The December 10, 1915, issue of the Aberdeen Herald had this brief item: “Chandler & Ripley, of the Western Circuit Amusement Company, have mortgaged their interests in the Bijou, Rex, and Starland Theaters, to the Aberdeen State Bank for $1,000.” There was an ad for the Weir Theatre on the same page, so both it and the Rex were operating at the same time.
I’ve found no advertising for the Rex in the Herald, nor for the Starland, nor any other mentions of either house. However, there are a few ads for the a movie house called the Dream Theatre, located on Heron Street, from May, 1911, to November, 1915.
The Bijou Theatre is owned by the Aberdeen post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The auditorium itself has not been in use since May, 2012, when the rafters were found to be damaged. The organization plans to repair the structure, replacing the rafters with engineered trusses, according to this recent article in The Daily World. The article notes that the Bijou was built in 1908.
The Bijou Theatre was listed in the 1913-1914 edition of Cahn’s guide. It was a ground floor house with 766 seats, playing vaudeville, stock, and musical comedy.
The March 4, 1913, issue of the Aberdeen Herald reported that the new Weir Theatre had opened the previous night. The program featured several vaudeville acts and two moving pictures.
Weir was the maiden name of the wife of the theater’s owner and operator, Edward Dolan.
Street View is now fixed. The five-story, six-bay office building now on the site replaced both the Strand Theatre building and the adjacent corner building that itself had replaced the Lois Theatre building after the 1911 fire, so the Strand has been demolished.
The 1915 Masonic Temple was the last major project designed by the Seattle architectural firm of Saunders & Lawton. Charles Willard Saunders was the architect of the Seattle Theatre (1892-1893), and in 1909 he and George Willis Lawton, with whom he had formed a partnership in 1898, designed the Alhambra Theatre.
The Alhambra Theatre began its life as a legitimate house operated by the Shuberts. The September 16, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World told the story up to that time:
“SEATTLE, Wash.—The Alhambra, one of the big downtown moving picture theaters owned and operated by Jensen & Von Herberg, is to be opened with Orpheum big time vaudeville on September 24. Carl Reiter, for seven years the manager of the Orpheum here, and last year manager at Portland, will be the local executive in charge. Vice-President L C. Brown and Secretary S. Lansing, of the Orpheum Theater Company, San Francisco, have been here several days negotiating. The lease covers a long period of years, and The Alhambra will be refinished outside and in. Two performances will be given daily.
“The Wilkes Stock Company has retained the lease on the old Orpheum theater and will continue there through the winter.
“This is by no means the first change that the Alhambra has seen. It was first opened in 1909 under Schubert management. Since then it has run the gamut of uses to which a theatrical building may be put. From legitimate to vaudeville, then a combination of vaudeville and pictures, then, as the first theater acquired by Jensen & Von Herberg, recognized as one of the finest and best motion picture theaters in town. Early last spring its bill was changed again to one of vaudeville and pictures and now comes this last change.”
The “last change” turned out not to have been the last after all. Orpheum’s lease was to run for seven years, but the Orpheum circuit soon moved its vaudeville shows to the Moore Theatre, and the Wilkes Stock Company, which had displaced the vaudeville at the Orpheum Theatre, ended up taking over the lease on the Alhambra and renaming the house for itself.
The Alhambra Theatre was designed by one of Seattle’s leading architectural firms of the period, Saunders & Lawton. Charles Willard Saunders and George Willis Lawton were partners from 1898 to 1915. Their last major project as partners was the Masonic Temple on Pine Street which, in 1980, was converted into the Egyptian Theatre by the Seattle International Film Festival. Prior to entering the partnership, Saunders had designed the Seattle Theatre, erected at Third Avenue and Cherry Street in 1892-93.
The Seattle Theatre was built in 1892-93, and was designed in the Romanesque Revival style by architect Charles Willard Saunders. Two years later, Saunders formed a partnership with George Willis Lawton. Saunders & Lawton designed the Alhambra Theatre (1909) and the Masonic Temple (1915) which in 1980 became the Egyptian Theatre.
