Two sources, a list of theaters in the 1915 St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press Almanac and Yearbook and a list in Dave Kenney’s book Twin Cities Picture Show: A Century of Moviegoing both give the address of this Gem Theatre (the second of three St.Paul houses to use the name) as 18 E. Seventh Street. The Penny Parlor/Alhambra/Cameo Theatre was at 16 E. Seventh and the Blue Mouse Theatre was at 20 E. Seventh. This photo, looking east along 7th Street toward Cedar Street, probably in the late 1910s, shows the three adjacent theaters, with the Gem in the middle.
Given a choice between a directory published by the local newspaper and the listings in the FDY I’d usually go with the local directory, but in this case, as we have only the 1915 directory available, it remains possible that the Elk Theatre opened in a storefront at 392 Selby and then moved to a new location across the street after that directory was published.
As the Beaux Arts operated into the 1950s it’s also possible that there is still somebody around who remembers it, and will eventually find this page and confirm the theater’s location.
This house was actually called the Blue Mouse Theatre. It operated at 20 E. Seventh Street from 1914 to 1922, according to Dave Kenney’s Twin Cities Picture Show: A Century of Moviegoing.
The February 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World said that the Calhoun Theatre had reopened on January 29 after being closed for an expansion. The project had almost doubled the seating capacity of the house to 1,430. The Calhoun had originally opened eight months earlier. Satellite View does show that the current building is considerably deeper than the building shown on the original floor plans which can be seen on our “Photos” page.
The February 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World noted that the new Majestic Theatre in Wyandotte had been designed by Detroit architect Christian W. Brandt.
Dave Kenney’s Twin Cities Picture Show: A Century of Moviegoing (Google Books preview) lists the Cozy/Tuxedo/Gem Theatre at 389 W. Seventh Street. The Cozy is listed at that address in the St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press Almanac and Yearbook for 1915 (Google Books scan) as well.
The St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press Almanac and Yearbook for 1915 (Google Books scan) lists the Elk Theatre at 392 Selby Avenue. I don’t know if that means the theater moved across the street at some point, the street was renumbered, or the Almanac made a mistake. The even-numbered side of the block has a building built in 1887 and a modern building, and I don’t know which would have the address 392.
This history page at the Park Theatre web site says that the Jennings Theatre opened on October 4, 1916.
Construction had actually begun in 1913, and the house was to have been operated by the Switow Amusement Company of Louisville, Kentucky, but financial problems caused the suspension of the project when it was only partly completed. In 1916, a local company was formed to take over the project and finish it.
The North Vernon Amusement Company operated the Jennings Theatre until 1938, when it was leased to Albert Thompson, who renamed the house the Park Theatre. Howard Black took over the theater in 1960, but it was closed in March, 1962.
In 1997, local volunteers formed Park Theatre Civic Inc., bought the theater building for $35,000, and set about renovating it. The Park Theatre Civic Centre opened in 2003.
The May 12, 1916, issue of The American Contractor carried this item about the theater project:
“North Vernon, Ind.—Moving Picture Theater, Store & Club Bldg.: $25,000. 2 sty. 65x150. Archt J. H. Miller. Owner North Vernon Amusement Co.. R. H. Hudson, secy. Gen. contr. let to J. H. Miller.”
J. H. Miller was a local architect and contractor in North Vernon. I haven’t been able to discover who was the original architect of the project for the Switow Amusement Company in 1913.
There is a tantalizing item in the “Building Operations” column of the July 15, 1905, issue of The Minneapolis Journal:
Charles S. Sedgwick, architect, is preparing plans for a two-story store and office building at Glenwood, Minn for J. H. McCauley. It will be 68x115, with pressed brick front operahouse.“
Type for the item was obviously badly set, and the McCauley Opera House as built was three stories, not two, but the timing, six months before the theater opened, the mention of McCauley, and the appearance, oddly placed though it is, of the word operahouse, suggests that Sedgwick might have been the architect of the McCauley Opera House.
The only other connection between Sedgwick and Glenwood I’ve found is a 1902 item inviting bids for construction of a two-story brick commercial and office building at Glenwood that was designed by Sedgwick. That project might have been the McCauley Block, another building McCauley owned in Glenwood.
Here is a 1987 photo of the McCauley Opera House/Glenwood Theatre at Glenwood, Minnesota. The 1935 FDY lists the Opera House in Glenwood as part of the small regional theater circuit operated by B. J. Benfield (spelled Benefield in the book) which was headquartered in the Strand Theatre at Morris, Minnesota.
