This .doc file (opens with Microsoft Word) lists some silent era theaters in Buffalo. It says that the first Lovejoy Theatre (originally called the Lovejoy Palace Theatre) was built in 1909 at the northwest corner of Lovejoy and Davey. The address was given as 1198 Lovejoy. It was in a newly-constructed wood framed building 25 x 100 feet.
In 1919, the Lovejoy Theatre was listed at 1202 Lovejoy, which is the modern address of the lot on the northwest corner of Lovejoy and Davey, so it looks as though there was only one Lovejoy Theatre before the one converted into a pool was built, but its address was changed sometime between 1909 and 1914 (for some reason, in the 1924 directory it was listed at 1196 Lovejoy, but the next year it was back at 1202.) My guess would be that it might have been remodeled or even substantially rebuilt around 1919, giving rise to the idea that there were three theaters called the Lovejoy.
The document says that the original Lovejoy Theatre was demolished in 1940 to make way for the Nu-Way Supermarket. The building now on the site is probably the one built in 1940, small though it is. Supermarkets were a lot smaller in those days than they are now. The building currently houses the office of Cricket Wireless.
Though Film Daily was still listing the Lovejoy at 1202 in 1950, if this document is correct the theater probably moved to the new building at 1171 Lovejoy sometime in the 1930s. The Streamline Modern lines of the building certainly look more pre-war than post-war. Film Daily still listing the house at the old address long after it had moved would no surprise to anyone familiar with that publication’s perennial failure to keep information up-to-date.
The Portola Theatre rated several lines in a July 15, 1916, article about San Francisco’s movie theaters in The Moving Picture World:
“The Portola theater on Market street, near Fourth, is one of the most interesting houses in the city. When first opened it was devoted to vaudeville and moving pictures, but has been showing the latter exclusively for several years. Under the able direction of Eugene Roth it was been made a great success with its never varying policy in regard to prices and the selection of attractions. It has a seating capacity of 1,100 and has shown many of the greatest films produced, at ten and twenty cents. So marked has been the success of this house that a company known as the Market Street Realty Company has been formed to erect a moving picture theater at Fourth and Market streets with a seating capacity of about 3,000, this house to be one of the finest in America. This company has taken over the Portola theater, as well as the Market Street theater, two blocks further up the street. This latter house, which has been conducted since its erection by Hallahan & Getz, has a seating capacity of 1,100, so that when the new theater is ready Mr. Roth will have charge of three houses within two blocks, with a total of about 5,200 seats.”
The proposed theater at Market and Fourth opened in November, 1917, as the California Theatre, and was later known as the State Theatre.
There were two Market Street houses called the Unique Theatre, one before the fire and one after. The pre-fire house was the one operated by the Graumans and located on the north side of Market between Mason and Taylor. The house at 757 Market, which was on the south side of the street opposite the end of Grant Avenue, was built after the fire and was not operated by the Graumans. Here is a paragraph from the July 15, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World that mentions the second Unique Theatre:
“Probably the second house to be opened on Market street [after the fire] was the Gold Palace of I. H. Lichtenstein, about opposite Sixth street. This, however, did not prove to be a success. Then came the Unique theater on Market opposite Grant avenue. This house occupied the entire building in which it was located and was the first one that was not merely a converted store. It is still conducted by the same company that originally built it, in conjunction with the Odeon theater a few doors below, under the direct management of Joe Huff. Both of these places have been kept thoroughly abreast of the times in the matter of equipment and furnishings and a little over a year ago changed from a five-cent to a ten-cent policy. Paramount pictures are now being shown, together with Chaplins, of which a feature are made. These houses have a combined seating capacity of about 700.”
If the Unique and the Odeon had a combined seating capacity of about 700, we’ve overestimated the capacity of the Unique, unless it was later enlarged (which doesn’t seem likely if it “…occupied the entire building in which it was located….”)