Mike Rivest’s list has this theater operating from 1914 to 1952, but I think he conflated it with the second Mission Theatre, in the Georgetown district, which opened in 1924.
It looks like I set Street View to the wrong side of the street. The Strand was on the east side. This pre-1911 photo shows the view north along Second Avenue looking across Seneca Street. The Pantages Theatre is on the northeast corner of Second and Seneca, and the Lois Theatre is on the southeast corner. Adjacent to the Lois is a building with a marquee, but I’m unable to read the writing on it. There is also a sign indicating that a five-cent theater might be in the building, which could have been the Ideal/Black Cat.
Comparing this photo with the photo of the Alaska Theatre in The Moving Picture World it looks as though the Alaska building occupied part of the lot where the Lois Theatre had been as well as the entire lot where the Ideal had been. If that was the same building the Ideal was in, it was altered beyond recognition.
John and James Clemmer originally announced that their new moving picture theater on Second Avenue would be called the New Empress. The October 28, 1911, issue of The Moving Picture World had this story:
“Seattle, Wash. — A modern, up-to-date $100,000 exclusive photoplay house on Second Avenue is the latest big addition to Seattle’s theatrical enterprises. The new theater will be located at 1412 Second Avenue, between Union and Pike Streets. John H. Clemmer, owner of two theaters in Spokane, and his son, James Q. Clemmer, owner of the Dream Theater in this city, are financing the moving picture venture, and they assert that their new house will be the finest of its kind in the West, and will be opened to the public about March 1. Plans for the new theater are already being drawn by Architect E. W. Houghton, of this city. The theater will be 60 feet by 108 feet, and will seat about 1,500 people. This new enterprise will be known as the New Empress Theater.”
Edwin W. Houghton was very busy around this time, designing several theaters in Seattle and the northwest in the early 1910s. From 1909 to 1911, B. Marcus Pritica was a draftsman in Houghton’s office, but I don’t know if he was there long enough in 1911 to have worked on the Clemmer Theatre.
The July 4, 1914, issue of Electrical Review and Western Electrician featured an article about the Mission Theatre and its unique lighting system (the Google Books scan is askew, and the second page is partly unreadable.) There are photos showing the Mission style facade, the projection booth, and the auditorium with its unusual artificial skylight effect.
In 1916, the first Mission Theatre was being operated by Jensen & Von Herberg. A January 16 article in The Moving Picture World about the opening of the chain’s new Coliseum Theatre noted that they also operated the Alhambra and Liberty Theatres.
The Mission Theatre had a very brief run. An item in the December 20, 1919, issue of Domestic Engineering reported that the theater had been leased to a Chinese syndicate who planned to convert the building into a large cafe.
The 1919 project I cited in my previous comment was not for the original construction of the Liberty Theatre, but was probably for alterations. History Link says that the Liberty Theatre opened on March 12, 1918. It was the first theater built by Frederick Mercy, who by that time already controlled the four other theaters in Yakima: the Majestic, the Empire, the Avenue, and the Yakima. In 1920, he built the Mercy Theatre, later the Capitol.
Mercy must have overextended himself, as by 1920 he was operating the theaters in Yakima in partnership with Jensen and Von Herberg.
Here’s something about the Strand from the October 6, 1917, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“Seattle to Have Third Orchestra for
Interpreting Pictures.
“Seattle, Wash. — When the Strand theater opens with its first Goldwyn picture, ‘Polly of the Circus,’ on September 22, the house will be all dressed up with new carpets and new paint; and the picture will be interpreted by a new orchestra of twelve expert soloists led by the famous violinist, M. Cherniavsky, one-time teacher of Mischa Elman. With these improvements in his house and in his policy Mr. Smythe expects to capture his share of the increased business that is coming to Seattle theaters with better general business.