The McCauley Opera House was built by James H. McCauley, who was, among other things, vice president and cashier of the Glenwood State Bank. The Opera House was opened in 1906, an event that was noted in the February 6 edition of The Minneapolis Journal.
McCauley also built another Glennwood landmark, the Lakeside Ballroom, which opened in 1909 and operated until being destroyed by a fire in 2003.
This page at the Morris Theatre’s web site says that the Orpheum opened in 1912, and competed with the Strand into the mid-1920s, but then both houses were bought by B. J. Benfield and the Orpheum was shuttered.
Although the Orpheum ceased to operate as a full-time movie theater at that time, a local resident remembers it being used occasionally through the 1930s for traveling shows, local live events, and what he called “cowboy shows,” which took place on Saturdays and for which admission was ten cents.
I presume that “cowboy shows” means western movies. Larger towns often had a full-time theater that specialized in westerns, or westerns and adventure moves, while the town’s “A” house offered more varied fare. Morris was probably just too small to support two full-time theaters, but large enough to have both houses open on Saturday when the farmers and residents of smaller outlying settlements came into town.
I now think it very likely that the 1935 FDY entry I cited in my previous comment was already out-of-date. The same entry appears in the “Circuits” section of the 1950 yearbook, even though the only house in Morris listed in the “Theatres” section that year is the Morris Theatre. Local sources in Morris say that the Orpheum was shuttered in the mid-1920s and the Strand closed when the Morris Theatre opened in 1940.
Also, the FDY almost always gives the owner’s name as Benefield, while local sources (and at least one item in a rival trade journal) use Benfield. I suspect that this is a case where the FDY failed to update its listings, this time for at least a decade, as well as repeating a misspelling year after year.
I can find no evidence that B. J. Benfield was actually trained as an architect. In fact Benfield (or Benefield, as his name was usually spelled in the Film Daily Yearbook) was the owner of the Morris Theatre, and had previously owned the Strand and Orpheum Theatres in Morris as well as several theaters in other small Minnesota towns. It’s quite possible that he designed the Morris Theatre, as exhibitors did occasionally design theaters for themselves, but he probably had to have hired a licensed architect or engineer to draw up the plans.
The Strand Theatre in Morris had been operating as a playhouse when this item appeared in the August 12, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“Morris, Minn.—The films have captured another playhouse built for the ‘legitimate’ business. The new Strand theater here has been turned over to the projection machine and the screen.”
The opening of the Strand as a movie house was also mentioned in the June 24, 1916, issue of The Billboard, which named the owner as J. J. Gaffnery.
The Strand was listed as the home office of the B. J. Benefield circuit in the 1935 FDY. Bennefield’s houses were the Star, Beardsley; the Clinton Opera House in Clinton; the Crystal in Elbau Lake; the Opera House in Glenwood; the Grand in Graceville; the Hancock in
Hancock; and the Orpheum and Strand in Morris.
The NRHP registration form for the Fremont Historic Commercial District says that the Empress Theatre was built in 1913 as a vaudeville and moving picture house.
Given the name and the timing, there’s a high probability that this theater was built for the Sullivan & Considine circuit.
The 1927 FDY lists the Fremont Theatre as one of several Nebraska houses operated by the World Realty Co. of Omaha. A photo of the Fremont Theatre appeared on this page of Motion Picture News for December 28, 1929.
The groundbreaking for the Columbus Theatre was reported in the May 27, 1926, issue of The Lincoln Star. Local investors in Columbus were building the house, which had been leased to the World Realty Co., theater operators of Omaha.
An April 19, 2008, post in the Caruthersville forum at Topix said that the Gem Theatre had been torn down a couple of months earlier.
The Saturday, January 17, 1942, issue of the Blytheville, Arkansas Courier-News said that the Rodgers theater circuit had opened the Gem Theatre in Caruthersville the previous Thursday. It wasn’t clear from the item if the Gem was then new or if it had just been taken over and reopened by Rodgers. The item also said that the opening of the Gem gave Caruthersville four operating theaters, but it only mentioned the Rodgers Theatre and the Stadium Theatre.
The January 2, 1942, issue of The Film Daily also had an item about the Gem:
“A new theater is being erected in Caruthersville, Mo., to be operated by I. W. Rodgers & Co. It will be christened the Gem Theater.”