An article about San Francisco’s movie theaters in the July 15, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had this paragraph about the Silver Palace Theatre:
“The first moving picture house to be opened on Market street following the fire of 1906 was the Silver Palace, just above Third, with a seating capacity of about 400. This house, which was conducted by the late Benjamin Michaels and Harry M. Lichtenstein, was fitted up at a heavy expense and at the time was considered quite a wonderful place. It is still being operated and is now under the management of N. K. Herzog, who also has charge of the Pastime theater in the same block. Both of these houses make a daily change of program and charge an admission of five cents.”
Here is an item about renovations from the March 25, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“The announcement is made that the Rialto theater, on the site of the old American on Market street, will be opened early in April, when improvements costing in excess of $70,000 will have been completed.”
An article about San Francisco’s movie theaters in the July 15 issue of the same publication had a slightly longer item about the Rialto:
“The latest and one of the largest houses to enter the downtown field is the Rialto theater on Market street, above Seventh. This theater occupies the site of the old American and is conducted by the Western Theater Company, under the management of Howard J. Sheehan. It has a seating capacity of 1,600 and is showing a Metro program, with an International Film Service serial and news pictorial at ten, twenty and thirty cents.”
The photos show two different buildings. The Stockton theaters page has three listings for houses at 21 Sutter, two with one of the photos and one with the other photos.
The round-cornered building is listed as the Aliskey Theatre, with the aka’s Empire, Unique, Forrest, and Garrick, with the address 21 N. Sutter.
The same photo then accompanies the listing for the Garrick Theatre, with the aka’s Strand and Hippodrome, but with the address 21 S. Sutter instead of 21 N. Sutter.
The building with VAUDEVILLE on the marquee is then listed as the Hippodrome with the aka’s Unique and Garrick, and with the address 21 S. Sutter in the heading and 21 N. Sutter in the text.
The VAUDEVILLE building is mid-block, next to an alley, so the address 21 makes sense, but the theater entrance in the round-cornered building is very close to the corner, so I would expect it to have either a higher or a lower number. I think that’s the building the Stockton theaters page misidentified. The address was probably misidentified, and the theater names might have been as well. Too bad the scan is so blurry that the theater’s name is unreadable.
I’m pretty sure the address 21 N. Sutter is correct for the VAUDEVILLE building. It was probably almost directly across the street from the old Kress store which is still standing at 20 N. Sutter. The building now on the site looks to have been built in the 1920s. The alley was probably closed off to accommodate that building’s extra width.
I’m still trying to figure out where the round-cornered building was, and what theater(s) occupied it.
The Bender Theatre opened on Christmas Day, 1912, according to an item in an early 1913 issue of Variety. Originally operating as a stock house, the 1913-1914 edition of the Cahn guide lists it as playing vaudeville with movies.
Austin Bender, operator of the theater, was sued by the city for showing movies on Sunday. The documentation of the suit gives the address of the theater as 325 Bleecker Street. A newspaper article from the period says that the Bender Theatre was on Bleecker Street at the foot of Academy Street, and that’s just about where 325 is, so the address probably hasn’t changed since that time.
The Gayety Theatre mentioned by WAJWAJ three comments back was a different house, listed here as the Shubert Theatre. The November 20 opening of the Imperial Theatre was noted in the November 25, 1911, issue of Variety.
Will, I haven’t found any period references to a Central Coliseum or Coliseum Theatre in DC, but as this house didn’t become the Central until 1922 it was probably unrelated to the 1916 house.
The November 25, 1911, issue of Variety said that the Lumberg Theatre in Utica would open on Monday, November 27. The two-a-day vaudeville house would be booked by the Loew agency.
The Lumberg was one of six Utica theaters listed in the 1913-1914 edition of the Cahn guide. It had 1,446 seats, and was operated by brothers Barney and Harris Lumberg. Vaudeville was presented the first three days of the week and burlesque the last three days. The Lumberg had a fairly large stage for a vaudeville house, being 70 feet between side walls and 33 feet from the footlights to the back wall, with a proscenium 36 feet wide. The Lumberg had three Wilmer & Vincent houses as competition; the Majestic, the Orpheum, and the Shubert. Two other houses, the Hippodrome and the Bender, played vaudeville with movies.
