I, too, found estimates of the capacity as being both 1,134 and 882.
The theater dates to 1915 and closed in either 1965-66. I got there only a couple of times – once when the Carroll Baker film “Sylvia,” partially shot in Pittsburgh, was doubled with a reissue of “Psycho.”
The last film may have been “Mary Poppins.”
The theater was razed and the property used for a bank’s surface parking lot.
I regret I cannot answer that, Veyoung. I never acquired inside information on screens and do not know what the Nixon did with its screens between movie engagements.
The longtime manager was a great guy named Leo Carlin, who had the build of a pugilist (which, if memory serves, he had been) and who ran a tight ship. Sometime in the 1970s or maybe early 1980s, Mr. Carlin became incapacitated and retreated to his home in – I want to say – Burgettstown.
In the Carlin era, plays opened on Monday nights. They played two performances on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and the theater was closed on Sundays.
As much as I loved seeing each new theater production that played the Nixon, including Forrest Tucker in “The Music Man,” my favorite time for attending the Nixon was during the 34-week run of “West Side Story,” which I saw very regularly there.
My first visit to the Nixon was for the movie “South Pacific,” but my first play there was “Sunrise at Campobello” with Leif Erickson.
The theater existed from 1915-59 and eventually was razed. Although it had a capacity of 575 at one point, I found a second source that indicates just 476 seats.
My records indicatde it opened in 1923 with 1,248 seats.
It was an ordinary neighborhood theater until owner Stanley (“Zundy”) Kramer took great pride in turning it into an art house. Although he once played a series of film classics that included “Good News,” most of the Kramer-Arcade years hosted such independent and foreign films as “I Sent a Letter to My Love,” “The Tin Drum,” “`Breaker' Morant” and “Sandakan 8.”
Jean-Luc Godard made an appearance here for one of his movies.
Zundy Kramer took great pride in the prestige associated with running a local art theater and seemed to distribute as many passes to local dignitaries as he sold tickets.
The fire that destroyed the theater robbed the South Side community of a significant asset.
This theater opened as the Alhambra, then became the Regent and possibly, later, just Cinema. There was a fire in 1970. It was still standing as late as 1983.
This theater at 956 Liberty Avenue, Downtown, opened as the Victoria, probably designed as a legitimate theater, from 1912 to about 1920.
Then it became the Sam Shubert from about 1920 to about 1927, suggesting it was almost certainlyh a legitimate theater during these early decades.
It was the Loew’s Aldine from Sept. 17, 1923, through 1934. The switrch from Shubert to Loew’s strongly suggests a shift from legit to moviehouse.
I cannot account at this time for the period from 1934-39, but in 1939 it became known at Loew’s Senator, but sometime between then and 1950, the John P. Harris circuit purchased the theater and modified the name to the (Harris) Senator.
It played some second-run features, generally in double features, as if it were a neighborhood house, and some minor first-run features, but more often the Senator picked up “moveover” movies directly after the completion of their first-run engagements at the nearby John P. Harris Theatre, the flagship of the Harris circuit.
These moveover attractions included “The Snake Pit,” “Yellow Sky,” “A Letter to Three Wives,” “Come to the Stable,” “Pinky” and “All the King’s Men.”
Meanwhile, Pittsburgh’s primary legitimate theater, the 2,160-seat Nixon at 417 Sixth Avenue (or 413 or 423), which had opened Dec. 7, 1903, closed on April 29, 1950 with Mae West in a revival of her “Diamond Lil.”
To maintain the continuity/identity of major national touring companies in Pittsburgh, the Harris Senator changed its name to the (new) 1,760-seat Nixon Theatre in 1950.
For the next quarter century, it functioned as the primary legitimate Pittsburgh theater for touring shows beginning with “Oklahoma” Sept. 4, 1950. Henry Fonda came in in “Mister Roberts.”
