Sam's Place One and Two
1836 Chestnut Street,
Philadelphia,
PA
19103
1836 Chestnut Street,
Philadelphia,
PA
19103
9 people
favorited this theater
Showing 51 - 65 of 65 comments
Maybe that was the suburbs back then. Wasn’t that in Center City somewhere?
suburban Locust Theater??
This is from Boxoffice magazine, February 1955:
PHILADELPHIA-Jay Wren, film buyer and city manager of AB-Paramount’s Philadelphia theaters, has been named general manager and film buyer of the Viking, the city’s new first-run house, and the suburban Locust Theater, according to Harry Sley, president of the Viking Theater Corp. Wren will assume his new duties March 1.
Here is a January 1983 photo by Jefferson Moak, from the PAB site. That’s how I remember the theater from my college days. I was also a big fan of Encore Books, which can be seen a few doors down. Talk about a ride in the wayback machine.
http://tinyurl.com/2ctqtt
This is a slightly larger version of one of the thumbnails posted by Howard in December 2005. I never saw this theater when it was the Viking, so I thought the photo was interesting:
http://tinyurl.com/3cun4r
According to the 1936 AFY Yearbook, the Aldine seated 1,416.
Photo by Dennis Zimmerman with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on the marquee:
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thanks to Dennis for taking these photos and allowing them to be posted.
I visited the booth in late 1971, and they were running “The French Connection”. They also ran a trailer for “A Clockwork Orange”. At that time, it was called the Cinema 19. The projectors were the blue Simplex 35/70’s.
photo I took yesterday here:
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Some historic photos here, don’t try to enlarge them without membership:
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The Ritz theatres are not considered “Movie Palaces”. The Movie Palaces of the old days included: RKO Stanley Warner’s Boyd Theatre (REG Sameric 4 Theatre), RKO Stanley Warner’s Stanley Theatre, Milgram’s Fox Theatre, Milgram’s Milgram Theatre (RKO Stanley Warner’s Stanton Theatre), Stanley Warner’s Earle Theatre, Stanley Warner’s Mastbaum Theatre, Stanley Warner’s Aldine Theatre (United Artists Sam’s Place Twin), Goldman’s Goldman Theatre, to name a few.
There are no big movie palaces in Philadelphia that are open rigt now. the closest movie theatres to Center City Philadelphia are: REG Riverview Stadium 17 Theatre, and National amusements The Bridge 6: Cinema De Lux.
The Poseidion Adventure opened on Dec 12, 1972, and The French Connection opened on 10/6/1971 at Sam’s Place Twin theatre, when it was known as Rugoff’s Cinema 19 Theatre. Rugoff & Becker Theatres became Cinema 5 Theatres when they were acquired by Pacific Theatres (then owners of RKO Stanley Warner) in 1975, after they sold the Cinema 19 to Sam Shapiro’s Sameric Theatres, and closed The World theatre.
Sad to say, walked down Chestnut street yesterday and saw the shuttered Boyd. Are there any movie houses left in Philly?
I attended “closing” weekend which was announced in the press, in August 1994 having seen many movies from 1988 in both houses. Sam’s Place no longer looked like the movie palace it once was. When it appeared in 2002 that its neighbor, the Boyd (Sameric) might be demolished, I viewed that as intolerable. After closing, Sam’s Place was immediately converted to a CVS.
Fantasia (think Phila. Orchestra) had its local run at the Aldine.
Howard B. Haas
It is, of course, widely known that this theatre, in its incarnation as the Warner Aldine, was one of the dozen or so houses that showed Disney’s Fantasia in Fantasound. Though a Warner house, in a city that had a ton of them, RKO product was funneled here, and at that time Disney films were released by RKO. This means, of course, that this is also the CITIZEN KANE house. Later on, the first feature-length 3-D film BWANA DEVIL ran here and was fabulously successful. The Warner chain subsequently took out the 3-D synching equipment and moved it 3 blocks away to the cavernous Mastbaum for the HOUSE OF WAX run. Warners had tried to close the Aldine, but the city prohibited the closure, and it was sold to parking lot magnate Henry Sley who renamed it the Viking. When 4 decades later as the Sams Place Twin it closed, the DTS equipment was moved across the street to the Sameric a/k/a Boyd.