The Lumberg Theatre was being altered in 1916. The June 10 issue of The American Contractor said that architect Leon Lempert had prepared the plans for the $4,000 project. The project also got a brief mention in the July 8 issue of The Moving Picture World.
The latest mention I’ve found of the Luberg Theatre in Utica is from 1919. The earliest occurrence I’ve found of the name Gaiety Theatre in Utica is from early 1922. The Gaiety was then being run as a vaudeville and movie house by Wilmer & Vincent.
This house opened on November 24, 1907, as the New Sun Theatre. It was built by Gus Sun. Sun had arrived in Springfield in October, 1904, as head of a troupe of minstrels, and later that month opened the Little Orpheum Theatre in the Fisher Building. This was the beginning of the Sun Circuit, which would grow to an extensive chain. Sun maintained his headquarters in Springfield, though the circuit had a booking office in New York City.
Before the New Sun Theatre was built, Gus Sun had formed a partnership with O. G. Murray, a broker from Richmond, Indiana. By 1908, the firm of Sun & Murray controlled ten vaudeville houses in Ohio and Indiana, and the circuit would eventually grow to some 275 houses.
When Sun’s Regent Theatre opened in 1920, it became the chain’s flagship house. I haven’t found the year the New Sun was renamed the Band Box, but it was probably around the time the Regent opened.
I’m sure the auditorium is gone. There’s a big parking lot behind the L-shaped Fairbanks Building now, where the theater must have been. The office building itself isn’t big enough, or the right shape, to have housed a theater.
I don’t know where the story that the Fairbanks Building was originally a hotel started, but it’s all over the Internet. Period sources (1907, 1911, 1922) all indicate that it was an office building with a theater and a few shops from the beginning. A brief biography (published 1911) of Newton Hamilton Fairbanks, who built the building, describes it as “…one of the largest bank, store and office buildings (fireproof) in Ohio; this building also contains Fairbanks Theater.”
The January 24, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World said that the Majestic Theatre in Springfield had opened on Christmas Day:
“A Whole Page.
“‘Some ad,’ is the comment William Lord Wright makes on a full page advertisement from the Springfield, Ohio, Sun that he sends in, and we echo ‘Some ad.’ It announces the opening of the Majestic Theater on Christmas day and takes up an entire page, with an ornamental frame in line cut and four half tones of the players that might have been better printed. This is a 900 house, a sister theater to the Princess, which shares the advertisement and the fact that the Majestic will open Christmas a made to stand out like the proverbial sore thumb.”
The line “a 900 house” is probably missing the word “Seat.”
A 1917 photo on page 34 of Springfield, by Harry C. Laybourne (Google Books preview), shows that the Princess Theatre was on the south side of West Main Street a few doors east of Fisher Street, across the street from the Fairbanks Building.
In the later 1910s, this house sported an enormous “M&C” logo on it, for McCue & Cahill. There’s a photo at Card Cow. As of 1916, Joseph Cahill controlled three of Brockton’s five theaters, including the City and the Brockton Strand. I found a couple of references to a vaudeville comedy team called McCue & Cahill from around 1904-1905. I wonder if it was the same pair? It was not unusual for vaudeville performers to “cross the footlights” and become theater operators.
Somehow I left a word out of my previous comment. It should start “Cinema Treasures member Cinemalover….” The link was posted on the page for the Palace Theatre, which was previously misidentified as being the same house as the Park.
“NYC issued a C/O to a New building at 292 Flatbush Avenue on March 22, 1927. The first architects name is H. G. Wiseman. The second architects name is Hugo ‘something’. I can’t read the last name.”
This was probably either Hugo Taussig, or Hugo Magnuson of the firm Magnuson & Kleinert. Wiseman worked with both at various times following the 1920 death of his partner Arthur Carlson.
