Ventnor Square Theatre
5211 Ventnor Avenue,
Ventnor City,
NJ
08406
5211 Ventnor Avenue,
Ventnor City,
NJ
08406
5 people
favorited this theater
Showing 26 - 50 of 67 comments
the franks allow the theater to sit, it closed down after the summer of 04, i remember seeing bewitched after a hockey tournament in atlantic city
i drove past a week or 2 ago and its boarded up. not a bad area to have a summer run movie house that works outside the box from the regular summer shows
Please let me know what the current status of the theater is. If it’s facing demolition, I have an idea that’s truly “outside of the box.”
I think that would have been the Ventnor Plaza shopping center on Wellington Avenue—don’t remember what the theaters were called.
There’s only one theater listed in Ventnor, but I saw a few movies in the late seventies at a shopping mall twin cinema there. If you took the Black Horse Pike and turned right before crossing the bridge, just after the Two Guys store, there was a shopping center about two miles down the road. I think there was a Jamesway there. I saw Airplane, Oh God, and maybe three other films there. No idea if the movie theaters are still there.
whats the story with this theater now, is there any hope at all in lighting up the projector any time soon
Any news from the article posted here on CT Aug 15, about this place being saved or demolished? It would be a shame to see this or the Beach 4 in Cape May destroyed. I remember in my youth when theatres dotted the shore from Long Branch to Cape May. Now you could probably count on 2 hands the remaining buildings, and this one in Ventnor is a nice place. I was there many years ago.
In the hallway, behind the projectoion booth, must have been some kind of ushers changing room. The wall is signed with names & dates from the eary ‘50s. I was supposed to paint that wall, but didn’t have the heart to cover up history. I even found vintage candy wrappers that the ushers stuck in the nooks & crannies. That was in the '70s.
The last thing I did at the end of each shift, was to make sure that the men’s room was empty on the way down from the booth. The manager was I.“Scotty” Carton, a local barber. The managers office was down by the stage on the left.
I found a Mickey Mouse “Buy War Bonds” poster back stage. I gave it to Mrs. Barbera Frank about a year before she died at the young age of 44.
We were discussing sensuround on another board, & I posted this, as it pretains to the Ventnor. Some of it is redundent.
“Yes, the Ventnor also had the large speaker
bins just below the foot lights, in front of the stage.
In ‘75, we had “Earthquake”, in '76, it was “Midway”, & in '77 We
ran, “Rollercoaster”. We had a theatre in Atlantic City called the
Charles, that ran “Battle Star Galattica” in SensurounD back in 1978.
Another thing about the Ventnor Theatre. It became my booth in the
spring of 1973. The theatre was as it was circa 1935, only run down.
The projectors were older Super Simplex (with crank holes), the sound
heads were Western Electric 208 B’s. They had a gate, instead of a
sound drum. There was a large flywheel & motor on the back. We had
all Western Electric/erpi tube sound. Both machines were equipted
with Sentry Safty Shutters. It was like an extra douser that would
drop down if the film broke. The arc lamps were Peerless Magnarc
model E’s. Two Hertner Generators occupied the ajacent room.
The next year we got remodeled with the equipment from the Rialto in
Pleasentville, NJ. We got a newer pair of Super’s, RCA Phot Phone
sound head. The old 5 point pedestals were replaced with Motioghraph
bases. They covered the tapastry walls with sound fold drapes, & put
in a drop ceiling about 10' lower than the ornate gold & rust stained
one.
The problem was that the old ceiling was falling down piece by piece.
The metal mesh that reinfored the concrete was rusting from years of
roof leaks. The sensuround would shake a piece loose now & then. I
mean a big enoungh piece that could kill someone! You didn’t know
where the next chunk was coming from becuse of the beautiful new drop
ceiling. More than once I saw a piece come flying through like a
meteor!
In 1979 the Ventnor got twinned. The generator room wall was removed,
& the projector was moved over. A 5 teir Christe platter was placed
in between. I put on a suit & became a manager/operator. I could now
start the shows by pushing a button down in the box office!"
