To Sir, With Love,” which hung in for 19 rounds.
All records then were broken during the 25-week run of “The Graduate.”
When the two theaters played the same film, the Forum consistently did better than the Encore by taking in 60-70 percent of the earnings.
But because the Denis had a second, larger auditorium on site, it could trump the Forvm’s numbers occasionally by moving “The Graduate” down to the main Denis at art house prices and letting the other audience, for a third-run movie such as “Wait Until Dark,” pay the lower price to watch it in the tonier Encore auditorium.
Eventually the original Denis Theatre was subdivided two ways. The main-floor auditorium was divided down the middle into a pair of 280-seat spaces.
The former balcony was piggybacked in a sense. The front of the balcony was sealed off and converted into a projection booth for the two main-floor auditoriums. The back half became an oddly wide, shallow space with few rows. No. 4 was difficult to access by a back stairwell that immediately made it an unpopular climb.
Denis 4, as the odd new 120-seater was called, drew complaints. Many folks, upon reaching the box office and learning their movie of choice was in No. 4, left the premises.
Dissatisfaction with the space was so pronounced that when Cinema World took over, it shut down auditorium No. 4 and used only the main three.
Under different managements, the main three auditoriums were numbered differently. Sometimes the former Encore was called Denis 1, and sometimes it was Denis 3 because it was third in size (by then listed as having 240 seats).
CineMagic took over, reopened the fourth auditorium and concentrated more and more on art films (generally moveovers from the Squirrel Hill and Manor in Squirrel Hill).
But the overall Denis continued to deteriorate, with some films shown out of frame and out of focus by employees who complained of poor equipment.
The upscale audience that supports art films became increasingly discontented with the condition of the Denis.
A few movies did do well, including the first run of “Fahrenheit 9/11” and the locally made sleeper “The Bread, My Sweet.”
But attendance worsened steadily until the Denis closed Sept. 12, 2004, with “We Don’t Live Here Any More,” “The Door in the Floor,” “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” and “Maria Full of Grace.”
We can be heartened by the purchase of the theater (see the link above to Barbara Vancheri’s Post-Gazette story) and hope that the proposed $3 million renovation, including significant reconstruction, will turn the Denis into the art house jewel of the South Hills.
The South Hills Theatre opened as a Harris theater with 1,222 seats. (There were far fewer seats once the theater was chopped up into Cinema 4.)
While the nearby Hollywood Theatre on Potomac Avenue for decades had first (South Hills) neighborhood run of films from United Artists, Universal(-International), Warner Bros., Disney and (until 1958) RKO Radio, the South Hills had the first South Hills run of films from MGM, Paramount, Fox and Columbia.
From there, the bigger hits (and a minority of the lesser ones) moved onto the Denis in Mt. Lebanon for a third run.
Business was brisk from the 1940s through the 1960s but began eroding as more of the bigger hits that had played Downtown were booked into the more modernly appointed new theaters such as the Village (now Carmike 10 at South Hills Village, the short-lived Cinemette South and eventually Galleria 6 and Destinta Chartiers.
These newer houses siphoned off so much of the audience that the two Dormont theaters were elbowed into being last-run houses at bargain prices.
In the old days it was not unusual for the South Hills to draw big crowds. I think they even oversold the house on a Friday night in mid-February 1961 when the original “Village of the Damned” (coupled with the tag-on feature “Haunted Strangler”) played to standing room only, with many teenagers sitting in the aisles.
Occasionally the stage was used, as for Saturday morning performances by the Knickerty Knockerty Players, but live performances were rare.
During the mid-1970s the South Hills booked a package of 20 Warner Bros. classics (“Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “Casablanca,” “Marked Woman,” etc.) and ran them back-to-back, four per weekend from midnight to about 8 a.m. on Fridays and possibly Saturday nights, too.
After the South Hills was purchased by Jim Baker, assisted by Bob Stone, the theater tried occasional live bookings, as for the River City Brass Band and for a musical revue featuring district native Karen Prunczik, who had been in Broadway’s “42nd Street.”
Baker even spoke of alleviating the notorious parking problem in Dormont by busing people from neighborhood lots such as the one at Keystone Oaks High School. The plan apparently never materialized or, if at all, only for special performances.
Mode Art Pictures, which may or may not have been affiliated with Baker, was based in the theater while he was the owner.
