Cinemette took over the Monroeville Jerry Lewis Cinemas and added two screens, making it a quad, all side by side with the screens facing east.
Cinema World bought it as part of the purchase of the Cinemette circuit. Finally, if briefly, Carmike took over and closed it.
It is a Best Buy retailer.
The nearby 10-screen Showcase Cinemas East in Wilkins Township could gross significantly more per screen than Cinemette East and much more frequently scarfed up the pictures that had greater grossing potential.
Cinema 22, in Monroeville Plaza, and the Monroe, at 3813 William Penn Highway – both on Route 22, have merged in my memory. Does anyone remember which had a spiral staircase in the lobby?
After growing to six screens – four stadium auditoriums in the original 1948 structure and two on the opposite side of Pittsburgh Street, the two that were off by themselves closed a year or more ago.
Although it outlasted the nearby six-screen Harmar indoor, the Cheswick faces competition now from the still-newish Cinemark 18 Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills or whatever the unwieldy correct name is.
The theater’s address was 701 Fifth Avenue. Capacity: 647.
In my book, the Chatham was the premiere Pittsburgh moviehouse in which to see a movie – before, then or since.
If you examine Ron Miller’s list of movies to play here, you can see that almost every one is first rate. The big theater circuit in town (Associated, which morphed into Cinemette) seemed to throw the Chatham a really choice bone every three or four months.
If the film did some business, as most did (“Alfie,” “Wait Until Dark,” “Bullitt,” “The Odd Couple,” “Airport,” “The Sting,” et al), the Chatham was set for months with deluxe fare that drew an upscale audience.
When something came up short (“Don’t Drink the Water,” “The Mephisto Waltz,” “Bang the Drum Slowly”), the theater had to scramble until its next gift of an important new film.
Helped by comfortable seats and superb sight lines, something about the communal ambiance of the Chatham allowed all sorts of moods to wash over audiences, from the comedy of “Barefoot in the Park” and “The Odd Couple” to the excitement of the two greatest car chase thrillers, “Bullitt” and “The French Connection,” to the shared shock of the climactic jolt in “Wait Until Dark,” when gasps and shouts invariably erupted, to the sheer euphoria of “That’s Entertainment,” the Chatham was the most purely enjoyable theater to attend.
I always thought of it as the Radio City Music Hall of Pittsburgh in terms of bookings and the classiness of the experience.
For most of the years it was open and owned by Morris Finkel, the Chatham’s manager was George Pappas, a mustached, dapper administrator who ran the theater like a tight ship.
He stood in his open-walled office, arms folded, surveying the audience in the lobby awaiting the next performance, admonishing sternly, and with a voice he projected effortlessly, anyone he caught sneaking a smoke or behaving a wee bit rambunctiously. (It was a different time and, frankly, a better time – sans cell phones and butterfly attention spans.)
At the Chatham there was a distinct sense that someone of military bearing was in charge and was determined to maintain standards. The audience itself was the primary beneficiary.
Given the outstanding bill of fare Pappas had the good fortune to exhibit over the years, I was astonished – no, incredulous – when Pappas admitted late in his career that he never sat down and watched a movie there. Not once, he insisted. He was, I always suspected, too restless, too determindly interactive.
The first hint that times were a-changing was in 1970 when the Chatham played “Airport” for 14 weeks to excellent attendance before Universal decided it wanted to move the blockbuster into the choicest suburban houses.
When “Airport’s” first week at the larger(South Hills) Village Theatre (now redesigned as Carmike 10), which was the 15th week in Pittsburgh, outdrew the biggest of the 14 weeks at the Chatham, it became apparent that suburban sites now had greater value to distributors than even the nicest Downtown theaters.
This would be the best of all possible sites for major art/specialty/independent releases if someone had the cash and the imagination to reopen and run it well.
The Chartiers Theatre on which I found information was also a 600-seater in Crafton but was listed as being at 44 Crafton Avenue. I have some misgivings about the Crafton Avenue address because that would place it in the same block as St. Phillip Catholic Church, which seems to consume all of that block now.
At one address or the other in 1983 I found a company called D&E Accounting.
“Galleria opened about 1989, under the name of Pittsburgh Theatre Corporation,” according to John Harper, who, with wife Cady, owned 50 percent. The other half was owned by mall developer Dick Zappala.
