Volume 4 of History of Dakota Territory by George W. Kingsbury says that Asher K. Pay opened the Colonial Theatre on June 13, 1914.
Page 14 of Eric Renshaw’s Forgotten Sioux Falls (Google Books preview has photos of the theater before and after its Egyptian-style remodeling, which the caption says took place in 1926.
Renshaw says that the Colonial opened on January 30, 1915, but I’m inclined to trust Kingsbury, whose book was actually published in 1915. There is also the record of a lawsuit that indicates that at least one of the Colonial’s roof trusses was already in place on February 23, 1914. That would be consistent with a June, 1914, opening.
A December 4, 1926, item in Motion Picture News said: “L. G. Roesner has installed a new heating plant in his State Theatre, at Winona, Minn.”
Winona, by Walter Bennick (Google Books preview) says that the State Theatre was opened in January, 1926, as the Apollo Theatre. It was initially operated by the Beyerstedt brothers, but about six months after the house opened they sold it to Louis Roesner, who renamed it the State Theatre. The book has a ca. 1944 photo of the State.
The Princess Theatre got a paragraph in an article about Detroit’s movie theaters that appeared in the July 15, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
“And just a few more words about the Princess theater, on Woodward avenue, between Congress and Larned streets.
“It is now operated by the Princess Amusement Company, of which J. E. Thomas is president. The theater is in charge of L. A. Chapeton, who formerly was operator at the same house. The Princess was erected in about 1907 and was the first strictly motion picture theater in the city—that is showing pictures exclusively, both the Casino and Bijou showing pictures and a little vaudeville. The Princess seats 316 and the original embellishments are still there, although each year or two they are done over. The Princess was the first house to put in Universal service, and it has been a Universal patron continuously ever since the beginning.”
Earlier in the article, it is noted that the Princess Theatre was originally operated by Mitchell Mark.
The 1919 Sharon directory has the Gable Theatre listed in the alphabetical section (at 58 S. Railroad Avenue), but not in the list of theaters. It also has the Thomas Theatre listed only in the alphabetical section. The only houses on the theater list are the Alpha, Family, Luna, Morgan Grand, and Orpheum, and the Orpheum’s address covers the street number given for the Thomas.
I’ve found another odd thing, this in the May 13, 1921, issue of Variety:
“SHARON QUICK CLOSING
“The Strand, Sharon, Pa. which opened with vaudeville April 20 closed May 7.
“The house plays five sets twice weekly, hooked by Billy Delaney, of the Keith office. Business has been light since the newest change of policy with the early closing following.”
Note that the proposed theater in the April, 1920, magazine article I quoted in a comment yesterday says that the new theater was to be built for the Strand Amusement Company, the same company that owned the Liberty, as noted in the Billboard item cited in the very first comment in this thread. One company building two large theaters in the same small city at the same time doesn’t make sense, so the Strand and the Liberty had to have been the same house. Variety must have confused the name of the operating company for the name of the theater itself, while The Billboard got it right.
I suspect that the Orpheum was the house originally called the Thomas Theatre. The Orpheum’s long address in the “Theatres” listings of the 1919 Sharon directory overlaps the address we have for the Thomas. I’ve been unable to find references to the house under either name later than 1919.
A 1919 Sharon city directory does not list the Thomas Theatre, but it does list an Orpheum Theatre with the address 24-34-40 Shenango. Given the overlap, Orpheum might have been an aka for the Thomas Theatre. The September 4, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World said that the Thomas theater was being closed for remodeling.
Here’s something rather odd. The April 24, 1920, issue of The American Contractor had a notice about a theater to be built in Sharon, and all the particulars- architects, builder, owner- were the same as the Liberty as described in the Billboard item Ken cited, but the location was given as State Street and Porter Street, which is roughly the location of the Columbia Theatre:
“Theater (M. P.): $225,000. 107x 145. State & Porter sts., Sharon, Pa. Archt. Simons, Brittain & English, 335 4th av., Pittsburgh. Owner Strand Amusement Co., Mr. Gable, pres., Sharon. Gen. contr. let to Wishart Sons Co., Sharon. Htg. & plmg. to Sempell Co., Sharon. Elec. wiring to Morganstern Elec. o., 325 2d av., Pittsburgh. Excav.”