When “Out of Africa” opened in late 1985 or early 1986, Universal was feuding with one of the local theater circuits, and so Baker’s South Hills, which had been playing late-run films, snapped up the future Oscar-winning Best Picture for a first-run engagement. To the chagrin of purists, Baker inserted an intermission where none was intended.
Eventually the theater was purchased by veteran exhibitor Mike Cardone, who turned it into a quad called Cinema 4 with a new, trimmer marquee.
Cardone sold the quad in 2000 to Key 15 Productions to be run by a young local couple who had no experience in moviehouse management.
A problem involving one of the four small auditoriums led to one of the four being closed almost immediately, never to be used for movies again. The other three screens closed abruptly in 2001. The final three attractions – “Blow,” “Along Came a Spider” and “Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles” – lingering on the marquee for years afterward.
Many of us would love to see the South Hills – and it will always be the South Hills to most of us – rehabilitated.
But, like the Hollywood a few blocks away, it was defeated by a number of factors. Dormont is still a nice community, but moviegoers here must rely on street parking, in some cases with meters.
But the bigger problem is that when neighborhood theaters were constructed during the first 60-70 years of the 20th Century, they were designed (a.) to serve an audience within walking distance or convenient public transportation, and (b.) a very significant portion of the movie audience waited until films had played first run Downtown and then filtered through a pecking order of second, third and fourth runs at lower prices at handy neighborhood houses, generally on bargain double bills.
When a dollar was a dollar and a quarter was a quarter, teenagers and children routinely waited a few weeks until they could see films at affordable prices.
Today, full-price muiltiplexes/megaplexes around the world cater to a free-spending young audience that not only “must” see heavily hyped movies the first weekend but even the first day. Truly, it’s a different world.
Ane because we have so many screens playing first-run films for so long, there’s no blood left in the turnip by the time it’s available for showing at second-run theaters. (As of this moment, the Maxi-Saver in West Mifflin is the last surviving bargain house in the Greater Pittsburgh area, and it’s grosses are terrible. It can’t keep going indefinitely.)
And so, for all of the integrity and good intentions in reopening theaters such as the South Hills and the Hollywood, they face a nearly insurmountable challenge in drawing an audience regularly. Collectively, we pay fervent lip service to supporting such theaters; in practice, when we go to moviehouses, we go to big sterile complexes while a film’s buzz is hot.
For a while in the early 1980s, La Cresta restaurant occupied the site.
The theater’s capacity turned up as 492 in one source. There’s perhaps a 50-50 chance the larger capacity is correct given the space’s uses since then.
Hi, Lost Memory. The International Movie DataBase corroborates the premiere dates you list.
Whether or not “Never Wave at a Wac” really premiered somewhere in January 1952, I can’t say. That might have been a failed test engagement. Remember, RKO Radio, which distributed it, routinely held movies back for years including “The Outlaw,” “Double Dynamite” and “Jet Pilot.”
In any event, “Wac” made its Pittsburgh debut at the Stanley in March 1953, three weeks before “Redhead From Woming” opened on the top half of a double bill at the Fulton.
Their pairing at the Embassy probably happened in April 1953.
Sorry, Ken, but despite your postings being news, I keep getting: “The page cannot be displayed.” No idea what the problem is here.
Correct, LM. Crazily enough, in Downtown Pittsburgh, Sixth Avenue takes a half turn when it crosses Liberty Avenhue and becomes Seventh Street. Sixth Avenue is a full city block from the start of Sixth Street.
Sixth Street is/was the location of the Byham (Fulton), former Gateway (previously J.P. Haris / before that the Alvin) and Heinz Hall (formerly Loew’s Penn).
It leads directlyy to what used to be called the Sixth Street Bridge, which officially had been renamed the Roberty Clemente Bridge.
It is called Federal Street when it reaches the North Side on the other side of the Allegheny River.
No luck accessing your marquee files, Ken.
Warren, Your post (about the Hollywood/Mark Hellinger) AND my post in response to yours turned up on both “blogs” – the one for the theater in Dormont/Pittsburgh and the one you intended on West 51st Street in NYC. Interesting electronic glitch.
Warren, Excellent post, but it does not apply to the Hollywood in the Pittsburgh suburban boro of Dormont. I believe you intended to assign your remarks to the Mark Hellinger Theatre in New York, just around the corner from Broadway.
Having trouble keeping my checkmark on on this theater.