“We sold out interest to Zappala in 1991, I think, and he sold the theater to Jeff Lewine’s Cinema World a couple of years later. Cinema World sold to Carmike in the mid to late 1990s,” Harper added.
The sixplex switched to digital a couple of years ago.
One of the more nicely maintained multiplexes in the district, it splits first-run product with its nearby stablemate, Carmike 10 (a reconstruction of the Village Theatre).
Galleria 6 tends to keep the films of greatest interest to audiences under 12 (cartoon features, for example) and to audiences over 35, including films with older middleage stars and the occasional art-house moveover.
I, too, first noted the theater being at 1862 Centre Avenue, then found that the address listed elsewhere (I think Pittsburgh Press directories) as 1822. It’s hard to verify now.
After the theater was leveled, the general site was used as a surface parking lot, a super market that closed, and later, as Andrew Johnson noted in the Tribune-Review two years ago, a Subway restaurant and Cheap Tobacco & More.
It was the next-to-last functioning moviehouse in the Hill. Only the long-dormant New Granada Theatre stayed open longer and still stands.
I have indications the theater is at 1909 Center (as listed above by Rick Aubrey) and 2009-13 Centre. Can anyone corroborate either? News stories and columns routinely ignore the address.
The structure opened in 1927 as the Pythian Temple of the Knights of Pythias. In the 1930s the building was sold to the owner of a nearby Hill District moviehouse called the Granada. He renamed the temple the New Granada. It had 850 or 920 seats, depending on one’s source.
The film house was owned by Associated Theatres in the 1960s (perhaps earlier, too) and early 1970s, but instead of including it the daily newspaper directory with other Associated theaters, the New Granada’s daily ad was listed alphabetically in the directory of Pittsburgh’s independent neighborhood theaters.
The New Grenada outlasted the Hill’s other longest-standing moviehouse, the Roosevelt at 1822 Centre.
In the New Grenada’s final years, it was open three days a week – not Fridays through Sundays, as you might expect, but Saturdays through Mondays. The owners had found attendance was weak on Fridays but felt they needed a three-day “weekend” for booking movies.
Given that it has been closed, deteriorating inside and out and, sadly, an eyesore for more than three decades (even longer if you consider how it was run into the ground during its last several years of operation), the New Granada has almost surely set the local record as the theater to remain erect the longest without being razed or used for any other commercial purpose.
Better it should linger in limbo than be sacrificed like hundreds of other Pittsburgh moviehouses.
This theater, located just east of the intersection at Craig Street, later was razed and used as a surface parking lot for Giant Eagle super market, which since has closed.
Though capacity is listed as 603 by at least one source, I also found an indication it had just 500.
The theater opened as the Weiland. The name was changed to Centre, mirroring the avenue on which it was located, when the late Jacques Kahn took over management in 1941-42.
I cannot remember the interior at all, but I was lucky enough to get there once in late 1951 or early 1952 for “The Frogman” and “Teresa.”
The theater was known as the Harris from 1911-36 and the Casino from 1936-66. (The Harris name was to be used again Downtown at 113 Sixth Street (earlier called the Alvin and later the Gateway) and then again at 809 Liberty Avenue (the former Art Cinema and the present Harris Theatre).
For decades in Pittsburgh, the Casino was THE burlesque house featuring such strippers as Lili St. Cyr, Irma The Body, Tempest Storm and Blaze Starr, as well as comedians such as Billy “Cheese & Crackers” Hagen.
The site’s official name seemed to become Casino Burlesk.
The theater became progressively more dilapidated. In its later years it used late-run movies to fill out the program, with the live shows probably becoming shorter.
For at least three decades after the Casino was razed, the property was occupied by a surface parking lot.
The property was part of a large block of land purchased by Point Park College in 2006 for development as part of the school’s campus.
There was a separate structure also called the New Carnegie, which apparently was across the street from the New Carnegie listed here. The other one to which I refer had become a grocery store by 1983 after the theater, in its final days, tried porno briefly.
Can anyone confirm that at different times, there were two New Carnegies whose properties apparently faced each other – or would have had they been in business concurrently?
The Louisa Theatre first occupied the site. After the Louisa burned down, the New Carnegie was built. By 1983 it was a state unemployment office. In 2000 the property was sold again.
One source listed the capacity at 1,571. No other details except that 838 Braddock Avenue, the nearest address listed on the county real estate web site, is owned by the Braddock Commons Corp.