1942 is the first year the Gem appears in the Film Daily Yearbook. It was also the first year for the Stadium Theatre and for a 286-seat house called the Cozy Theatre, which was listed as closed. The Cozy must have been the fourth theater mentioned in the newspaper item.
The Paris Theatre is still open and has converted to digital projection. I can’t find an official web site, but there is a Facebook page.
There’s probably little, if anything, remaining of the old Lincoln Theatre. An article about the remodeling of Kerasotes' Broadway Theatre at Cape Girardeau in the October 19, 1970, issue of Boxoffice said that Kerasotes Theatres had also completely rebuilt the Lincoln Theatre in Paris, Illinois before reopening it as the Paris Theatre the previous May.
I suspect that the theater name should be spelled Rodgers rather than Rogers. This history on the web site of the Rodgers Theatre in Poplar Bluff mentions that I. W. Rodgers operated a theater in Caruthersville. It was probably this house.
The Liberty Theatre in Caruthersville was mentioned in the May 20, 1915, edition of the Hayti, Missouri Herald. The paper also mentioned a Dixie Theatre in Caruthersville.
The March 4, 1922, edition of The Southeast Missourian newspaper of Cape Girardeau had an ad marking the 10th anniversary of Paramount Pictures with listings of movies scheduled to appear that month at twelve theaters in the region, and the Liberty Theatre at Caruthersville was among them.
It’s quite possible that the Perry Street Theatre never became the Cox Theatre. In fact I have no idea why I made the assumption in that comment (though as I was on the Internet at 6:07 pm there’s a good chance my dinner was late and my blood sugar had crashed, taking my higher brain functions with it.)
There is an old postcard that shows up now and then at auction websites depicting a “Cox-Pier-Theatre” on the Cape May Boardwalk (it might have been the postcard in teecee’s long-dead link), but I don’t know if that house was called the Cox Theatre, the Pier Theatre, the Cox Pier Theatre, or something else altogether (it might even have been the Palace Theatre, a house opened by J. P. Cox in 1916.) Houses called Cox’s Old Pier, Cox’s New Pier, and Cox’s Palace were all mentioned in the 1924 FDY. There’s not much information about Cape May’s old theaters on the Internet, so it might be quite a while before anybody comes along to fill in the gaps.
Anyway, my apologies for assuming that Mr. Cox had only one theater. It was pretty stupid of me.
Two sources, a list of theaters in the 1915 St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press Almanac and Yearbook and a list in Dave Kenney’s book Twin Cities Picture Show: A Century of Moviegoing both give the address of this Gem Theatre (the second of three St.Paul houses to use the name) as 18 E. Seventh Street. The Penny Parlor/Alhambra/Cameo Theatre was at 16 E. Seventh and the Blue Mouse Theatre was at 20 E. Seventh. This photo, looking east along 7th Street toward Cedar Street, probably in the late 1910s, shows the three adjacent theaters, with the Gem in the middle.
Given a choice between a directory published by the local newspaper and the listings in the FDY I’d usually go with the local directory, but in this case, as we have only the 1915 directory available, it remains possible that the Elk Theatre opened in a storefront at 392 Selby and then moved to a new location across the street after that directory was published.
As the Beaux Arts operated into the 1950s it’s also possible that there is still somebody around who remembers it, and will eventually find this page and confirm the theater’s location.
This house was actually called the Blue Mouse Theatre. It operated at 20 E. Seventh Street from 1914 to 1922, according to Dave Kenney’s Twin Cities Picture Show: A Century of Moviegoing.
The February 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World said that the Calhoun Theatre had reopened on January 29 after being closed for an expansion. The project had almost doubled the seating capacity of the house to 1,430. The Calhoun had originally opened eight months earlier. Satellite View does show that the current building is considerably deeper than the building shown on the original floor plans which can be seen on our “Photos” page.
The February 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World noted that the new Majestic Theatre in Wyandotte had been designed by Detroit architect Christian W. Brandt.
Dave Kenney’s Twin Cities Picture Show: A Century of Moviegoing (Google Books preview) lists the Cozy/Tuxedo/Gem Theatre at 389 W. Seventh Street. The Cozy is listed at that address in the St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press Almanac and Yearbook for 1915 (Google Books scan) as well.