“With so many added expenses the Strand manager has found it necessary to raise his admission price in the evening to 20 cents, the matinee price remaining at 15 cents. He is the second theater manager to raise to 20 cents, James Q. Clemmer having made the same change on August 25.”
The October 6, 1917, issue of The Moving Picture World gave the opening date of the American Theatre as August 25:
“Big Publicity for Opening of American Theater.
“Walla Walla, Wash.— When A. W. Eiler opened the new American theater on August 25 the entire motion picture section of the leading paper of the town was devoted to his house. The six pages which made up this section had nothing on them that did not pertain to the American theater. The feature of the opening day was Norma Talmadge in "The Law of Compensation,” handled by the De Luxe Feature Film Company of Seattle.“
This Pantages Theatre opened in August, 1915. An article in the October 13 issue of the Spokane Spokesman-Review that year told of a Spokane exhibitor and his partner from Montana who had taken a lease on the Lois Theatre in Seattle and planned to operate it as a movie house. The article said that the Lois Theatre was the old Pantages Theatre, and that Alexander Pantages had been operating it as a combination house since opening the new Pantages Theatre in August.
I noticed that the ad for the Ideal and one of the ads for the Black Cat both use the line “Next Door to the Lois”. That must have been the Lois Theatre, a house that Alexander Pantages began operating as a legitimate stock theater in 1905. It was named for his wife, and was located on the corner of 2nd and Seneca, so the Strand could not have been too far from that intersection.
As near as I can discover, the Lois never showed movies, but was destroyed by a fire in December, 1911. When a new Pantages Theatre opened in 1915, the old Pantages was renamed the Lois and became a movie house.
Also, a modern office block stands where the Strand used to be, so we can mark this theater demolished.
In Street View, it looks like the branch Post Office at this address occupies the former lobby of the theater. The furniture store that occupies some of the storefronts along the side of the auditorium advertises a 20,000 square foot showroom. That has to include the auditorium itself.
There is also a women’s clothing store in two of the storefronts, but it probably doesn’t extend into the auditorium. I don’t know why the Internet says the furniture store is at 3448 Jerome. In Street View that’s just a small building with an H & R Block office in it. Maybe the furniture store added that space to its operation since August, 2011, when Google’s camera car went by.
The link to Historic Aerials in my previous comment no longer fetches the Maple Theater’s location. Here is a fresh link. The 1952 view is the clearest.
The address 5206 Maple Avenue is for the first Maple Theatre. The second Maple was at 5139 Maple. That’s the one in the aerial photos.
Satellite View says paulnelson is correct. The building is still standing. Even the stage house is still there.
Also, we have our Google Street View set to the wrong side of the street, and a bit too far south. The Egyptian Theatre’s entrance was where Aladdin Falafel and the storefronts either side of it are now. The Dollar Tree store tdickensheets mentions is at the stage end of the theater.
If you take Street View around to the Brooklyn Avenue side of the block you can see the theater building across the parking lot, and it’s pretty obvious what it used to be.
This article about the New Alaska Theatre appeared in The Moving Picture World of November 14, 1914. It says that the theater was designed by the local architectural firm of W. H. Milner & Co.
This essay from The Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History says that the Alaska Theatre was on the site of an earlier movie house called the Black Cat Theatre, which itself had opened in 1909 as the Ideal Theatre, the name having been changed in 1911. The essay claims that the existing building was extensively remodeled when it became the Alaska Theatre. I’ve been unable to find any period sources with information about the Ideal or the Black Cat. The essay also says that the Strand operated well into the 1930s.
The new Majestic Bay Theatre has its own Cinema Treasures page. See the earlier comment by kateymac01 on May 6, 2005, quoting the newspaper article which says that the developers were unable to save any of the original Bay Theatre because the structure was beyond salvaging. If an old theater is demolished to make way for an entirely new building on the same site, the new theater will usually get its own CT page.