One of many Capitol theaters in and around Pittsburgh, this one was in the Beltzhoover section of Pittsburgh.
It may have been called the New Capitol when it opened in 1919 with a reported 750 seats. Later listings indicate it had 650-690 seats and more specifically the 663 mentioned by Rick Aubrey.
The address may have been 120, 124 or 126 Beltzhoover or may have enveloped all of that street frontage.
By 1973 it was a boarded up service station. By 1983 it was Village Pest Control. The property is listed now as being owned by CMN Management LLC.
The theater existed from 1915 (initial capacity possibly 850) through maybe as late as 1964 (776 capacity corroborated). Of the six East Liberty moviehouses that survived into the 1950s, it ranked fifth in the pecking order of when it played movies as they moved through the then-high-earning neighborhood.
Movies began their East Liberty showings at either the Sheridan Square or the Liberty (depending on the distributor) and sometimes the Regent, then moved on into mix ‘n’ match double bills at the Enright, the nearby Shadyside (often concurrently with the Enright) and finally the Cameraphone. (The Triangle got them last.)
The Cameraphone sometimes used the same double bills as the Enright, normally about two weeks later. Usually the bill of fare changed twice a week.
In January 1953 the Cameraphone had the exclusive rerelease of the landmark 1945 exploitation film “Mom and Dad” (1945), an occasion so heavily hyped for its daring content that the booking of the film condemned by the Legion of Decency led to the theater being placed off limits for Catholics for several weeks.
The picture played for 26 days, complete with gender-segregated showings daily and book-selling appearances by the ubiquitous Elliot Forbes, who was portrayed by different actors/lecturers in dozens of theaters around the country concurrently.
The success of the booking and decreasing attendance for late-run movies in the mushrooming TV era led the Cameraphone’s management to try racier fare (“We Want a Child,” “The French Line,” “Bitter Rice,” “Striporama”) with increasing frequency but with none of “Mom and Dad’s” exceptional success.
By 1955 the Cameraphone was trying triple bills of action films.
Advertising vanished from the daily newspapers during most of the theater’s final decade except when it joined the Art Cinema (Downtown) and/or several drive-ins in playing especially adult and softcore sex films.
The theater was razed in the mid-1960s and the property enveloped by the disastrous Penn Circle redevelopment. The specific plot of land once occupied by the Cameraphone became a lawn with benches, a small traffic circle and possibly part of the busway.
The relatively narrow theater was characterized by the fact trains passed by behind its screen wall and by the slightly musty smell of its popcorn and aged carpeting. Theater maintenance was functional at best.
There was a vestibule and a concession area, but minimal separation of the lobby from the auditorium, so that if one entered the theater before an earlier performance had concluded, it was almost impossible not to be aware of what was happening on screen.
The theater may have has as few as 349 seats when it was the Cameraphone. If indeed it grew to 700 seats, one of the renovations may have included taking over an adjacent building.
The theater was a 700-seater with distinctive light fixtures (clusters of little orange lights, if I recall) along the side walls.
Twinned roughly down the middle, it had 417 seats on one side and 390 on the other. Some of the original character was sacrificed, which is always the case nice old houses are halved or quartered.
The Bellevue closed Sept, 2, 2002.
The building is occupied now by something called (I believe) Dollar General.
The (Harris) Beechview Theatre also was known as the Olympic and New Olympic. The structure was used for many years by American Legion Post 740, but by 1983 it was boarded up and advertised as being for sale. The property was sold in 1997 for $200,000 and has a real estate tax value of $238,200. Unsure of its present use.
Millard (nor Miller) and his older brother Ralph Green ran the Guild. Both are deceased.
The theater opened as the Princess, though it’s not clear whether the Green brothers' father owned and operated it from the beginning or whether he took over in 1944, which is apparently when the Princess became the Beacon, named for a nearby street.
Though a late-run neighborhood theater in its pre-Guild days, the Beacon showed an opera version of “Of Mice and Men,” of which the Internet Movie DataBase has no record, in August 1951.
After an extensive renovation that reduced the capacity to 500, the newly rechristened Guild reopened as an art house at Christmas 1954 with the Laurence Harvey version of “Romeo and Juliet,” which lasted seven weeks.