Postscript: Although it’s true that a silent called “The Baffled Burglar” was released in 1907 and a silent called “Poor But Honest” was released in 1923, most movies were so short (often a few seconds to a few minutes) in the first decade or so of the 20th Century that the titles are situations almost certainly were recycled repeatedly.
I suspect the records-keeping was casual at best. Titles, especially, may be used many times, even for major films that have no relationship to one another such as “The Enforcer,” “Crash” and “(The) Unforgiven.”
A Los Angeles-based showbiz attorney told me a few years ago he could not explain how and when certain titles acquire a “hands off” status (think “Gone With the Wind” and “The Sound of Music”) while others may be used again almost immediately.
Surely copyright laws did not govern the naming of seven-minute movies made back in 1905. But that’s just speculation.
I, too, found that the Nickelodeon, identified in 1905 as being at 433-435 Smithfield Street, somehow is 441 Smithfield Street today – and for the past many years.
Can anyone explain why the numbering of addresses on a single specific commercial block, such as one in Downtown Pittsburgh, would change?
For the record, in addition to the 96 seats, patrons on crowded days also occupied standing room.
The theater closed in 1911.
For the record, this theater was never identified as the Denis Quad.
This theater should have its location changed from Pittsburgh to Dormont.
Any chance this place is in danger of closing?
I don’t want to overload the Cinema 4/South Hills Theatre line with comments about Maxi-Saver, but the word is that it had become dirty and scruffy. Older audiences are too discriminating to settle for that. It’s also what hurt the Denis Theatre’s attempts to appear to the art house crowd in the past decade or so. Middleage and older audiences require higher standards – not lower than average.
Thanks, guys. I’ve seldom had occasion to visit Downtown Coraopolis, but I had an uncle, now deceased, who maintained his accounting office there until he was in his 80s. His second-floor office was on a main street and was near a theater with a traditional marquee, which was still there in the 1980s, I believe. No idea what the street was. Maybe this was the 1970s. It seemed to me it might have been the last moviehouse of its kind still standing (if not functioning) in town.
Your logic is right, I believe, Susan, but historically, in the past fopur decades or so of prosperity, older people – today’s most reticent moviegoers – are the first to respond to economic downturns.
Young people are the last to change their habits. They’re the most eager spenders, which is why advertisers and film companies court them so eagerly. And young people overwhelming buy, buy, buy the moment as product becomes available, not two months later when it’s cheaper.
During the first two years of the theater’s existence, when it was known as the Imperial, it lost money trying to present vaudeville shows.
Associated Theatres opened the Fiesta in the summer of 1967 with “In the Heat of the Night,” which played for 11 weeks to the kind of good attendance required to help establish a moviehouse.
Its capacity was estimated at both 542 and 524.
Although it’s true that a parking garage occupied several levels above the nicely appointed basement moviehouse, the building’s street level space was occupied for decades by a restaurant.
Some notable films to open here were “In Cold Blood” (6 weeks), “Yours, Mine and Ours” (9), a moveover roadshow engagement of “Funny Girl” (weeks 11 through 52), “Cactus Flower” (11), “MAS*H” (11), “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” (8), “A New Leaf” (8), “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (8), “Dirty Harry” (13), “What’s Up, Doc?” (15), “Butterflies Are Free” (8), “Paper Moon” (11)“ and "Sleeper” (9), “Blazing Saddles” (7), “Murder on the Orient Express” (10) and “Murder by Death” (16).
About midway through the 14-week run of “Network,” the Fiesta off and on had to start sharing movies with at least one of the encroaching suburban houses. Despite the sharing, “Saturday Night Fever” held on for 18 weeks.
Although there may have been a horror film or two during the 1980s as Downtown’s other larger, dilapidated theaters closed for refurbishing or conversion into other uses, gory films were never the Fiesta’s forte. They did invade the Stanley, Warner, Gateway and Fulton, though.
The Pittsburgh-based Associated Theatres circuit opened the elegant 373-seat Forum (often spelled Forvm in advertising) in the early summer of 1963 in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, hub of the city’s art houses.
Its manager was one of the proudest and friendliest in the local film business, the dimuitive Bill Scott.
A distinctive feature of the theater is that the screen’s wall was against the sidewalk on Forbes Avenue. One entered the theater beside the screen and walked along a corridor to the left of the auditorium to reach the concession stand and the entrance to the auditorium.