The St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press Almanac and Yearbook for 1915 (Google Books scan) lists the Elk Theatre at 392 Selby Avenue. I don’t know if that means the theater moved across the street at some point, the street was renumbered, or the Almanac made a mistake. The even-numbered side of the block has a building built in 1887 and a modern building, and I don’t know which would have the address 392.
This is the same theater already listed as the Beaux Arts.
Google Maps provides no street view for the Morris Theatre’s location, but Bing Maps has a decent Bird’s Eye View.
This history page at the Park Theatre web site says that the Jennings Theatre opened on October 4, 1916.
Construction had actually begun in 1913, and the house was to have been operated by the Switow Amusement Company of Louisville, Kentucky, but financial problems caused the suspension of the project when it was only partly completed. In 1916, a local company was formed to take over the project and finish it.
The North Vernon Amusement Company operated the Jennings Theatre until 1938, when it was leased to Albert Thompson, who renamed the house the Park Theatre. Howard Black took over the theater in 1960, but it was closed in March, 1962.
In 1997, local volunteers formed Park Theatre Civic Inc., bought the theater building for $35,000, and set about renovating it. The Park Theatre Civic Centre opened in 2003.
The May 12, 1916, issue of The American Contractor carried this item about the theater project:
J. H. Miller was a local architect and contractor in North Vernon. I haven’t been able to discover who was the original architect of the project for the Switow Amusement Company in 1913.There is a tantalizing item in the “Building Operations” column of the July 15, 1905, issue of The Minneapolis Journal:
Type for the item was obviously badly set, and the McCauley Opera House as built was three stories, not two, but the timing, six months before the theater opened, the mention of McCauley, and the appearance, oddly placed though it is, of the word operahouse, suggests that Sedgwick might have been the architect of the McCauley Opera House.The only other connection between Sedgwick and Glenwood I’ve found is a 1902 item inviting bids for construction of a two-story brick commercial and office building at Glenwood that was designed by Sedgwick. That project might have been the McCauley Block, another building McCauley owned in Glenwood.
Here is a 1987 photo of the McCauley Opera House/Glenwood Theatre at Glenwood, Minnesota. The 1935 FDY lists the Opera House in Glenwood as part of the small regional theater circuit operated by B. J. Benfield (spelled Benefield in the book) which was headquartered in the Strand Theatre at Morris, Minnesota.
The McCauley Opera House was built by James H. McCauley, who was, among other things, vice president and cashier of the Glenwood State Bank. The Opera House was opened in 1906, an event that was noted in the February 6 edition of The Minneapolis Journal.
McCauley also built another Glennwood landmark, the Lakeside Ballroom, which opened in 1909 and operated until being destroyed by a fire in 2003.
This page at the Morris Theatre’s web site says that the Orpheum opened in 1912, and competed with the Strand into the mid-1920s, but then both houses were bought by B. J. Benfield and the Orpheum was shuttered.
Although the Orpheum ceased to operate as a full-time movie theater at that time, a local resident remembers it being used occasionally through the 1930s for traveling shows, local live events, and what he called “cowboy shows,” which took place on Saturdays and for which admission was ten cents.
I presume that “cowboy shows” means western movies. Larger towns often had a full-time theater that specialized in westerns, or westerns and adventure moves, while the town’s “A” house offered more varied fare. Morris was probably just too small to support two full-time theaters, but large enough to have both houses open on Saturday when the farmers and residents of smaller outlying settlements came into town.
I now think it very likely that the 1935 FDY entry I cited in my previous comment was already out-of-date. The same entry appears in the “Circuits” section of the 1950 yearbook, even though the only house in Morris listed in the “Theatres” section that year is the Morris Theatre. Local sources in Morris say that the Orpheum was shuttered in the mid-1920s and the Strand closed when the Morris Theatre opened in 1940.
Also, the FDY almost always gives the owner’s name as Benefield, while local sources (and at least one item in a rival trade journal) use Benfield. I suspect that this is a case where the FDY failed to update its listings, this time for at least a decade, as well as repeating a misspelling year after year.
I can find no evidence that B. J. Benfield was actually trained as an architect. In fact Benfield (or Benefield, as his name was usually spelled in the Film Daily Yearbook) was the owner of the Morris Theatre, and had previously owned the Strand and Orpheum Theatres in Morris as well as several theaters in other small Minnesota towns. It’s quite possible that he designed the Morris Theatre, as exhibitors did occasionally design theaters for themselves, but he probably had to have hired a licensed architect or engineer to draw up the plans.