Big hits of the 1950s included “The Green Scarf” (11 weeks), which was a British thriller that has vanished from the planet, “The Sheep Has Five Legs” (eight weeks), “The Ladykillers” (10 weeks), “Lust for Life” (seven weeks before MGM pulled the print), “Wee Geordie” (14), “A Touch of Larceny” (six), “Sons and Lovers” (eight).
The many great films that opened here for shorter runs include “Ugetsu,” “The Killing” and “The Seventh Seal.”
In 1960 the theater brought in the Melina Mercouri blockbuster “Never on Sunday,” which broke house records in its 21-week run. “Tunes of Glory” lasted nine weeks, a subrun of “La Dolce Vita” held on for seven and “Only Two Can Play” for eight.
Mercouri returned in “Phaedra” stayed for 26 or 28 weeks in 1962-63, though reportedly taking in less than “Never on Sunday.”
Cut to 1968. When the French lesbian drama “Therese and Isabelle” opened on a Wednesday in 1968, it was targeted for a raid by the Pittsburgh district attorney. (Note: I cannot account for the date July 19, 1969, that was typed into a legal document shown above and other dates in that document. My time frame is easily verified by microfilm.)
I happened to be working an evening shift that week at The Pittsburgh Press when the call came in from the DA’s office that a raid was to take place during a mid-evening (the 8 p.m.) Friday performance after a token viewing of the evening’s first (the 6 p.m.) performance by someone sent by the DA
Beyond being annoyed that a somewhat legitimate art film was about to be shut down and that the raid was being rigged in the manner it was, I was quadruply dismayed because the warning to the newspapers was designed to draw calalry-to-the-rescue media coverage and because my working hours that week would not permit me to catch the picture before it was closed down.
The raid took place precisely on cue, and the theater lost its picture. But when “Therese and Isabelle” later was cleared to re-open, lines stretched around the block, and the Guild shattered all house records. The notorious movie burned out after 12 weeks as word crept out that it was leisurely, artsy and much less explicit than expected.
Among the bigger hits that followed were “The Libertine” (eight weeks), “Putney Swope” (13), “What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?” (10), “The Lickerish Quartet” (12) and “I Never Sang for My Father” (eight).
By mid-1972, suffering from competition for bookings from several other newer Pittsburgh art houses and some reported differences with distributors, the Guild launched a new policy of playing double bills of recent commercial hits and, more often, double bills of classics.
Partly because of the Guild’s proximity to the colleges located in Pittsburgh’s Oakland section, the theater began booking combinations of classics and cult favorites, especially the films of Humphrey Bogart, W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, all of whom were enjoying a renewed vogue. Woody Allen’s recent comedies, but not his dramas, fit comfortably into the new agenda. Mel Brooks joined the repertoire, too.
Films dealing with drugs humorously or hysterically (“Yellow Submarine” and “Reefer Madness” being the ultimate examples) or into which an hallucinogenic nature could be read (“Fantasia,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Freaks”) were recycled regularly, too. “Fantasia” returned every few months for years.
The theater closed at the end of 1978 ignominiously with a second-run engagement of “(National Lampoon’s) Animal House,” which was showing in several other theaters the same week.
The theater had exhausted the audience for its cult classics, which had returned so many times they seemed to have worn out their welcome.
Though it would be easy to blame the demise of the Guild, like that of dozens of classic/rep houses across the country in the 1980s, on the advent of home video, which mushroomed in 1982, the theater in fact closed three to four years earlier.
The Guild was missed immediately and since then by those of us who frequented it.
A bonus on any visit was interacting with the Green brothers, who were the sort of mischievous, good-natured “characters” who too soon vanished from the exhibition landscape they once made so colorful.
I don’t recall seeing anything in Deridder, but I thank you, Don and Billy for the information. From another source I learnhed that the third indoor was the Lee and that the drive-in was the Pines.
I seem to recall two of the indoors being on the same side of the street and one of the nicer ones being nearby on the opposite side of a side street.
I remember the Pines repeatedly playing a re-release of the eight-year-old “Thunder Road” as a co-feature or third feature and that the drive-in seemed to infested with mosquitos. The heat and humidity were so high you couldn’t keep the windows closed, and yet when the windows were open, you’d turn into a pin cushion.
This site opened as a Jerry Lewis twin cinema.
Cinemette took over the Monroeville Jerry Lewis Cinemas and added two screens, making it a quad, all side by side with the screens facing east.
Cinema World bought it as part of the purchase of the Cinemette circuit. Finally, if briefly, Carmike took over and closed it.