A big hit from the first week, the Forum started with a seven-week run of “Mouse on the Moon” and soon played the exclusive first-run engagement of “Lilies of the Field” for 24 weeks. It ran “Dr. Strangelove” for 10,“ a re-release of "Lili” for eight, “Marriage, Italian Style” for 16 and “Zorba the Greek” for 13.
Associated was having such success with choice bookings for its little jewel that it built a companion for the Forum about 15 miles away in a southwestern suburb of Pittsburgh called Mt. Lebanon.
The new 274-seat house was dubbed the Encore (or Denis Encore). The Forum and Encore thereafter almost always day-dated (played the same art house movies concurrently).
The Encore opened in the summer of 1965 and joined the Forum in presenting a spy spoof called “Agent 8 ¾,” which had been known in England as “Hot Enough for June.”
The film did not do well, but “Casanova ‘70” quickly became the first joint Forum/Encore hit, followed soon by “A Patch of Blue,” which lasted 16 weeks, and “To Sir, With Love,” which lasted 19.
All records then were broken during the 25-week run of “The Graduate.”
When the two theaters played the same film, the Forum consistently did better than the Encore by taking in 60-70 percent of the earnings.
A few of the biggest hits they shared were “Charly” (14 weeks), “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (12), “The 12 Chairs” (11), “Bananas” (9), “A Touch of Class” (18), “Harry and Tonto” (15), “The Return of the Pink Panther” (17) and “The Man Who Would Be King” (12).
After a three-week run of “Cat and Mouse,” the Forum closed in mid-December 1978.
The site has been used for a bagel shop and two different ice cream emporiums since. The structure is that of the theater, albeit barely identifiable as such.
The Stanley Warner-owned Enright Theatre, named in a contest for the first Pittsburgh area serviceman to die in World War I, was absolutely located at 5820 Penn Avenue in East Liberty. I grew up nearby.
I cannot account for the wildly incorrect use of the address 1806 Pennsylvania Avenue in the lawsuit link listed above, but I’ve come across such legal-document errors before.
Arkansas-born crooner-actor-director Dick Powell emceed shows here and at Pittsburgh’s Stanley Theatre around 1930. (He was making movies by 1932.)
The Enright famously showed Saturday kiddie shows in the 1930s and 1940s with serials.
Despite the fact it was the third largest moviehouse in Western Pennsylvania (the Stanley and Loew’s Penn had greater capacities but were both first-run deluxe Downtown theaters), the Enright was a third-to-fourth-run house (second or third neighborhood run), playing movies only after they made their East Liberty neighborhood debuts at the Sheridan Square, Liberty and Regent theaters.
The Enright played strictly double bills (even “Quo Vadis” opened on a double feature), with changes every three or four days.
It’s unclear why Stanley Warner downgraded the Enright to being such a late-run house and why they allowed it to deteriorate so markedly and without any renovation of note in the final several years.
It opened and closed off and on in the 1950s. I cannot say positively whether it was used for any live performances in the 1950s, save a minor rock ‘n’ show or two. The only boxing I can vouch took place there was when the theater booked an occasional closed-circuit TV-on-the-big screen of heavyweight championship fights, as three of four large theaters did periodically in the 1950s.
The Enright already had played its final movie program when it reopened for a single night to show one of these closed-circuit matches.
The theater was razed and the sizable property used for parking and for a small urban version of a strip mall, with downscale stores. I believe all of those little stores and offices have been razed in the past few years.
The capacity was 754.
The 501 Butler Street address apparently was correct when the Etna Theatre opened (I, too, found it that way in old phone directories and newspaper ads), but the building’s address inexplicably became 435 Butler Street without moving.
It may have changed when the theater building was taken over by Tippins Machinery Company (also called Tippins, Inc.), which deals in steel mill equipment. The original structure is still there.
An unusual feature of the Etna was that, like the Strand in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, you entered the theater from behind the screen and walked toward the projection booth when selecting a seat.
Appealingly to old theater buffs, you can identify the structure’s original use by the appearance of its left side.
Postscript to TomB’s note above:
The Denis opened as a Harris theater in 1937 in Mt. Lebanon Township, a suburb southwest of Pittsburgh.
It played third run (second neighborhood run) commercial films after they had played Downtown and after, in a 50-50 ratio, one of nearby Dormont’s two theaters, the Hollywood and the South Hills. (The latter appears in Cinema Treasures as Cinema 4 in Dormont.)