The dozens of other live productions included “Darkness at Noon” with Edward G. Robinson, “Bell, Book and Candle” with Rosalind Russell, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” with Carol Channing, “Call Me Madam” with Elaine Stritch and “Porgy and Bess” with William Warfield, Leontyne Price and Cab Calloway. Plus Bette Davis in “Two’s Company,” Julie Harris in “I Am a Camera,” Helen Hayes in “Mrs. McThing” and many others.
Though an occasional movie slipped in, the Nixon didn’t begin a recurring policy of roadshow films until “Guys and Dolls” open in late January 1956 and stayed 10 weeks. From then on, theater and roadshow movies opened in alternating wavess.
The movie “Oklahoma” played for 24 weeks, “Around the World in 80 Days” for 39, “South Pacific” for 26, soon returning for 10 additional weeks after an interruption for plays, and Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” for nine.
The film of “The Diary of Anne Frank” was booked for the summer of 1959 but inexplicably did disastrous business and was yanked after four weeks and four days.
“Porgy and Bess” played for eight weeks, “Can-Can” for 14, “Spartacus” for 13, “Gone With the Wind” for six, “La Dolce Vita” for 11, “West Side Story” for 34 and “Mutiny on the Bounty” for 16.
“Lawrence of Arabia” had played just four days of its third week when the Nixon suffered a fire. “Lawrence” moved over to the Fulton a couple of weeks later to resume a reserved-seat engagement, but the momentum was lost, and it lasted just seven more weeks.
Stage plays continued to turn up at the Nixon, but more and more the balance of the theater’s schedule was given over to movies.
Oddly, when the theater played regular continuous-performance films such as “The Prize,” “Sunday in New York” and “Kelly’s Heroes,” it under-performed. The Nixon was off the beaten path of ordinary moviehouses and tended not to benefit from impulse ticket purchasing.
“The Fall of the Roman Empire” returned the theater to a roadshow policy but lasted a lean six weeks. “Mary Poppins,” though, did 16 hardy weeks before having to vacate the premises for a run of plays.
“The Sound of Music” then blasted all previous hose records with a 106-week run that was still going gangbusters when the theater switched to another Julie Andrews musical, “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” for 30 weeks, giving Andrews 136 consecutive weeks here.
“Far From the Madding Crowd” limped through eight weeks. After a few months of plays, “Finian’s Rainbow” moved in for seven weeks and “Sweet Charity” for 13.
Many more plays played before “Patton” settled in for 16 weeks.
Aidst a flurry of plays, the Nixon tried a couple of blaxploitation films that died.
The many plays that followed included three engagements of “Godspell” totaling 13 weeks.
The theater’s subscription base for plays, so often interrupted for long stretches of movies, eroded over the years. By 1974-75, subscribers had become wary of an extremely irregular play schedule, with promised productions being canceled and name players backing out of tours. Business was terrible. The shows that came in were small and tacky.
The theater closed in November 1975 and was leveled. It became a surface parking lot.
One distinctive feature of the exterior had been a marquee that stretched over an alleyway adjacent to the theater.
Yes, understood, Warren. Thank you. I typed my earlier comment too hastily and wasn’t as clear as I might have been. But it was based on the fact I’d discovered that “Pandora” had opened at the Normandie.
I love all those interior and exterior shots and the ads that contain plenty of detail – but especially those that show surrounding ads to we can see again which pictures were running concurrently. We had MOVIES then.
It was interesting to me to learn a few days ago that when “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” opened in New York, MGM premiered it in a new art house, several blocks from the heart of Broadway. In my hometown of Pittsburgh it went into Loew’s Penn (now called Heinz Hall), a 3300-seater that was MGM’s main outlet in Western Pennsylvania.
Thanks, Warren. Never saw that marquee before. I love the old ones, with the individually-placed letters. I was always intrigued when moviehouses outside New York used the names of actors who weren’t necessarily the top-billed ones, violating the contractual billing, so to speak, to favor a hometown actor, a singer who was at a local nightclub, etc.
But I did like the Broadway Theatre’s script-like marquee from the 1980s and 1990s.