It is a Best Buy retailer.
The nearby 10-screen Showcase Cinemas East in Wilkins Township could gross significantly more per screen than Cinemette East and much more frequently scarfed up the pictures that had greater grossing potential.
Thanks for that thorough report, Denny.
Cinema 22 had 775 seats.
Cinema 22, in Monroeville Plaza, and the Monroe, at 3813 William Penn Highway – both on Route 22, have merged in my memory. Does anyone remember which had a spiral staircase in the lobby?
After growing to six screens – four stadium auditoriums in the original 1948 structure and two on the opposite side of Pittsburgh Street, the two that were off by themselves closed a year or more ago.
Although it outlasted the nearby six-screen Harmar indoor, the Cheswick faces competition now from the still-newish Cinemark 18 Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills or whatever the unwieldy correct name is.
The theater’s address was 701 Fifth Avenue. Capacity: 647.
In my book, the Chatham was the premiere Pittsburgh moviehouse in which to see a movie – before, then or since.
If you examine Ron Miller’s list of movies to play here, you can see that almost every one is first rate. The big theater circuit in town (Associated, which morphed into Cinemette) seemed to throw the Chatham a really choice bone every three or four months.
If the film did some business, as most did (“Alfie,” “Wait Until Dark,” “Bullitt,” “The Odd Couple,” “Airport,” “The Sting,” et al), the Chatham was set for months with deluxe fare that drew an upscale audience.
When something came up short (“Don’t Drink the Water,” “The Mephisto Waltz,” “Bang the Drum Slowly”), the theater had to scramble until its next gift of an important new film.
Helped by comfortable seats and superb sight lines, something about the communal ambiance of the Chatham allowed all sorts of moods to wash over audiences, from the comedy of “Barefoot in the Park” and “The Odd Couple” to the excitement of the two greatest car chase thrillers, “Bullitt” and “The French Connection,” to the shared shock of the climactic jolt in “Wait Until Dark,” when gasps and shouts invariably erupted, to the sheer euphoria of “That’s Entertainment,” the Chatham was the most purely enjoyable theater to attend.
I always thought of it as the Radio City Music Hall of Pittsburgh in terms of bookings and the classiness of the experience.
For most of the years it was open and owned by Morris Finkel, the Chatham’s manager was George Pappas, a mustached, dapper administrator who ran the theater like a tight ship.
He stood in his open-walled office, arms folded, surveying the audience in the lobby awaiting the next performance, admonishing sternly, and with a voice he projected effortlessly, anyone he caught sneaking a smoke or behaving a wee bit rambunctiously. (It was a different time and, frankly, a better time – sans cell phones and butterfly attention spans.)
At the Chatham there was a distinct sense that someone of military bearing was in charge and was determined to maintain standards. The audience itself was the primary beneficiary.
Given the outstanding bill of fare Pappas had the good fortune to exhibit over the years, I was astonished – no, incredulous – when Pappas admitted late in his career that he never sat down and watched a movie there. Not once, he insisted. He was, I always suspected, too restless, too determindly interactive.
The first hint that times were a-changing was in 1970 when the Chatham played “Airport” for 14 weeks to excellent attendance before Universal decided it wanted to move the blockbuster into the choicest suburban houses.
When “Airport’s” first week at the larger(South Hills) Village Theatre (now redesigned as Carmike 10), which was the 15th week in Pittsburgh, outdrew the biggest of the 14 weeks at the Chatham, it became apparent that suburban sites now had greater value to distributors than even the nicest Downtown theaters.
This would be the best of all possible sites for major art/specialty/independent releases if someone had the cash and the imagination to reopen and run it well.
The Chartiers Theatre on which I found information was also a 600-seater in Crafton but was listed as being at 44 Crafton Avenue. I have some misgivings about the Crafton Avenue address because that would place it in the same block as St. Phillip Catholic Church, which seems to consume all of that block now.
At one address or the other in 1983 I found a company called D&E Accounting.
“Galleria opened about 1989, under the name of Pittsburgh Theatre Corporation,” according to John Harper, who, with wife Cady, owned 50 percent. The other half was owned by mall developer Dick Zappala.
“We sold out interest to Zappala in 1991, I think, and he sold the theater to Jeff Lewine’s Cinema World a couple of years later. Cinema World sold to Carmike in the mid to late 1990s,” Harper added.