The initial Denis capacity reportedly was, as Dave-Bronx notes, 1,152, part of which was in a balcony I never knew to be used.
Occasionally, thanks to the vagaries of booking, the Denis played a major second-run film before the Dormont theaters. Examples included “Porgy and Bess,” “Sons and Lovers” and “Experiment in Terror.”
Associated Theatres, which had taken over the Denis and many other Pittsburgh area theaters, had been having great success as the district’s leading purveyor of art films.
In order to have a South Hills area outlet for art films that could “daydate” (play concurrently) with their popular 374-seat Forvm Theatre in Squirrel Hill, Associated Theatres reconstructed part of the Denis property to put its new Encore (or Denis Encore) auditorium on what had been an upstairs lobby – long unusued – that had led to the main theater’s balcony.
The Denis charged regular neighborhood prices for the third-run commercial films in its larger main-floor theater and higher first-run prices for the art films shown upstairs in the 274-seat Encore.
The Encore opened in the summer of 1965 and joined the Forum in presenting a spy spoof called “Agent 8 ¾,” which had been known in England as “Hot Enough for June.”
The film did not do well, but “Casanova ‘70” quickly became the first joint Forvm/Encore hit, followed soon by “A Patch of Blue,” which lasted 16 weeks, and “To Sir, With Love,” which hung in for 19 rounds.
All records then were broken during the 25-week run of “The Graduate.”
When the two theaters played the same film, the Forum consistently did better than the Encore by taking in 60-70 percent of the earnings.
But because the Denis had a second, larger auditorium on site, it could trump the Forvm’s numbers occasionally by moving “The Graduate” down to the main Denis at art house prices and letting the other audience, for a third-run movie such as “Wait Until Dark,” pay the lower price to watch it in the tonier Encore auditorium.
Eventually the original Denis Theatre was subdivided two ways. The main-floor auditorium was divided down the middle into a pair of 280-seat spaces.
The former balcony was piggybacked in a sense. The front of the balcony was sealed off and converted into a projection booth for the two main-floor auditoriums. The back half became an oddly wide, shallow space with few rows. No. 4 was difficult to access by a back stairwell that immediately made it an unpopular climb.
Denis 4, as the odd new 120-seater was called, drew complaints. Many folks, upon reaching the box office and learning their movie of choice was in No. 4, left the premises.
Dissatisfaction with the space was so pronounced that when Cinema World took over, it shut down auditorium No. 4 and used only the main three.
Under different managements, the main three auditoriums were numbered differently. Sometimes the former Encore was called Denis 1, and sometimes it was Denis 3 because it was third in size (by then listed as having 240 seats).
CineMagic took over, reopened the fourth auditorium and concentrated more and more on art films (generally moveovers from the Squirrel Hill and Manor in Squirrel Hill).
But the overall Denis continued to deteriorate, with some films shown out of frame and out of focus by employees who complained of poor equipment.
The upscale audience that supports art films became increasingly discontented with the condition of the Denis.
A few movies did do well, including the first run of “Fahrenheit 9/11” and the locally made sleeper “The Bread, My Sweet.”
But attendance worsened steadily until the Denis closed Sept. 12, 2004, with “We Don’t Live Here Any More,” “The Door in the Floor,” “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” and “Maria Full of Grace.”
We can be heartened by the purchase of the theater (see the link above to Barbara Vancheri’s Post-Gazette story) and hope that the proposed $3 million renovation, including significant reconstruction, will turn the Denis into the art house jewel of the South Hills.
The South Hills Theatre opened as a Harris theater with 1,222 seats. (There were far fewer seats once the theater was chopped up into Cinema 4.)
While the nearby Hollywood Theatre on Potomac Avenue for decades had first (South Hills) neighborhood run of films from United Artists, Universal(-International), Warner Bros., Disney and (until 1958) RKO Radio, the South Hills had the first South Hills run of films from MGM, Paramount, Fox and Columbia.
From there, the bigger hits (and a minority of the lesser ones) moved onto the Denis in Mt. Lebanon for a third run.
Business was brisk from the 1940s through the 1960s but began eroding as more of the bigger hits that had played Downtown were booked into the more modernly appointed new theaters such as the Village (now Carmike 10 at South Hills Village, the short-lived Cinemette South and eventually Galleria 6 and Destinta Chartiers.
These newer houses siphoned off so much of the audience that the two Dormont theaters were elbowed into being last-run houses at bargain prices.