Ruth Anne Phillips' book Pre-Columbian Revival attributes the design of the 1923 Cameo Theatre to Wiseman and Hugo Taussig. Cezar del Valle’s Brooklyn Theatre Index attributes the Sanders Theatre to Wiseman with Magnuson & Kleinert.
As the C/O for the Carlton names only two architects, it was probably Taussig who worked with Wiseman on this house. In any case, the firm of Carlson & Wiseman was long gone by the time the Carlton Theatre was designed.
Cinema Treasures Cinemalover found two vintage photos of the Park Theatre on this Facebook page. The upper photo appears to be from the late 1960s or early 1970s, and the theater looks closed. The lower photo is probably from the early-mid 1950s, when the house was still in operation.
Prior to April, 1935, this house was called the Castle Square Theatre. The name change to Chateau Theatre was noted in the April 8 issue of The Film Daily.
There might have been three houses called the Joyo Theatre in this neighborhood. A document pertaining to the establishment of a Historic Preservation District says that the original Joyo Theatre opened around 1912 in a building at 6121 Havelock Avenue. If that’s the case, then the Joyo mentioned in the 1908 Billboard items must have been an even earlier house.
The document says that the Joyo moved into the theater at 6102 Havelock in 1937. Prior to that the house had been called the Lyric Theatre. The document gives the opening of the Lyric as ca. 1928. 1928 is also the year given for the opening of the Lyric in an article by Jim McKee in the Lincoln Journal Star. McKee says that his great uncle, Volney Headrick, built the Lyric Theatre.
I’ve also found a house called the Havelock Theatre, operated by Bob Wintersteen, mentioned in The Film Daily of September 10, 1936. I don’t know if this is yet another theater or an aka for the Lyric. A December 15 Film Daily item says that the Havelock had been bought from Wintersteen by C. Fraser, operator of the Joyo Theatre, so this purchase might have led to the newer house being renamed the Joyo, assuming that it had originally been the Lyric, which does seem likely.
This article from the Daily Nebraskan says that the Joyo Theatre was built in 1926.
It had a predecessor, though, as there was a movie house called the Joyo Theatre operating in Lincoln (or Havelock, as the neighborhood appears to have been independent of Lincoln at one time) as far back as 1908, when it was mentioned in multiple issues of The Billboard and once in Variety. It was also mentioned twice in The Moving Picture World in 1916.
The Joyo Theatre in Havelock was also mentioned in The Film Daily in 1927 and 1935. I’ve also found mentions of houses called the Joyo in Fairfield (1938) and Coleridge (1957), Nebraska, but haven’t found any details about either of them.
Here is an announcement about the yet-unnamed Palace Theatre from the April 1, 1935, issue of The Film Daily:
“New House for Silverton, Ore.
“Silverton, Ore.— Alfred L. Adams will build a 515-seat house at Oak and Water Sts. here. Lee Thomas of Portland is the architect.”
Lee Thomas must have been Lee Arden Thomas who, usually in partnership with Albert Mercier, designed several other theaters in the region. Their partnership, established in 1924, was dissolved in 1934.
A photo of the loge section of the recently remodeled Bay Theatre illustrated an ad for Heywood-Wakefield seats on this page of Boxoffice, April 5, 1952.
ChrisB’s photo with a clickable link. The marquee certainly has an Art Deco look, but that facade above it is pure Midcentury Modern. The auditorium looks more Streamline Modern. The Midcentury touch isn’t surprising, as the house was designed by Michael DeAngelis, who was usually ahead of most other theater architects in his willingness to experiment with new styles.
This .doc file (opens with Microsoft Word) lists some silent era theaters in Buffalo. It says that the first Lovejoy Theatre (originally called the Lovejoy Palace Theatre) was built in 1909 at the northwest corner of Lovejoy and Davey. The address was given as 1198 Lovejoy. It was in a newly-constructed wood framed building 25 x 100 feet.