The December 3, 1921, issue of Exhibitors Trade Review noted the recent opening of Michael Comerford’s State Theatre in Scranton. The Miles Theatre, which in 1923 would become Comerford’s Capitol Theatre, had been opened by H. S. Miles about the same time.
The October, 1916, issue of the Scranton Board of Trade Journal said that Michael Comerford’s Strand Theatre had been opened on September 23. Leon H. Lempert Jr. was the architect for the conversion of Robert W. Gibson’s 1901 Merchants and Mechanics Bank Building and an adjacent structure into a theater. Construction supervision was by local architect H. C. Rutherford.
Nancy McDonald’s If You Can Play Scranton says that the Capitol Theatre opened as the Miles Theatre on November 7, 1921. It started out attempting to compete with the Poli Theatre, then Scranton’s leading vaudeville house, but had little success. In 1923 it was sold to Michael Comerford who renamed it the Capitol Theatre. Comerford’s management so completely reversed its fortunes that he was able to buy Poli’s Theatre in 1925.
The Capitol operated as a combination house for many years, and though after the 1920s it ran movies most of the time, through the 1930s and 1940s it also hosted performances by the popular bands of the day, and even presented occasional vaudeville shows.
According to this web page, this 1954 advertisement is from the Capitol Theatre in Scranton. Assuming the attribution is correct (the town’s name does not appear on the ad), this is the most recent mention of the Capitol I’ve found.
The December 10, 1915, issue of the Aberdeen Herald had this brief item: “Chandler & Ripley, of the Western Circuit Amusement Company, have mortgaged their interests in the Bijou, Rex, and Starland Theaters, to the Aberdeen State Bank for $1,000.” There was an ad for the Weir Theatre on the same page, so both it and the Rex were operating at the same time.
I’ve found no advertising for the Rex in the Herald, nor for the Starland, nor any other mentions of either house. However, there are a few ads for the a movie house called the Dream Theatre, located on Heron Street, from May, 1911, to November, 1915.
The Bijou Theatre is owned by the Aberdeen post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The auditorium itself has not been in use since May, 2012, when the rafters were found to be damaged. The organization plans to repair the structure, replacing the rafters with engineered trusses, according to this recent article in The Daily World. The article notes that the Bijou was built in 1908.
The Bijou Theatre was listed in the 1913-1914 edition of Cahn’s guide. It was a ground floor house with 766 seats, playing vaudeville, stock, and musical comedy.
The March 4, 1913, issue of the Aberdeen Herald reported that the new Weir Theatre had opened the previous night. The program featured several vaudeville acts and two moving pictures.
Weir was the maiden name of the wife of the theater’s owner and operator, Edward Dolan.
Street View is now fixed. The five-story, six-bay office building now on the site replaced both the Strand Theatre building and the adjacent corner building that itself had replaced the Lois Theatre building after the 1911 fire, so the Strand has been demolished.
The 1915 Masonic Temple was the last major project designed by the Seattle architectural firm of Saunders & Lawton. Charles Willard Saunders was the architect of the Seattle Theatre (1892-1893), and in 1909 he and George Willis Lawton, with whom he had formed a partnership in 1898, designed the Alhambra Theatre.
The Alhambra Theatre began its life as a legitimate house operated by the Shuberts. The September 16, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World told the story up to that time:
The “last change” turned out not to have been the last after all. Orpheum’s lease was to run for seven years, but the Orpheum circuit soon moved its vaudeville shows to the Moore Theatre, and the Wilkes Stock Company, which had displaced the vaudeville at the Orpheum Theatre, ended up taking over the lease on the Alhambra and renaming the house for itself.The Alhambra Theatre was designed by one of Seattle’s leading architectural firms of the period, Saunders & Lawton. Charles Willard Saunders and George Willis Lawton were partners from 1898 to 1915. Their last major project as partners was the Masonic Temple on Pine Street which, in 1980, was converted into the Egyptian Theatre by the Seattle International Film Festival. Prior to entering the partnership, Saunders had designed the Seattle Theatre, erected at Third Avenue and Cherry Street in 1892-93.