I don’t know if the magazine made a mistake about the location, or if Mr. Gable lost the location to the rival company that later built the Columbia, and had to find another location for the Liberty project.
Charles Gable, incidentally, was the uncle of actor Clark Gable, and also owned a house in Sharon called the Family Theatre in the 1910s. I don’t know if the Family is the same house that later was called the Gable Theatre or not, but it was called Gable’s Family Theatre for awhile.
Architect E. E. Clepper’s full name was Edgar Ellis Clepper. He also designed the Luna Theatre and the Alpha Theatre in Sharon, both also in operation by 1912. A biographical sketch published in 1908 also credits him with the Lewis Opera House, but I’ve been unable to discover where that theater was located.
The Luna Theatre’s auditorium originally featured a center aisle, as seen in the photo I linked to in my previous comment, so it must have been reconfigured at some point. The facade was certainly altered from Edgar E. Clepper’s original ornate design, though the five windows on the upper floor in the more recent photo are placed and sized exactly as they were in the 1912 photo. The facade and auditorium were probably remodeled at the same time, and that was probably when the name was changed to Nuluna Theatre.
The Vocal Group Hall of Fame Foundation has a web site with pages about the history of the Columbia Theatre and about the restoration work (“The Museum” link) that is still underway.
Google’s snippet view of Showtime, by Cynthia Farah Haines, says that the Eureka Theatre opened on May 31, 1913, and adds the aka Iris Theatre. Additionally, CinemaTour adds the aka’s Isis Theatre and Chaputlepec Theatre. Presumably it ran Spanish language movies later in its history.
The March 13, 1915, issue of The Construction News had an item that was about the Strand Theatre, though it had not yet been named. It said that plans were being drawn by local architects Parkinson & Dockindorf for a 450-seat moving picture near the corner of 12th (now West Avenue) and Jackson Streets. A.E. Parkinson, the architect, was also the owner of the theater.
Mr. Parkinson was involved in a lawsuit over the theater’s management a few years later, and the record of the suit revels that the Strand opened about Thanksgiving Day, 1915 (November.) It also reveals that Parkinson also owned a house called the Casino Theatre in La Crosse.
The District Police Report for the year ending October 31, 1913, lists Charles L. Higginbotham as the operator of the Globe Theatre. A Charles S. Higginbotham was listed as operator of the Suffolk Theatre. One midle initial or the other might have been an error.
The District Police Report for the year ending October 31, 1916, listed the Globe Theatre in Holyoke as being operated by Alexander Cameron. Cameron had also opened the Strand Theatre around the end of the previous year.
The Grand Theatre was listed in the District Police Report for the year ending October 31, 1917, but not in the following year’s report, or any later report I’ve seen. so it must have closed by the fall of 1918.
The July-December, 1915, edition of Safety Engineering reported that the fire at the Empire Theatre in Holyoke took place on April 22. The fire, which started at the rear of the stage, caused $50,000 damage.
The reason the Olympia Theatre was shown in brown on the Sanborn map that Ron Newman linked to on March 1, 2006, is because it was still under construction at the time the map was drawn. The April 22, 1916, issue of The American contractor reported that architect William Mowll was preparing plans for the Olympia Theatre Company’s new house at Cambridge. The firm of Mowll & Rand also designed the company’s Olympia Theatre at New Bedford, opened the same year.
The Bijou Theatre was in operation by 1913, the year in which it was taken over by Frank Rainault, according to his biography in the Encyclopedia of Massachusetts published in 1916. Shortly before the Encyclopedia was published, Rainault had the Bijou remodeled and expanded. According to items in The American Contractor that year, plans for the project were drawn by Holyoke architect Oscar Beauchemin.