The sixplex switched to digital a couple of years ago.
One of the more nicely maintained multiplexes in the district, it splits first-run product with its nearby stablemate, Carmike 10 (a reconstruction of the Village Theatre).
Galleria 6 tends to keep the films of greatest interest to audiences under 12 (cartoon features, for example) and to audiences over 35, including films with older middleage stars and the occasional art-house moveover.
Can’t enlarge the photos on Page 7, LM. No Acrobat Reader on my computer, probably. Sorry.
I, too, first noted the theater being at 1862 Centre Avenue, then found that the address listed elsewhere (I think Pittsburgh Press directories) as 1822. It’s hard to verify now.
After the theater was leveled, the general site was used as a surface parking lot, a super market that closed, and later, as Andrew Johnson noted in the Tribune-Review two years ago, a Subway restaurant and Cheap Tobacco & More.
It was the next-to-last functioning moviehouse in the Hill. Only the long-dormant New Granada Theatre stayed open longer and still stands.
I have indications the theater is at 1909 Center (as listed above by Rick Aubrey) and 2009-13 Centre. Can anyone corroborate either? News stories and columns routinely ignore the address.
The structure opened in 1927 as the Pythian Temple of the Knights of Pythias. In the 1930s the building was sold to the owner of a nearby Hill District moviehouse called the Granada. He renamed the temple the New Granada. It had 850 or 920 seats, depending on one’s source.
The film house was owned by Associated Theatres in the 1960s (perhaps earlier, too) and early 1970s, but instead of including it the daily newspaper directory with other Associated theaters, the New Granada’s daily ad was listed alphabetically in the directory of Pittsburgh’s independent neighborhood theaters.
The New Grenada outlasted the Hill’s other longest-standing moviehouse, the Roosevelt at 1822 Centre.
In the New Grenada’s final years, it was open three days a week – not Fridays through Sundays, as you might expect, but Saturdays through Mondays. The owners had found attendance was weak on Fridays but felt they needed a three-day “weekend” for booking movies.
Given that it has been closed, deteriorating inside and out and, sadly, an eyesore for more than three decades (even longer if you consider how it was run into the ground during its last several years of operation), the New Granada has almost surely set the local record as the theater to remain erect the longest without being razed or used for any other commercial purpose.
Better it should linger in limbo than be sacrificed like hundreds of other Pittsburgh moviehouses.
This theater, located just east of the intersection at Craig Street, later was razed and used as a surface parking lot for Giant Eagle super market, which since has closed.
Though capacity is listed as 603 by at least one source, I also found an indication it had just 500.
The theater opened as the Weiland. The name was changed to Centre, mirroring the avenue on which it was located, when the late Jacques Kahn took over management in 1941-42.
I cannot remember the interior at all, but I was lucky enough to get there once in late 1951 or early 1952 for “The Frogman” and “Teresa.”
The theater was known as the Harris from 1911-36 and the Casino from 1936-66. (The Harris name was to be used again Downtown at 113 Sixth Street (earlier called the Alvin and later the Gateway) and then again at 809 Liberty Avenue (the former Art Cinema and the present Harris Theatre).
For decades in Pittsburgh, the Casino was THE burlesque house featuring such strippers as Lili St. Cyr, Irma The Body, Tempest Storm and Blaze Starr, as well as comedians such as Billy “Cheese & Crackers” Hagen.
The site’s official name seemed to become Casino Burlesk.
The theater became progressively more dilapidated. In its later years it used late-run movies to fill out the program, with the live shows probably becoming shorter.
For at least three decades after the Casino was razed, the property was occupied by a surface parking lot.
The property was part of a large block of land purchased by Point Park College in 2006 for development as part of the school’s campus.
One of the drive-ins nearest to Downtown Pittsburgh.
There was a separate structure also called the New Carnegie, which apparently was across the street from the New Carnegie listed here. The other one to which I refer had become a grocery store by 1983 after the theater, in its final days, tried porno briefly.
Can anyone confirm that at different times, there were two New Carnegies whose properties apparently faced each other – or would have had they been in business concurrently?
The Louisa Theatre first occupied the site. After the Louisa burned down, the New Carnegie was built. By 1983 it was a state unemployment office. In 2000 the property was sold again.
One source listed the capacity at 1,571. No other details except that 838 Braddock Avenue, the nearest address listed on the county real estate web site, is owned by the Braddock Commons Corp.