In the old days it was not unusual for the South Hills to draw big crowds. I think they even oversold the house on a Friday night in mid-February 1961 when the original “Village of the Damned” (coupled with the tag-on feature “Haunted Strangler”) played to standing room only, with many teenagers sitting in the aisles.
Occasionally the stage was used, as for Saturday morning performances by the Knickerty Knockerty Players, but live performances were rare.
During the mid-1970s the South Hills booked a package of 20 Warner Bros. classics (“Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “Casablanca,” “Marked Woman,” etc.) and ran them back-to-back, four per weekend from midnight to about 8 a.m. on Fridays and possibly Saturday nights, too.
After the South Hills was purchased by Jim Baker, assisted by Bob Stone, the theater tried occasional live bookings, as for the River City Brass Band and for a musical revue featuring district native Karen Prunczik, who had been in Broadway’s “42nd Street.”
Baker even spoke of alleviating the notorious parking problem in Dormont by busing people from neighborhood lots such as the one at Keystone Oaks High School. The plan apparently never materialized or, if at all, only for special performances.
Mode Art Pictures, which may or may not have been affiliated with Baker, was based in the theater while he was the owner.
When “Out of Africa” opened in late 1985 or early 1986, Universal was feuding with one of the local theater circuits, and so Baker’s South Hills, which had been playing late-run films, snapped up the future Oscar-winning Best Picture for a first-run engagement. To the chagrin of purists, Baker inserted an intermission where none was intended.
Eventually the theater was purchased by veteran exhibitor Mike Cardone, who turned it into a quad called Cinema 4 with a new, trimmer marquee.
Cardone sold the quad in 2000 to Key 15 Productions to be run by a young local couple who had no experience in moviehouse management.
A problem involving one of the four small auditoriums led to one of the four being closed almost immediately, never to be used for movies again. The other three screens closed abruptly in 2001. The final three attractions – “Blow,” “Along Came a Spider” and “Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles” – lingering on the marquee for years afterward.
Many of us would love to see the South Hills – and it will always be the South Hills to most of us – rehabilitated.
But, like the Hollywood a few blocks away, it was defeated by a number of factors. Dormont is still a nice community, but moviegoers here must rely on street parking, in some cases with meters.
But the bigger problem is that when neighborhood theaters were constructed during the first 60-70 years of the 20th Century, they were designed (a.) to serve an audience within walking distance or convenient public transportation, and (b.) a very significant portion of the movie audience waited until films had played first run Downtown and then filtered through a pecking order of second, third and fourth runs at lower prices at handy neighborhood houses, generally on bargain double bills.
When a dollar was a dollar and a quarter was a quarter, teenagers and children routinely waited a few weeks until they could see films at affordable prices.
Today, full-price muiltiplexes/megaplexes around the world cater to a free-spending young audience that not only “must” see heavily hyped movies the first weekend but even the first day. Truly, it’s a different world.
Ane because we have so many screens playing first-run films for so long, there’s no blood left in the turnip by the time it’s available for showing at second-run theaters. (As of this moment, the Maxi-Saver in West Mifflin is the last surviving bargain house in the Greater Pittsburgh area, and it’s grosses are terrible. It can’t keep going indefinitely.)
And so, for all of the integrity and good intentions in reopening theaters such as the South Hills and the Hollywood, they face a nearly insurmountable challenge in drawing an audience regularly. Collectively, we pay fervent lip service to supporting such theaters; in practice, when we go to moviehouses, we go to big sterile complexes while a film’s buzz is hot.
Our ideals and our habits get out of sync.
For a while in the early 1980s, La Cresta restaurant occupied the site.
The theater’s capacity turned up as 492 in one source. There’s perhaps a 50-50 chance the larger capacity is correct given the space’s uses since then.
Hi, Lost Memory. The International Movie DataBase corroborates the premiere dates you list.
Whether or not “Never Wave at a Wac” really premiered somewhere in January 1952, I can’t say. That might have been a failed test engagement. Remember, RKO Radio, which distributed it, routinely held movies back for years including “The Outlaw,” “Double Dynamite” and “Jet Pilot.”
In any event, “Wac” made its Pittsburgh debut at the Stanley in March 1953, three weeks before “Redhead From Woming” opened on the top half of a double bill at the Fulton.
Their pairing at the Embassy probably happened in April 1953.