This web page says that the Empire Theatre opened on November 2, 1893. A Springfield Republican article about the event noted that the theater was designed by J. B. McElfatrick & Son, and that the Empire resembled the Court Square Theatre in Springfield, designed by the same firm and opened the previous year.
An 1893 Springfield Republican article about the opening of the Empire Theatre in Holyoke noted that the new house resembled the Court Square Theatre, which had been designed by the same architectural firm, J.B. McElfatrick & Son.
The Empire Theatre was one of two houses listed for Holyoke in the 1906-1907 Cahn guide. It was a ground floor house with 1,050 seats. T. F. Murray was the manager.
The Empire Theatre was listed (without an address) in the District Police Report for the year ending on October 31, 1913. It was one of eight theaters listed for Holyoke.
The January 22, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World carried this item:
“Thomas Murray, whose Empire theater at Holyoke, Mass., burned down several months ago, was in Boston last week and announced that he had secured additional land adjoining the site of the old theater upon which he intends to erect a new structure with a seating capacity of 1,800.”
The only mention of the Star Theatre I’ve found in the trade publications is in the March 18, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World, which says that the Star had just been purchased by Oliver Bernest. The seller’s name was not given.
No theater was listed for the address 147 High Street, or any nearby address, in the 1922 New England Business Directory, which had a total of ten theaters listed. If the Star was indeed the theater built on the site of the Empire, and it had 1,600 seats, I can’t imagine why it closed so soon. Maybe Murray’s rebuilding plans fell through and something more modest was built.
A 1982 Reconnaissance Survey Town Report from the Massachusetts Historical Commission gives the construction year of the Strand Theatre at Holyoke as 1915, and gives the name of the architect as G.P.B. Alderman (George Perkins Bissell Alderman.)
The February 26, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World ran an item saying that two new theaters had recently opened in Holyoke. The larger of them, with 900 seats, was the Strand, operated by Alexander Cameron. The Strand was showing Paramount and General Film releases.
The Strand is listed under Public Halls rather than Theatres in the District Police Report for the year ending October 31, 1916.
This weblog post has a 1922 photo of Maple Street with the Strand Theatre at far right.
Volume 4 of History of Dakota Territory by George W. Kingsbury says that Asher K. Pay opened the Colonial Theatre on June 13, 1914.
Page 14 of Eric Renshaw’s Forgotten Sioux Falls (Google Books preview has photos of the theater before and after its Egyptian-style remodeling, which the caption says took place in 1926.
Renshaw says that the Colonial opened on January 30, 1915, but I’m inclined to trust Kingsbury, whose book was actually published in 1915. There is also the record of a lawsuit that indicates that at least one of the Colonial’s roof trusses was already in place on February 23, 1914. That would be consistent with a June, 1914, opening.
A December 4, 1926, item in Motion Picture News said: “L. G. Roesner has installed a new heating plant in his State Theatre, at Winona, Minn.”
Winona, by Walter Bennick (Google Books preview) says that the State Theatre was opened in January, 1926, as the Apollo Theatre. It was initially operated by the Beyerstedt brothers, but about six months after the house opened they sold it to Louis Roesner, who renamed it the State Theatre. The book has a ca. 1944 photo of the State.
Documents published by the City of Paso Robles indicate that the Park Cinema was designed by local architect Nick Gilman.
This timeline from the Walnut Creek Historical Society says that the Ramona Theatre opened on March 6, 1920.
The Princess Theatre got a paragraph in an article about Detroit’s movie theaters that appeared in the July 15, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World:
Earlier in the article, it is noted that the Princess Theatre was originally operated by Mitchell Mark.The 1919 Sharon directory has the Gable Theatre listed in the alphabetical section (at 58 S. Railroad Avenue), but not in the list of theaters. It also has the Thomas Theatre listed only in the alphabetical section. The only houses on the theater list are the Alpha, Family, Luna, Morgan Grand, and Orpheum, and the Orpheum’s address covers the street number given for the Thomas.