NOW—1,779.000
has anything new gone on with this theater being picked up, while i was running the stone harbor theater last summer i took a drive to see this joint, and i wish i had the cash to turn this into a revival house down the shore, a hot spot for cinema classics and blockbusters and family films
It’s close to the beach, and Ventnor is a nice town (or used to be, when I was living in that area), but I think 2 mil is a stretch.
Do you lack access to a telephone? I’ve given all the information I have.
NOT LISTED ON THERE SITE
Hello! You can find their website by google. Their number is 609-822-1836. Feel free to email me (you can find it by clicking on my name) and I can directly copy you in the future if you like, with others.
is there A LINK
I’ve heard that it is up for sale by realtor Farley and Ferry.
Here is a 1941 photo:
http://tinyurl.com/28dple
Is William Appenzeller the GM of Towne 16 the same William Appenzeller who worked as a projectionist in the New Brunswick-Edison N.J. area in the late 1990’s ???
Additional thought – when I worked at the Ventnor the Manager was a Mr. Watson (maybe Ed?). Most of the time he sat in the drug store next door having coffee reading etc. One assignment he gave me was doing the movie schedule timing each week and I called it into the paper for publication.
We almost always had a newsreel and cartoon plus other shorts.
At that period of life you could buy a ticket and stay all day…people came in during the middle and stayed until they saw the entire show.
We had a candy machine and one the reheated pop-corn via heat light. The pop-corn came in large brown paper bags we used to load into the top. For $0.10 or $0.15 you got a small bag of pop-corn dispensed at the bottom. We do not think we had soda….
I also was an Usher at the Ventnor during 1954-56. One movie I remember playing was Mister Roberts, another was an Oil Rig film with Dan Duryea among many of the stars. When I set up the marquee there was not enough room and I did not know who he was so I left off his name. Well Atlantic City was then a popular play ground for stars…guess what Mr. Duryea stopped in asked the Manager why his name was missing (he was one of the main stars)…they had me change it ASAP.
Also, the movies ran every day starting at 1:00 pm bit during the summer when we had good weather, we’d run the real with no light to keep the schedule in time…if someone bought a ticket I had to run upstairs to tell the projectionist to turn the carbon on.
However, if we had rain or poor weather, the afternoons would be filled with kids as most summer apartments at that time did not have A/C of even television (if it had TV the reception was poor this was before cable and the nearest signals came from Philadelphia).
John Berezowski did a magnificent job restoring the theater and my wife and I saw many movies there while it was open. It was even less musky then when I worked there in the 50’s. John planed to buy the theater, but had to drop those plans when Ventnor City put forth a redevelopment plan which called for the theater’s demolition. John always said the Commissioners said he was save so he then poured his money and time into the restoration…but when the Commissioners backed a plan calling for its removal poor John just had to pull out and lost a small fortune.
I saw “Earthquake” at the Ventnor, with the Sensurround. What a great movie.
I once lived in one of the four apartments over the Ventnor. In the Summer of 1975 we played “Earthquake” in SensurounD. Everynight, it use to shake the dishes right out of our cupboards!
Listed in the 1951 FDY with 968 seats. Listing is under Atlantic City.
Jul. 7—VENTNOR, N.J.—This could be the nicest movie theater at the Shore.
Or anywhere.
The owner gives you mints as you leave the theater. He smiles at you. He’ll make you coffee and offer to bring it to your seat if the movie is starting. The ushers say thank you.
Once a big movie town, Atlantic City hasn’t had a movie theater in decades. Its down-the-beach neighbors, Ventnor and Margate, saw their local theaters closed and boarded up.
But now there is a movie theater again on Absecon Island — home of Atlantic City, Ventnor, Margate and Longport — courtesy of the man who swept the floors of the old Ventnor Theater before it closed, bought the place, and renovated it into the kind of old-fashioned, big-screen movie palace that is disappearing elsewhere.
He even managed to keep the theater open all winter in this beach town.
And he still sweeps the floors every night.
“This is my line of work — theater repair,” said Thomas John Berezowski, whose reputation as the “nice movie guy” grows every day in this movie-bereft barrier island.
“When I leave here, I’ll sweep the floor here and a lot of other theaters, fixing chairs and drapes, scraping up Jujubes,” he said.