The Strand Theatre in Morris had been operating as a playhouse when this item appeared in the August 12, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
The opening of the Strand as a movie house was also mentioned in the June 24, 1916, issue of The Billboard, which named the owner as J. J. Gaffnery.The Strand was listed as the home office of the B. J. Benefield circuit in the 1935 FDY. Bennefield’s houses were the Star, Beardsley; the Clinton Opera House in Clinton; the Crystal in Elbau Lake; the Opera House in Glenwood; the Grand in Graceville; the Hancock in Hancock; and the Orpheum and Strand in Morris.
So 420 W. Main Street was the second of three locations for the Princess Theatre?
The NRHP registration form for the Fremont Historic Commercial District says that the Empress Theatre was built in 1913 as a vaudeville and moving picture house.
Given the name and the timing, there’s a high probability that this theater was built for the Sullivan & Considine circuit.
Here is a 1949 photo of the Empress Theatre.
The 1927 FDY lists the Fremont Theatre as one of several Nebraska houses operated by the World Realty Co. of Omaha. A photo of the Fremont Theatre appeared on this page of Motion Picture News for December 28, 1929.
The groundbreaking for the Columbus Theatre was reported in the May 27, 1926, issue of The Lincoln Star. Local investors in Columbus were building the house, which had been leased to the World Realty Co., theater operators of Omaha.
An April 19, 2008, post in the Caruthersville forum at Topix said that the Gem Theatre had been torn down a couple of months earlier.
The Saturday, January 17, 1942, issue of the Blytheville, Arkansas Courier-News said that the Rodgers theater circuit had opened the Gem Theatre in Caruthersville the previous Thursday. It wasn’t clear from the item if the Gem was then new or if it had just been taken over and reopened by Rodgers. The item also said that the opening of the Gem gave Caruthersville four operating theaters, but it only mentioned the Rodgers Theatre and the Stadium Theatre.
The January 2, 1942, issue of The Film Daily also had an item about the Gem:
1942 is the first year the Gem appears in the Film Daily Yearbook. It was also the first year for the Stadium Theatre and for a 286-seat house called the Cozy Theatre, which was listed as closed. The Cozy must have been the fourth theater mentioned in the newspaper item.Here is a photo of the Gem Theatre taken in the late 1990s.
The Paris Theatre is still open and has converted to digital projection. I can’t find an official web site, but there is a Facebook page.
There’s probably little, if anything, remaining of the old Lincoln Theatre. An article about the remodeling of Kerasotes' Broadway Theatre at Cape Girardeau in the October 19, 1970, issue of Boxoffice said that Kerasotes Theatres had also completely rebuilt the Lincoln Theatre in Paris, Illinois before reopening it as the Paris Theatre the previous May.
I suspect that the theater name should be spelled Rodgers rather than Rogers. This history on the web site of the Rodgers Theatre in Poplar Bluff mentions that I. W. Rodgers operated a theater in Caruthersville. It was probably this house.
The Liberty Theatre in Caruthersville was mentioned in the May 20, 1915, edition of the Hayti, Missouri Herald. The paper also mentioned a Dixie Theatre in Caruthersville.
The March 4, 1922, edition of The Southeast Missourian newspaper of Cape Girardeau had an ad marking the 10th anniversary of Paramount Pictures with listings of movies scheduled to appear that month at twelve theaters in the region, and the Liberty Theatre at Caruthersville was among them.
It’s quite possible that the Perry Street Theatre never became the Cox Theatre. In fact I have no idea why I made the assumption in that comment (though as I was on the Internet at 6:07 pm there’s a good chance my dinner was late and my blood sugar had crashed, taking my higher brain functions with it.)
There is an old postcard that shows up now and then at auction websites depicting a “Cox-Pier-Theatre” on the Cape May Boardwalk (it might have been the postcard in teecee’s long-dead link), but I don’t know if that house was called the Cox Theatre, the Pier Theatre, the Cox Pier Theatre, or something else altogether (it might even have been the Palace Theatre, a house opened by J. P. Cox in 1916.) Houses called Cox’s Old Pier, Cox’s New Pier, and Cox’s Palace were all mentioned in the 1924 FDY. There’s not much information about Cape May’s old theaters on the Internet, so it might be quite a while before anybody comes along to fill in the gaps.
Anyway, my apologies for assuming that Mr. Cox had only one theater. It was pretty stupid of me.