Of all the Manhattan moviehouses I never got to visit, this is the one I most mind having missed. When I accompanied my folks to New York starting in 1955, we always went to whatever was playing at Radio City Music Hall, starting with “Mr. Roberts.” But despite the awareness that the Roxy was nearby, we somehow never got there. Damn!
What a kick it was to see big pictures here such as “Star” and “The Sand Pebbles.” Sorry my regular NYC access had not begun early enough to catch “West Side Story” here.
Best rep/classics house in New York ever, right? The hours I spent in here watching irresistible double bills programmed by Frank Rowley. Just receiving those schedules in the mail meant everything stopped while I read them, both sides, top to bottom. What great festivals!
Am I the only one who, a short time later, cannot remember which movies he saw here versus which ones he saw across the street? The experiences all runs together when you’re in soulless multiplexes and megaplexes.
Do I remember correctly that Frank Sinatra appeared here during the engagement of his “Johnny Concho”? He (oddly enough) co-produced this minor western, which he later dissed on the TV special “Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back."
I saw "Johnny Concho” at the Paramount and vaguely recall Sinatra making a live appearance.
Also caught “The Carpetbaggers” here on a mobbed Saturday night in the summer of 1964.
These were comfortable subterranean theaters, but anyone could tell they were doomed. They were buried, without sufficient signage, in the bowels of the building. I never saw a movie in there that wasn’t close to being a private screening.
First visited here for “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” When I saw “Love Story” for the first time here, I think I went in with a bit of an “OK, show me” attitude. Gotta admit: It got to me.
It was a dump, but I sure enjoyed reading and saving the schedules of the film classics and studying the combinations in which they were booked. I remember seeing “Salo” here. It seemed to appear regularly.
I, too, found estimates of the capacity as being both 1,134 and 882.
The theater dates to 1915 and closed in either 1965-66. I got there only a couple of times – once when the Carroll Baker film “Sylvia,” partially shot in Pittsburgh, was doubled with a reissue of “Psycho.”
The last film may have been “Mary Poppins.”
The theater was razed and the property used for a bank’s surface parking lot.
I regret I cannot answer that, Veyoung. I never acquired inside information on screens and do not know what the Nixon did with its screens between movie engagements.
The longtime manager was a great guy named Leo Carlin, who had the build of a pugilist (which, if memory serves, he had been) and who ran a tight ship. Sometime in the 1970s or maybe early 1980s, Mr. Carlin became incapacitated and retreated to his home in – I want to say – Burgettstown.
In the Carlin era, plays opened on Monday nights. They played two performances on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and the theater was closed on Sundays.
As much as I loved seeing each new theater production that played the Nixon, including Forrest Tucker in “The Music Man,” my favorite time for attending the Nixon was during the 34-week run of “West Side Story,” which I saw very regularly there.
My first visit to the Nixon was for the movie “South Pacific,” but my first play there was “Sunrise at Campobello” with Leif Erickson.
The theater existed from 1915-59 and eventually was razed. Although it had a capacity of 575 at one point, I found a second source that indicates just 476 seats.
The Arcade was at 1915 East Carson Street.
My records indicatde it opened in 1923 with 1,248 seats.
It was an ordinary neighborhood theater until owner Stanley (“Zundy”) Kramer took great pride in turning it into an art house. Although he once played a series of film classics that included “Good News,” most of the Kramer-Arcade years hosted such independent and foreign films as “I Sent a Letter to My Love,” “The Tin Drum,” “`Breaker' Morant” and “Sandakan 8.”
Jean-Luc Godard made an appearance here for one of his movies.
Zundy Kramer took great pride in the prestige associated with running a local art theater and seemed to distribute as many passes to local dignitaries as he sold tickets.
The fire that destroyed the theater robbed the South Side community of a significant asset.
This theater opened as the Alhambra, then became the Regent and possibly, later, just Cinema. There was a fire in 1970. It was still standing as late as 1983.
This theater at 956 Liberty Avenue, Downtown, opened as the Victoria, probably designed as a legitimate theater, from 1912 to about 1920.