The Seattle Theatre was built in 1892-93, and was designed in the Romanesque Revival style by architect Charles Willard Saunders. Two years later, Saunders formed a partnership with George Willis Lawton. Saunders & Lawton designed the Alhambra Theatre (1909) and the Masonic Temple (1915) which in 1980 became the Egyptian Theatre.
I found only the one listing, giving Fourth Avenue as the location.
A comment by David Jeffers on this web page gives the address of the Mission Theatre as 1412-14 Fourth Avenue.
Mike Rivest’s list has this theater operating from 1914 to 1952, but I think he conflated it with the second Mission Theatre, in the Georgetown district, which opened in 1924.
It looks like I set Street View to the wrong side of the street. The Strand was on the east side. This pre-1911 photo shows the view north along Second Avenue looking across Seneca Street. The Pantages Theatre is on the northeast corner of Second and Seneca, and the Lois Theatre is on the southeast corner. Adjacent to the Lois is a building with a marquee, but I’m unable to read the writing on it. There is also a sign indicating that a five-cent theater might be in the building, which could have been the Ideal/Black Cat.
Comparing this photo with the photo of the Alaska Theatre in The Moving Picture World it looks as though the Alaska building occupied part of the lot where the Lois Theatre had been as well as the entire lot where the Ideal had been. If that was the same building the Ideal was in, it was altered beyond recognition.
John and James Clemmer originally announced that their new moving picture theater on Second Avenue would be called the New Empress. The October 28, 1911, issue of The Moving Picture World had this story:
Edwin W. Houghton was very busy around this time, designing several theaters in Seattle and the northwest in the early 1910s. From 1909 to 1911, B. Marcus Pritica was a draftsman in Houghton’s office, but I don’t know if he was there long enough in 1911 to have worked on the Clemmer Theatre.The July 4, 1914, issue of Electrical Review and Western Electrician featured an article about the Mission Theatre and its unique lighting system (the Google Books scan is askew, and the second page is partly unreadable.) There are photos showing the Mission style facade, the projection booth, and the auditorium with its unusual artificial skylight effect.
In 1916, the first Mission Theatre was being operated by Jensen & Von Herberg. A January 16 article in The Moving Picture World about the opening of the chain’s new Coliseum Theatre noted that they also operated the Alhambra and Liberty Theatres.
The Mission Theatre had a very brief run. An item in the December 20, 1919, issue of Domestic Engineering reported that the theater had been leased to a Chinese syndicate who planned to convert the building into a large cafe.
The 1919 project I cited in my previous comment was not for the original construction of the Liberty Theatre, but was probably for alterations. History Link says that the Liberty Theatre opened on March 12, 1918. It was the first theater built by Frederick Mercy, who by that time already controlled the four other theaters in Yakima: the Majestic, the Empire, the Avenue, and the Yakima. In 1920, he built the Mercy Theatre, later the Capitol.
Mercy must have overextended himself, as by 1920 he was operating the theaters in Yakima in partnership with Jensen and Von Herberg.
Here’s something about the Strand from the October 6, 1917, issue of The Moving Picture World:
The October 6, 1917, issue of The Moving Picture World gave the opening date of the American Theatre as August 25:
This Pantages Theatre opened in August, 1915. An article in the October 13 issue of the Spokane Spokesman-Review that year told of a Spokane exhibitor and his partner from Montana who had taken a lease on the Lois Theatre in Seattle and planned to operate it as a movie house. The article said that the Lois Theatre was the old Pantages Theatre, and that Alexander Pantages had been operating it as a combination house since opening the new Pantages Theatre in August.
I noticed that the ad for the Ideal and one of the ads for the Black Cat both use the line “Next Door to the Lois”. That must have been the Lois Theatre, a house that Alexander Pantages began operating as a legitimate stock theater in 1905. It was named for his wife, and was located on the corner of 2nd and Seneca, so the Strand could not have been too far from that intersection.
