Point Theatre
2665 Main Street,
Whitney Point,
NY
13862
2665 Main Street,
Whitney Point,
NY
13862
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Showing 26 - 42 of 42 comments
Wow, great to see the new research on the theater. I had come to suspect pretty strongly that the Point was in the village hall building, but it struck me as odd no mention was made of its former use…which indicates it had been closed for some time by ‘67 (which was incidentally the year the theater closed in Greene, which was the last of the small town ones in the area).
One thing we can be fairly sure of is that the Point was in the space formerly occupied by the Opera House built in 1899. The Crescent’s being open in the ‘20s (when we have contemporaneous accounts of “two opera houses”), and closed in the early '30s dovetails with it having been the Point, since we have the article specifically stating Byron Gosh was bringing in sound equipment to open up a talking theater in the village hall in 1934. That makes sense, since all of the silent movie houses in the area pretty much folded by 1930. So the chronology does strongly suggest the Point Theater, the Crescent, and the Whitney Point Opera House are all one and the same.
As for the Tyler-Peoples' situation, since the 1932 combined seating of the two theaters is almost the same as the original seating of the Tyler, could this have been the world’s first twin?
Just kidding.
The above pictured building was burned down by an arsonist in 1967, and was a total loss. This was the last theater in Whitney Point. A new fire station was built on the same spot. This new building is where I went to teen dances. The new building being constructed on the same lot has probably added to the confusion of whether the building was still standing. New information on the WP memories group adds there was a balcony, which had an age minimum if you weren’t accompanied by an adult, and there were free standing rocking chairs in the back of the balcony. This may account for some of the pluses and minuses in the seating numbers.
Classmates of mine remember going there as children, so it would have to have been open atleast until 1960. One of my friends remembers seeing Toby Tyler there and it was released in 1960.
Deception, with Bette Davis, and the coming attraction Wake Up and Dream were both released in the latter part of 1946, so the photo most likely dates from 1947. A small town like Whitney Point would not have gotten a movie for anywhere from several weeks to a few months after its release in major markets.
That should read municipal building.
Someone posted a photo to the Whitney Point history group I created on Facebook, so now we have a photo of the last incarnation of the Point theater.This photo also clears up the confusion of whether it was above the firestation, or on the second floor of the town hall. The building was inclusively called the municipsl building. The fire station was on the right, and the town hall was on the left side of the first floor. The Point theater was housed on the entire second floor. I am still trying to pin point the street number and if this was the building that burned down in 1967.
I’ve checked the editions of the Film Daily Yearbook from 1926 to 1962 for theaters in Whitney Point. Keeping in mind that the Yearbooks are not definitive (numerous errors crept into them, some of them repeated year after year) the information still might offer a few clues.
I found theaters with four different names in Whitney Point: the Crescent, the Tyler, the People’s, and the Point. The Point first appears in 1938, and from then on is the only theater listed in the town, though its seating capacity changes a couple of times, and it is not listed at all in some years.
The Point Theatre is listed with 225 seats from 1938 through 1942 (the Yearbook lists theaters operating as of January 1 each year, so the Point probably began operation in 1937.) It is still listed in 1943, but with 250 seats. It is listed in 1944 but with the notation (CL), which means closed. It was open again in 1945 and 1946, but with 260 seats, and then in 1947 was open, but back down to 225 seats.
In 1948 and 1949, Whitney Point is not listed at all, but the Point Theatre reappears in 1950, now with 335 seats. The same obtains in 1951 and 1952, but in 1953 and 1954 Whitney Point vanishes from the listings again. The Point Theatre makes its last appearance in the 1956 Yearbook, and I haven’t found the town listed after that as far as I’ve searched (1962.)
I suspect that the Point Theatre might have been the same house as the Crescent Theatre that was listed as closed, but with 225 seats, in the 1933, 1935, and 1937 Yearbooks, and I suspect that that Crescent Theatre was the former Peoples Theatre that was listed as open with 225 seats in the 1932 Yearbook. The People’s Theatre first appeared in the 1929 Yearbook, but with 300 seats.
Here it gets a bit complicated. In 1932, when the 225-seat People’s Theatre was listed as open, there are also listings for a 390-seat Crescent Theatre (closed) and a 250-seat Tyler Theatre (also closed.) Were there actually three buildings in Whitney Point with theaters in them, or did the Yearbook mistakenly list one of them under two different names? Such mistakes were sometimes made.