In 1919, the Lovejoy Theatre was listed at 1202 Lovejoy, which is the modern address of the lot on the northwest corner of Lovejoy and Davey, so it looks as though there was only one Lovejoy Theatre before the one converted into a pool was built, but its address was changed sometime between 1909 and 1914 (for some reason, in the 1924 directory it was listed at 1196 Lovejoy, but the next year it was back at 1202.) My guess would be that it might have been remodeled or even substantially rebuilt around 1919, giving rise to the idea that there were three theaters called the Lovejoy.
The document says that the original Lovejoy Theatre was demolished in 1940 to make way for the Nu-Way Supermarket. The building now on the site is probably the one built in 1940, small though it is. Supermarkets were a lot smaller in those days than they are now. The building currently houses the office of Cricket Wireless.
Though Film Daily was still listing the Lovejoy at 1202 in 1950, if this document is correct the theater probably moved to the new building at 1171 Lovejoy sometime in the 1930s. The Streamline Modern lines of the building certainly look more pre-war than post-war. Film Daily still listing the house at the old address long after it had moved would no surprise to anyone familiar with that publication’s perennial failure to keep information up-to-date.
The Portola Theatre rated several lines in a July 15, 1916, article about San Francisco’s movie theaters in The Moving Picture World:
The proposed theater at Market and Fourth opened in November, 1917, as the California Theatre, and was later known as the State Theatre.There were two Market Street houses called the Unique Theatre, one before the fire and one after. The pre-fire house was the one operated by the Graumans and located on the north side of Market between Mason and Taylor. The house at 757 Market, which was on the south side of the street opposite the end of Grant Avenue, was built after the fire and was not operated by the Graumans. Here is a paragraph from the July 15, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World that mentions the second Unique Theatre:
If the Unique and the Odeon had a combined seating capacity of about 700, we’ve overestimated the capacity of the Unique, unless it was later enlarged (which doesn’t seem likely if it “…occupied the entire building in which it was located….”)An article about San Francisco’s movie theaters in the July 15, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had this paragraph about the Silver Palace Theatre:
Here is an item about renovations from the March 25, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
An article about San Francisco’s movie theaters in the July 15 issue of the same publication had a slightly longer item about the Rialto:The photos show two different buildings. The Stockton theaters page has three listings for houses at 21 Sutter, two with one of the photos and one with the other photos.
The round-cornered building is listed as the Aliskey Theatre, with the aka’s Empire, Unique, Forrest, and Garrick, with the address 21 N. Sutter.
The same photo then accompanies the listing for the Garrick Theatre, with the aka’s Strand and Hippodrome, but with the address 21 S. Sutter instead of 21 N. Sutter.
The building with VAUDEVILLE on the marquee is then listed as the Hippodrome with the aka’s Unique and Garrick, and with the address 21 S. Sutter in the heading and 21 N. Sutter in the text.
The VAUDEVILLE building is mid-block, next to an alley, so the address 21 makes sense, but the theater entrance in the round-cornered building is very close to the corner, so I would expect it to have either a higher or a lower number. I think that’s the building the Stockton theaters page misidentified. The address was probably misidentified, and the theater names might have been as well. Too bad the scan is so blurry that the theater’s name is unreadable.
I’m pretty sure the address 21 N. Sutter is correct for the VAUDEVILLE building. It was probably almost directly across the street from the old Kress store which is still standing at 20 N. Sutter. The building now on the site looks to have been built in the 1920s. The alley was probably closed off to accommodate that building’s extra width.
I’m still trying to figure out where the round-cornered building was, and what theater(s) occupied it.
The Bender Theatre opened on Christmas Day, 1912, according to an item in an early 1913 issue of Variety. Originally operating as a stock house, the 1913-1914 edition of the Cahn guide lists it as playing vaudeville with movies.
Austin Bender, operator of the theater, was sued by the city for showing movies on Sunday. The documentation of the suit gives the address of the theater as 325 Bleecker Street. A newspaper article from the period says that the Bender Theatre was on Bleecker Street at the foot of Academy Street, and that’s just about where 325 is, so the address probably hasn’t changed since that time.