As near as I can discover, the Lois never showed movies, but was destroyed by a fire in December, 1911. When a new Pantages Theatre opened in 1915, the old Pantages was renamed the Lois and became a movie house.
Also, a modern office block stands where the Strand used to be, so we can mark this theater demolished.
In Street View, it looks like the branch Post Office at this address occupies the former lobby of the theater. The furniture store that occupies some of the storefronts along the side of the auditorium advertises a 20,000 square foot showroom. That has to include the auditorium itself.
There is also a women’s clothing store in two of the storefronts, but it probably doesn’t extend into the auditorium. I don’t know why the Internet says the furniture store is at 3448 Jerome. In Street View that’s just a small building with an H & R Block office in it. Maybe the furniture store added that space to its operation since August, 2011, when Google’s camera car went by.
The link to Historic Aerials in my previous comment no longer fetches the Maple Theater’s location. Here is a fresh link. The 1952 view is the clearest.
The address 5206 Maple Avenue is for the first Maple Theatre. The second Maple was at 5139 Maple. That’s the one in the aerial photos.
Satellite View says paulnelson is correct. The building is still standing. Even the stage house is still there.
Also, we have our Google Street View set to the wrong side of the street, and a bit too far south. The Egyptian Theatre’s entrance was where Aladdin Falafel and the storefronts either side of it are now. The Dollar Tree store tdickensheets mentions is at the stage end of the theater.
If you take Street View around to the Brooklyn Avenue side of the block you can see the theater building across the parking lot, and it’s pretty obvious what it used to be.
This article about the New Alaska Theatre appeared in The Moving Picture World of November 14, 1914. It says that the theater was designed by the local architectural firm of W. H. Milner & Co.
This essay from The Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History says that the Alaska Theatre was on the site of an earlier movie house called the Black Cat Theatre, which itself had opened in 1909 as the Ideal Theatre, the name having been changed in 1911. The essay claims that the existing building was extensively remodeled when it became the Alaska Theatre. I’ve been unable to find any period sources with information about the Ideal or the Black Cat. The essay also says that the Strand operated well into the 1930s.
The new Majestic Bay Theatre has its own Cinema Treasures page. See the earlier comment by kateymac01 on May 6, 2005, quoting the newspaper article which says that the developers were unable to save any of the original Bay Theatre because the structure was beyond salvaging. If an old theater is demolished to make way for an entirely new building on the same site, the new theater will usually get its own CT page.
The December 3, 1921, issue of Exhibitors Trade Review noted the recent opening of Michael Comerford’s State Theatre in Scranton. The Miles Theatre, which in 1923 would become Comerford’s Capitol Theatre, had been opened by H. S. Miles about the same time.
The October, 1916, issue of the Scranton Board of Trade Journal said that Michael Comerford’s Strand Theatre had been opened on September 23. Leon H. Lempert Jr. was the architect for the conversion of Robert W. Gibson’s 1901 Merchants and Mechanics Bank Building and an adjacent structure into a theater. Construction supervision was by local architect H. C. Rutherford.
Nancy McDonald’s If You Can Play Scranton says that the Capitol Theatre opened as the Miles Theatre on November 7, 1921. It started out attempting to compete with the Poli Theatre, then Scranton’s leading vaudeville house, but had little success. In 1923 it was sold to Michael Comerford who renamed it the Capitol Theatre. Comerford’s management so completely reversed its fortunes that he was able to buy Poli’s Theatre in 1925.
The Capitol operated as a combination house for many years, and though after the 1920s it ran movies most of the time, through the 1930s and 1940s it also hosted performances by the popular bands of the day, and even presented occasional vaudeville shows.
According to this web page, this 1954 advertisement is from the Capitol Theatre in Scranton. Assuming the attribution is correct (the town’s name does not appear on the ad), this is the most recent mention of the Capitol I’ve found.