One of many Capitol theaters in and around Pittsburgh, this one was in the Beltzhoover section of Pittsburgh.
It may have been called the New Capitol when it opened in 1919 with a reported 750 seats. Later listings indicate it had 650-690 seats and more specifically the 663 mentioned by Rick Aubrey.
The address may have been 120, 124 or 126 Beltzhoover or may have enveloped all of that street frontage.
By 1973 it was a boarded up service station. By 1983 it was Village Pest Control. The property is listed now as being owned by CMN Management LLC.
The theater existed from 1915 (initial capacity possibly 850) through maybe as late as 1964 (776 capacity corroborated). Of the six East Liberty moviehouses that survived into the 1950s, it ranked fifth in the pecking order of when it played movies as they moved through the then-high-earning neighborhood.
Movies began their East Liberty showings at either the Sheridan Square or the Liberty (depending on the distributor) and sometimes the Regent, then moved on into mix ‘n’ match double bills at the Enright, the nearby Shadyside (often concurrently with the Enright) and finally the Cameraphone. (The Triangle got them last.)
The Cameraphone sometimes used the same double bills as the Enright, normally about two weeks later. Usually the bill of fare changed twice a week.
In January 1953 the Cameraphone had the exclusive rerelease of the landmark 1945 exploitation film “Mom and Dad” (1945), an occasion so heavily hyped for its daring content that the booking of the film condemned by the Legion of Decency led to the theater being placed off limits for Catholics for several weeks.
The picture played for 26 days, complete with gender-segregated showings daily and book-selling appearances by the ubiquitous Elliot Forbes, who was portrayed by different actors/lecturers in dozens of theaters around the country concurrently.
The success of the booking and decreasing attendance for late-run movies in the mushrooming TV era led the Cameraphone’s management to try racier fare (“We Want a Child,” “The French Line,” “Bitter Rice,” “Striporama”) with increasing frequency but with none of “Mom and Dad’s” exceptional success.
By 1955 the Cameraphone was trying triple bills of action films.
Advertising vanished from the daily newspapers during most of the theater’s final decade except when it joined the Art Cinema (Downtown) and/or several drive-ins in playing especially adult and softcore sex films.
The theater was razed in the mid-1960s and the property enveloped by the disastrous Penn Circle redevelopment. The specific plot of land once occupied by the Cameraphone became a lawn with benches, a small traffic circle and possibly part of the busway.
The relatively narrow theater was characterized by the fact trains passed by behind its screen wall and by the slightly musty smell of its popcorn and aged carpeting. Theater maintenance was functional at best.
There was a vestibule and a concession area, but minimal separation of the lobby from the auditorium, so that if one entered the theater before an earlier performance had concluded, it was almost impossible not to be aware of what was happening on screen.
The theater may have has as few as 349 seats when it was the Cameraphone. If indeed it grew to 700 seats, one of the renovations may have included taking over an adjacent building.
The theater was a 700-seater with distinctive light fixtures (clusters of little orange lights, if I recall) along the side walls.
Twinned roughly down the middle, it had 417 seats on one side and 390 on the other. Some of the original character was sacrificed, which is always the case nice old houses are halved or quartered.
The Bellevue closed Sept, 2, 2002.
The building is occupied now by something called (I believe) Dollar General.
Thanks, Ken. I always appreciated that the restaurant’s owners retained a suggestion of the old marquee.
The (Harris) Beechview Theatre also was known as the Olympic and New Olympic. The structure was used for many years by American Legion Post 740, but by 1983 it was boarded up and advertised as being for sale. The property was sold in 1997 for $200,000 and has a real estate tax value of $238,200. Unsure of its present use.
By 1983 the property was occupied by a shoe store and a jewelry store.
Millard (nor Miller) and his older brother Ralph Green ran the Guild. Both are deceased.
The theater opened as the Princess, though it’s not clear whether the Green brothers' father owned and operated it from the beginning or whether he took over in 1944, which is apparently when the Princess became the Beacon, named for a nearby street.
Though a late-run neighborhood theater in its pre-Guild days, the Beacon showed an opera version of “Of Mice and Men,” of which the Internet Movie DataBase has no record, in August 1951.
After an extensive renovation that reduced the capacity to 500, the newly rechristened Guild reopened as an art house at Christmas 1954 with the Laurence Harvey version of “Romeo and Juliet,” which lasted seven weeks.