Then it became the Sam Shubert from about 1920 to about 1927, suggesting it was almost certainlyh a legitimate theater during these early decades.
It was the Loew’s Aldine from Sept. 17, 1923, through 1934. The switrch from Shubert to Loew’s strongly suggests a shift from legit to moviehouse.
I cannot account at this time for the period from 1934-39, but in 1939 it became known at Loew’s Senator, but sometime between then and 1950, the John P. Harris circuit purchased the theater and modified the name to the (Harris) Senator.
It played some second-run features, generally in double features, as if it were a neighborhood house, and some minor first-run features, but more often the Senator picked up “moveover” movies directly after the completion of their first-run engagements at the nearby John P. Harris Theatre, the flagship of the Harris circuit.
These moveover attractions included “The Snake Pit,” “Yellow Sky,” “A Letter to Three Wives,” “Come to the Stable,” “Pinky” and “All the King’s Men.”
Meanwhile, Pittsburgh’s primary legitimate theater, the 2,160-seat Nixon at 417 Sixth Avenue (or 413 or 423), which had opened Dec. 7, 1903, closed on April 29, 1950 with Mae West in a revival of her “Diamond Lil.”
To maintain the continuity/identity of major national touring companies in Pittsburgh, the Harris Senator changed its name to the (new) 1,760-seat Nixon Theatre in 1950.
For the next quarter century, it functioned as the primary legitimate Pittsburgh theater for touring shows beginning with “Oklahoma” Sept. 4, 1950. Henry Fonda came in in “Mister Roberts.”
The dozens of other live productions included “Darkness at Noon” with Edward G. Robinson, “Bell, Book and Candle” with Rosalind Russell, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” with Carol Channing, “Call Me Madam” with Elaine Stritch and “Porgy and Bess” with William Warfield, Leontyne Price and Cab Calloway. Plus Bette Davis in “Two’s Company,” Julie Harris in “I Am a Camera,” Helen Hayes in “Mrs. McThing” and many others.
Though an occasional movie slipped in, the Nixon didn’t begin a recurring policy of roadshow films until “Guys and Dolls” open in late January 1956 and stayed 10 weeks. From then on, theater and roadshow movies opened in alternating wavess.
The movie “Oklahoma” played for 24 weeks, “Around the World in 80 Days” for 39, “South Pacific” for 26, soon returning for 10 additional weeks after an interruption for plays, and Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” for nine.
The film of “The Diary of Anne Frank” was booked for the summer of 1959 but inexplicably did disastrous business and was yanked after four weeks and four days.
“Porgy and Bess” played for eight weeks, “Can-Can” for 14, “Spartacus” for 13, “Gone With the Wind” for six, “La Dolce Vita” for 11, “West Side Story” for 34 and “Mutiny on the Bounty” for 16.
“Lawrence of Arabia” had played just four days of its third week when the Nixon suffered a fire. “Lawrence” moved over to the Fulton a couple of weeks later to resume a reserved-seat engagement, but the momentum was lost, and it lasted just seven more weeks.
Stage plays continued to turn up at the Nixon, but more and more the balance of the theater’s schedule was given over to movies.
Oddly, when the theater played regular continuous-performance films such as “The Prize,” “Sunday in New York” and “Kelly’s Heroes,” it under-performed. The Nixon was off the beaten path of ordinary moviehouses and tended not to benefit from impulse ticket purchasing.
“The Fall of the Roman Empire” returned the theater to a roadshow policy but lasted a lean six weeks. “Mary Poppins,” though, did 16 hardy weeks before having to vacate the premises for a run of plays.
“The Sound of Music” then blasted all previous hose records with a 106-week run that was still going gangbusters when the theater switched to another Julie Andrews musical, “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” for 30 weeks, giving Andrews 136 consecutive weeks here.
“Far From the Madding Crowd” limped through eight weeks. After a few months of plays, “Finian’s Rainbow” moved in for seven weeks and “Sweet Charity” for 13.
Many more plays played before “Patton” settled in for 16 weeks.