The Gayety Theatre mentioned by WAJWAJ three comments back was a different house, listed here as the Shubert Theatre. The November 20 opening of the Imperial Theatre was noted in the November 25, 1911, issue of Variety.
Will, I haven’t found any period references to a Central Coliseum or Coliseum Theatre in DC, but as this house didn’t become the Central until 1922 it was probably unrelated to the 1916 house.
Here is an informative article about the Gayety Theatre by John DeFerrari. There are several photos of the Gayety and nearby theaters and restaurants.
The November 25, 1911, issue of Variety said that the Lumberg Theatre in Utica would open on Monday, November 27. The two-a-day vaudeville house would be booked by the Loew agency.
The Lumberg was one of six Utica theaters listed in the 1913-1914 edition of the Cahn guide. It had 1,446 seats, and was operated by brothers Barney and Harris Lumberg. Vaudeville was presented the first three days of the week and burlesque the last three days. The Lumberg had a fairly large stage for a vaudeville house, being 70 feet between side walls and 33 feet from the footlights to the back wall, with a proscenium 36 feet wide. The Lumberg had three Wilmer & Vincent houses as competition; the Majestic, the Orpheum, and the Shubert. Two other houses, the Hippodrome and the Bender, played vaudeville with movies.
The Lumberg Theatre was being altered in 1916. The June 10 issue of The American Contractor said that architect Leon Lempert had prepared the plans for the $4,000 project. The project also got a brief mention in the July 8 issue of The Moving Picture World.
The latest mention I’ve found of the Luberg Theatre in Utica is from 1919. The earliest occurrence I’ve found of the name Gaiety Theatre in Utica is from early 1922. The Gaiety was then being run as a vaudeville and movie house by Wilmer & Vincent.
This house opened on November 24, 1907, as the New Sun Theatre. It was built by Gus Sun. Sun had arrived in Springfield in October, 1904, as head of a troupe of minstrels, and later that month opened the Little Orpheum Theatre in the Fisher Building. This was the beginning of the Sun Circuit, which would grow to an extensive chain. Sun maintained his headquarters in Springfield, though the circuit had a booking office in New York City.
Before the New Sun Theatre was built, Gus Sun had formed a partnership with O. G. Murray, a broker from Richmond, Indiana. By 1908, the firm of Sun & Murray controlled ten vaudeville houses in Ohio and Indiana, and the circuit would eventually grow to some 275 houses.
When Sun’s Regent Theatre opened in 1920, it became the chain’s flagship house. I haven’t found the year the New Sun was renamed the Band Box, but it was probably around the time the Regent opened.
Springfield, Ohio: A Summary of Two Centuries, by Tom Dunham, gives the address of the Princess Theatre as 17 West Main Street.
I’m sure the auditorium is gone. There’s a big parking lot behind the L-shaped Fairbanks Building now, where the theater must have been. The office building itself isn’t big enough, or the right shape, to have housed a theater.
I don’t know where the story that the Fairbanks Building was originally a hotel started, but it’s all over the Internet. Period sources (1907, 1911, 1922) all indicate that it was an office building with a theater and a few shops from the beginning. A brief biography (published 1911) of Newton Hamilton Fairbanks, who built the building, describes it as “…one of the largest bank, store and office buildings (fireproof) in Ohio; this building also contains Fairbanks Theater.”
The January 24, 1914, issue of The Moving Picture World said that the Majestic Theatre in Springfield had opened on Christmas Day:
The line “a 900 house” is probably missing the word “Seat.”A 1917 photo on page 34 of Springfield, by Harry C. Laybourne (Google Books preview), shows that the Princess Theatre was on the south side of West Main Street a few doors east of Fisher Street, across the street from the Fairbanks Building.
In the later 1910s, this house sported an enormous “M&C” logo on it, for McCue & Cahill. There’s a photo at Card Cow. As of 1916, Joseph Cahill controlled three of Brockton’s five theaters, including the City and the Brockton Strand. I found a couple of references to a vaudeville comedy team called McCue & Cahill from around 1904-1905. I wonder if it was the same pair? It was not unusual for vaudeville performers to “cross the footlights” and become theater operators.