Big hits of the 1950s included “The Green Scarf” (11 weeks), which was a British thriller that has vanished from the planet, “The Sheep Has Five Legs” (eight weeks), “The Ladykillers” (10 weeks), “Lust for Life” (seven weeks before MGM pulled the print), “Wee Geordie” (14), “A Touch of Larceny” (six), “Sons and Lovers” (eight).
The many great films that opened here for shorter runs include “Ugetsu,” “The Killing” and “The Seventh Seal.”
In 1960 the theater brought in the Melina Mercouri blockbuster “Never on Sunday,” which broke house records in its 21-week run. “Tunes of Glory” lasted nine weeks, a subrun of “La Dolce Vita” held on for seven and “Only Two Can Play” for eight.
Mercouri returned in “Phaedra” stayed for 26 or 28 weeks in 1962-63, though reportedly taking in less than “Never on Sunday.”
Cut to 1968. When the French lesbian drama “Therese and Isabelle” opened on a Wednesday in 1968, it was targeted for a raid by the Pittsburgh district attorney. (Note: I cannot account for the date July 19, 1969, that was typed into a legal document shown above and other dates in that document. My time frame is easily verified by microfilm.)
I happened to be working an evening shift that week at The Pittsburgh Press when the call came in from the DA’s office that a raid was to take place during a mid-evening (the 8 p.m.) Friday performance after a token viewing of the evening’s first (the 6 p.m.) performance by someone sent by the DA
Beyond being annoyed that a somewhat legitimate art film was about to be shut down and that the raid was being rigged in the manner it was, I was quadruply dismayed because the warning to the newspapers was designed to draw calalry-to-the-rescue media coverage and because my working hours that week would not permit me to catch the picture before it was closed down.
The raid took place precisely on cue, and the theater lost its picture. But when “Therese and Isabelle” later was cleared to re-open, lines stretched around the block, and the Guild shattered all house records. The notorious movie burned out after 12 weeks as word crept out that it was leisurely, artsy and much less explicit than expected.
Among the bigger hits that followed were “The Libertine” (eight weeks), “Putney Swope” (13), “What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?” (10), “The Lickerish Quartet” (12) and “I Never Sang for My Father” (eight).
By mid-1972, suffering from competition for bookings from several other newer Pittsburgh art houses and some reported differences with distributors, the Guild launched a new policy of playing double bills of recent commercial hits and, more often, double bills of classics.
Partly because of the Guild’s proximity to the colleges located in Pittsburgh’s Oakland section, the theater began booking combinations of classics and cult favorites, especially the films of Humphrey Bogart, W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, all of whom were enjoying a renewed vogue. Woody Allen’s recent comedies, but not his dramas, fit comfortably into the new agenda. Mel Brooks joined the repertoire, too.
Films dealing with drugs humorously or hysterically (“Yellow Submarine” and “Reefer Madness” being the ultimate examples) or into which an hallucinogenic nature could be read (“Fantasia,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Freaks”) were recycled regularly, too. “Fantasia” returned every few months for years.
The theater closed at the end of 1978 ignominiously with a second-run engagement of “(National Lampoon’s) Animal House,” which was showing in several other theaters the same week.
The theater had exhausted the audience for its cult classics, which had returned so many times they seemed to have worn out their welcome.
Though it would be easy to blame the demise of the Guild, like that of dozens of classic/rep houses across the country in the 1980s, on the advent of home video, which mushroomed in 1982, the theater in fact closed three to four years earlier.
The Guild was missed immediately and since then by those of us who frequented it.
A bonus on any visit was interacting with the Green brothers, who were the sort of mischievous, good-natured “characters” who too soon vanished from the exhibition landscape they once made so colorful.
I don’t recall seeing anything in Deridder, but I thank you, Don and Billy for the information. From another source I learnhed that the third indoor was the Lee and that the drive-in was the Pines.
I seem to recall two of the indoors being on the same side of the street and one of the nicer ones being nearby on the opposite side of a side street.
I remember the Pines repeatedly playing a re-release of the eight-year-old “Thunder Road” as a co-feature or third feature and that the drive-in seemed to infested with mosquitos. The heat and humidity were so high you couldn’t keep the windows closed, and yet when the windows were open, you’d turn into a pin cushion.
Had no problems at any of the indoors.