Aidst a flurry of plays, the Nixon tried a couple of blaxploitation films that died.
The many plays that followed included three engagements of “Godspell” totaling 13 weeks.
The theater’s subscription base for plays, so often interrupted for long stretches of movies, eroded over the years. By 1974-75, subscribers had become wary of an extremely irregular play schedule, with promised productions being canceled and name players backing out of tours. Business was terrible. The shows that came in were small and tacky.
The theater closed in November 1975 and was leveled. It became a surface parking lot.
One distinctive feature of the exterior had been a marquee that stretched over an alleyway adjacent to the theater.
The
Yes, understood, Warren. Thank you. I typed my earlier comment too hastily and wasn’t as clear as I might have been. But it was based on the fact I’d discovered that “Pandora” had opened at the Normandie.
I love all those interior and exterior shots and the ads that contain plenty of detail – but especially those that show surrounding ads to we can see again which pictures were running concurrently. We had MOVIES then.
It was interesting to me to learn a few days ago that when “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” opened in New York, MGM premiered it in a new art house, several blocks from the heart of Broadway. In my hometown of Pittsburgh it went into Loew’s Penn (now called Heinz Hall), a 3300-seater that was MGM’s main outlet in Western Pennsylvania.
Thanks, Warren. Never saw that marquee before. I love the old ones, with the individually-placed letters. I was always intrigued when moviehouses outside New York used the names of actors who weren’t necessarily the top-billed ones, violating the contractual billing, so to speak, to favor a hometown actor, a singer who was at a local nightclub, etc.
But I did like the Broadway Theatre’s script-like marquee from the 1980s and 1990s.
Sorry! Please advise: What is the proper … nomenclature?
Does anyone disagree that this offers the most majestic movie experience (with the possible exception of IMAX) left in New York?
Of all the Manhattan moviehouses I never got to visit, this is the one I most mind having missed. When I accompanied my folks to New York starting in 1955, we always went to whatever was playing at Radio City Music Hall, starting with “Mr. Roberts.” But despite the awareness that the Roxy was nearby, we somehow never got there. Damn!
What a kick it was to see big pictures here such as “Star” and “The Sand Pebbles.” Sorry my regular NYC access had not begun early enough to catch “West Side Story” here.
Best rep/classics house in New York ever, right? The hours I spent in here watching irresistible double bills programmed by Frank Rowley. Just receiving those schedules in the mail meant everything stopped while I read them, both sides, top to bottom. What great festivals!
Am I the only one who, a short time later, cannot remember which movies he saw here versus which ones he saw across the street? The experiences all runs together when you’re in soulless multiplexes and megaplexes.
Do I remember correctly that Frank Sinatra appeared here during the engagement of his “Johnny Concho”? He (oddly enough) co-produced this minor western, which he later dissed on the TV special “Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back."
I saw "Johnny Concho” at the Paramount and vaguely recall Sinatra making a live appearance.
Also caught “The Carpetbaggers” here on a mobbed Saturday night in the summer of 1964.
I know there’s some resentment of the Disneyfication of Times Square, but in truth, we owe thanks for the restorative rescue of this theater.
Having trouble keeping the checkmark box checked for this theater. I’m hoping that by adding once more to the blog, that’ll do the trick.
These were comfortable subterranean theaters, but anyone could tell they were doomed. They were buried, without sufficient signage, in the bowels of the building. I never saw a movie in there that wasn’t close to being a private screening.
First visited here for “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” When I saw “Love Story” for the first time here, I think I went in with a bit of an “OK, show me” attitude. Gotta admit: It got to me.
Saw “Little Big Man” and the long-awaited return of “The Manchurian Candidate” here.
Nice theater, as I recall, but the bookings could be eclectic.
Is this theater doing any business?
It’s a little surprising that a threeplex, however good the location, can survive against neighborhood competition.
It was a dump, but I sure enjoyed reading and saving the schedules of the film classics and studying the combinations in which they were booked. I remember seeing “Salo” here. It seemed to appear regularly.