Clearly, Berezowski is bucking the trend. He could have chopped up the spacious 1938 art-deco theater on Ventnor Avenue into four theaters, but he chose to limit it to two 350-seat auditoriums, retaining many of the original architectural details.
“We won’t do it if it doesn’t look right, if it’s not aesthetically correct,” he said. “There are a lot of art-deco treasures hidden in here.”
The lobby still holds the original ticket grinder, and the grand staircases that lead up to second-floor restrooms remain. The auditoriums have art-deco flourishes and fake balconies, originally designed to evoke the grander theaters in adjacent Atlantic City.
But Berezowski also recently put in digital sound and held one of the area’s only midnight screenings on opening day of the new Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones. He has navigated the political intrigue of movie distribution to nail first-run films like Minority Report.
Now, he is even in the planning stages of opening a movie theater in Atlantic City, in the new retail development at the foot of the Atlantic City Expressway to be called the Walk.
“Customers come in constantly and talk about the theaters on the Boardwalk, the balconies, the orchestra pits and the 5-cent matinees,” he said, loading tickets into a dispenser before the start of the afternoon shows.
Atlantic City theaters fell victim to competition from the casinos and the explosion of multiscreen corporate chains that chose the year-round population centers on the mainland.
And even with the enthusiasm and affection audiences feel for older theaters like his, Berezowski explained that doesn’t always translate into “bodies in seats.” Which is why he is not giving up the janitorial side of the business just yet.
Movie-going at the Shore, always a dicey experience for those used to the renovated, state-of-the-art suburban and downtown theaters, has been upgraded somewhat in the last year.
There’s a huge, new Hoyt’s stadium-seating multiplex on the Black Horse Pike near Exit 12 of the Atlantic City Expressway. The recently renovated Tilton 9 in nearby Northfield is screening more independent, art and foreign films and has begun 3 p.m. and midnight weekend showings of old favorites, starting with Raiders of the Lost Ark this weekend.
But in Ocean City, the Hoyt company never bothered to reopen the Morlyn, one of two art-deco movie theaters on the boardwalk, and the Hoyt’s Somers Point theater also has closed.
In Ventnor, though, the movie scene is back, with lines out the door for Wednesday and bad-beach-day matinees, plenty of people within walking distance, and the friendliest staff around. So friendly, in fact, that Harry Tini, 74, volunteers his time just to be around them.
“I work for gratis,” he said. “There’s no better place around. Who else in the world is going to give you mints? They have such gracious people here.”
Customers regularly look for their favorite employees, including Yong Price, 51, a Thai who runs the concession stand, and ushers Mary, 52, and James Howard, 48, who live in the apartment upstairs and are always available to work on a minute’s notice.
“They’ve become real fixtures here,” said Berezowski, himself the main fixture, of course. “Yong is constantly bringing me curry dishes. Harry brings me raviolis.”
Berezowski is always striking up conversations with customers, and he can even talk movies, though he says he’s really more of a movie-theater buff than a movie buff. Still, make a joke about the Woody Allen rule of refusing to go into a movie even a minute late, and Johnny B. — Berezowski’s nickname — will quote the whole scene from Annie Hall.
He is more than just a nice guy, of course. His busy movie-maintenance and janitorial company has a hand in running 21 theaters nationwide, most of them theaters he has helped repair for owners who found themselves with more than they bargained for.
As for the mints and the polite staff, Berezowski says there’s no room on his payroll for ushers who can’t say thank you.
“Usually, when you go to a movie, everyone leaves the theater and you’re lucky if there’s anyone to open the door. We really appreciate when people come to the Ventnor. It’s not just standing there with a mint. It’s thank you from the bottom of our heart, especially if you brought your trash out.”
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA), Jul 07, 2002
Item: 2W60373139590
To the best of my recollection, the Ventnor did not show any roadshow reserved seat feature attractions. I can definitely state that the Embassy Theater (Atlantic City, NJ) showed at least one roadshow reserved seat attraction, “Doctor Zhivago”. I saw it there, in the summer of 1966. It was presented in 70mm, and it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. It’s ashame that all of AC’s movie palaces are gone; they’re just bygone-memories now!