Somehow I left a word out of my previous comment. It should start “Cinema Treasures member Cinemalover….” The link was posted on the page for the Palace Theatre, which was previously misidentified as being the same house as the Park.
On October 17, 2005, lostmemory commented:
This was probably either Hugo Taussig, or Hugo Magnuson of the firm Magnuson & Kleinert. Wiseman worked with both at various times following the 1920 death of his partner Arthur Carlson.Ruth Anne Phillips' book Pre-Columbian Revival attributes the design of the 1923 Cameo Theatre to Wiseman and Hugo Taussig. Cezar del Valle’s Brooklyn Theatre Index attributes the Sanders Theatre to Wiseman with Magnuson & Kleinert.
As the C/O for the Carlton names only two architects, it was probably Taussig who worked with Wiseman on this house. In any case, the firm of Carlson & Wiseman was long gone by the time the Carlton Theatre was designed.
Cinema Treasures Cinemalover found two vintage photos of the Park Theatre on this Facebook page. The upper photo appears to be from the late 1960s or early 1970s, and the theater looks closed. The lower photo is probably from the early-mid 1950s, when the house was still in operation.
Prior to April, 1935, this house was called the Castle Square Theatre. The name change to Chateau Theatre was noted in the April 8 issue of The Film Daily.
There might have been three houses called the Joyo Theatre in this neighborhood. A document pertaining to the establishment of a Historic Preservation District says that the original Joyo Theatre opened around 1912 in a building at 6121 Havelock Avenue. If that’s the case, then the Joyo mentioned in the 1908 Billboard items must have been an even earlier house.
The document says that the Joyo moved into the theater at 6102 Havelock in 1937. Prior to that the house had been called the Lyric Theatre. The document gives the opening of the Lyric as ca. 1928. 1928 is also the year given for the opening of the Lyric in an article by Jim McKee in the Lincoln Journal Star. McKee says that his great uncle, Volney Headrick, built the Lyric Theatre.
I’ve also found a house called the Havelock Theatre, operated by Bob Wintersteen, mentioned in The Film Daily of September 10, 1936. I don’t know if this is yet another theater or an aka for the Lyric. A December 15 Film Daily item says that the Havelock had been bought from Wintersteen by C. Fraser, operator of the Joyo Theatre, so this purchase might have led to the newer house being renamed the Joyo, assuming that it had originally been the Lyric, which does seem likely.
This article from the Daily Nebraskan says that the Joyo Theatre was built in 1926.
It had a predecessor, though, as there was a movie house called the Joyo Theatre operating in Lincoln (or Havelock, as the neighborhood appears to have been independent of Lincoln at one time) as far back as 1908, when it was mentioned in multiple issues of The Billboard and once in Variety. It was also mentioned twice in The Moving Picture World in 1916.
The Joyo Theatre in Havelock was also mentioned in The Film Daily in 1927 and 1935. I’ve also found mentions of houses called the Joyo in Fairfield (1938) and Coleridge (1957), Nebraska, but haven’t found any details about either of them.
Here is an announcement about the yet-unnamed Palace Theatre from the April 1, 1935, issue of The Film Daily:
Lee Thomas must have been Lee Arden Thomas who, usually in partnership with Albert Mercier, designed several other theaters in the region. Their partnership, established in 1924, was dissolved in 1934.A photo of the loge section of the recently remodeled Bay Theatre illustrated an ad for Heywood-Wakefield seats on this page of Boxoffice, April 5, 1952.
ChrisB’s photo with a clickable link. The marquee certainly has an Art Deco look, but that facade above it is pure Midcentury Modern. The auditorium looks more Streamline Modern. The Midcentury touch isn’t surprising, as the house was designed by Michael DeAngelis, who was usually ahead of most other theater architects in his willingness to experiment with new styles.