A further complication is that, in 1933, The Crescent is listed as closed, but with 225 seats, and the Tyler is listed as closed with 250 seats. And then in 1934 and 1936, Whitney Point is not listed at all. It is not listed in 1930 or 1931, either. I don’t know if the years the town is not listed means that the theaters were all closed and the Yearbook was just saving space by not listing them, or if the town was just overlooked by accident.
In 1926, 1927, and 1928, the Crescent was listed, but without the seating capacity given, and in 1929 it was listed with 500 seats. Meanwhile, the Tyler was listed only in 1926 and 1928, but with 300 seats. Then the People’s Theatre appears with 300 seats in 1929. Did th Tyler change its name to the People’s Theatre in 1929, and the Yearbook mistakenly list it again as a closed house in 1932 and 1933? Perhaps. Did the Crescent move from its former location into the building of the 225-seat People’s Theatre sometime during 1932, but then close before the 1933 Yearbook was put together? Perhaps.
It’s quite a tangle, and most likely it can only be sorted out with research on the ground, meaning in the archives of the local newspaper, or with other local sources such as directories or telephone books. The assortment theater names from the Yearbook should give a good starting point for anyone doing that, though.
I’ve also searched the available trade journals of the period, but have come up empty. Apparently Whitney Point’s theaters were never mentioned in any of them, of if they were then the search applications available to me haven’t found them.
I started a Whitney Point memories group on Facebook and most of them are saying the Point Theater was next to the hardware store and burned down in 1967.
Someone also suggested there is an extensive newspaper clippings archive at the Mary Wilcox Library that may be helpful.
Ad in Cincinnatus newspaper indicates Point Theatre was operating, by that name, no later than March 1940.
Byron Gosh = By Gosh. Heh.
Just when I thought the tale of Whitney Point’s movie theaters couldn’t get any weirder or more confusing. As I was trying to confirm or deny the existence of the Whitney Point Opera House/Point Theater in the town (later village) hall, I just ran across this item from the DeRuyter paper in 1934:
“Byron Gosh, a former circus clown has leased the Whitey Point village hall, and is installing sound equipment for a moving picture theatre.”
So, yes, there was theatre in the village hall…in 1934. But the opera house was still in operation as late in 1936. They can’t be one and the same, then. Can they?
So, to recap, here is what we know about the many theaters in Whitney Point, population 1,000:
I promise I will get to the bottom of all this someday, and when I have a story that makes sense, update it all for cinematreasures!
1899 article in the Press indicates that the opera house was open and operating in the second and third floors of “the public building.” If that refers to the town hall, we may finally have a location for this theater (and it would help explain, if my vague memory of long-ago research is correct, why the village fathers asked the upstart second opera house to close in 1925). A 1905 post card shows the town hall building was indeed three stories high…it just gives no outward indication, other than its dimensions, of being an opera house/theater.
It’s become clear that, in 1924 at least, there were two theaters in Whitney Point. The newer, movie-only one was called “Tyler Theater.” Almost simultaneously in the Press there is mention of a “Crescent Theater” in Whitney Point. That may well have been another name for the opera house/Point Theater — though at this point, who knows.
A November 1931 article from DeRuyter states that “Carl Bird’s movie house in Whitney Point has gone out of business.” No idea where that fits in; it may be a later iteration of the Tyler. For such a small town, Whitney Point seems to have had a lot of theaters. It will probably take someone going through old copies of the Reporter to conclusively sort this all out.
Still researching where this theater was, and another curious data point: an 1898 special pamphlet put out by the Whitney Point Reporter is online and viewable. It appears to have been a bit of boosterism to celebrate the rebuilding of the town after the disastrous 1897 fire. It contains pictures of most of the reconstructed downtown area. What is odd is that there are only two mentions of the opera house, both PRIOR to the fire. There’s no mention of a rebuilt opera house, which one would expect. I don’t recall where I got the 1897 date above, but wherever it was, it appears to be wrong. It seems the opera house rebuilding may have lagged behind the rest of the town, and that may mean it went up on a side street or some other place one would not expect.
The picture is starting to clear about the Point Theater, though where it was is still a mystery.
The Point Theater was very likely a continuation of the Whitney Point Opera House, which was erected in 1897 to replace a previous venue that was lost, along with much of the town, in a fire that year. Newspaper articles make it clear that the opera house survived the great 1935 flood in that over 50 survivors camped there until flood waters went down. About this time a flyer was made for the “Whitney Point Theater.” Concerts were still being given at the opera house the following year, in 1936.
It is still not clear whether the building still exists or not, or whether the opera house and Point Theater were one and the same. But it does now seem clear that the opera house is/was one of the brick buildings built erected downtown after the fire.
Point Theater was still open in April 1959 per Binghamton Press.