I’ve found another odd thing, this in the May 13, 1921, issue of Variety:
Note that the proposed theater in the April, 1920, magazine article I quoted in a comment yesterday says that the new theater was to be built for the Strand Amusement Company, the same company that owned the Liberty, as noted in the Billboard item cited in the very first comment in this thread. One company building two large theaters in the same small city at the same time doesn’t make sense, so the Strand and the Liberty had to have been the same house. Variety must have confused the name of the operating company for the name of the theater itself, while The Billboard got it right.I suspect that the Orpheum was the house originally called the Thomas Theatre. The Orpheum’s long address in the “Theatres” listings of the 1919 Sharon directory overlaps the address we have for the Thomas. I’ve been unable to find references to the house under either name later than 1919.
A 1919 Sharon city directory does not list the Thomas Theatre, but it does list an Orpheum Theatre with the address 24-34-40 Shenango. Given the overlap, Orpheum might have been an aka for the Thomas Theatre. The September 4, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World said that the Thomas theater was being closed for remodeling.
Here’s something rather odd. The April 24, 1920, issue of The American Contractor had a notice about a theater to be built in Sharon, and all the particulars- architects, builder, owner- were the same as the Liberty as described in the Billboard item Ken cited, but the location was given as State Street and Porter Street, which is roughly the location of the Columbia Theatre:
I don’t know if the magazine made a mistake about the location, or if Mr. Gable lost the location to the rival company that later built the Columbia, and had to find another location for the Liberty project.Charles Gable, incidentally, was the uncle of actor Clark Gable, and also owned a house in Sharon called the Family Theatre in the 1910s. I don’t know if the Family is the same house that later was called the Gable Theatre or not, but it was called Gable’s Family Theatre for awhile.
Architect E. E. Clepper’s full name was Edgar Ellis Clepper. He also designed the Luna Theatre and the Alpha Theatre in Sharon, both also in operation by 1912. A biographical sketch published in 1908 also credits him with the Lewis Opera House, but I’ve been unable to discover where that theater was located.
The Luna Theatre’s auditorium originally featured a center aisle, as seen in the photo I linked to in my previous comment, so it must have been reconfigured at some point. The facade was certainly altered from Edgar E. Clepper’s original ornate design, though the five windows on the upper floor in the more recent photo are placed and sized exactly as they were in the 1912 photo. The facade and auditorium were probably remodeled at the same time, and that was probably when the name was changed to Nuluna Theatre.
The Vocal Group Hall of Fame Foundation has a web site with pages about the history of the Columbia Theatre and about the restoration work (“The Museum” link) that is still underway.
Google’s snippet view of Showtime, by Cynthia Farah Haines, says that the Eureka Theatre opened on May 31, 1913, and adds the aka Iris Theatre. Additionally, CinemaTour adds the aka’s Isis Theatre and Chaputlepec Theatre. Presumably it ran Spanish language movies later in its history.
To get Google Maps to fetch the location of the Harriet Theatre I think we’ll have to change the address to Upton Avenue S.
The March 13, 1915, issue of The Construction News had an item that was about the Strand Theatre, though it had not yet been named. It said that plans were being drawn by local architects Parkinson & Dockindorf for a 450-seat moving picture near the corner of 12th (now West Avenue) and Jackson Streets. A.E. Parkinson, the architect, was also the owner of the theater.
Mr. Parkinson was involved in a lawsuit over the theater’s management a few years later, and the record of the suit revels that the Strand opened about Thanksgiving Day, 1915 (November.) It also reveals that Parkinson also owned a house called the Casino Theatre in La Crosse.
The District Police Report for the year ending October 31, 1913, lists Charles L. Higginbotham as the operator of the Globe Theatre. A Charles S. Higginbotham was listed as operator of the Suffolk Theatre. One midle initial or the other might have been an error.
The District Police Report for the year ending October 31, 1916, listed the Globe Theatre in Holyoke as being operated by Alexander Cameron. Cameron had also opened the Strand Theatre around the end of the previous year.
The Grand Theatre was listed in the District Police Report for the year ending October 31, 1917, but not in the following year’s report, or any later report I’ve seen. so it must have closed by the fall of 1918.
The July-December, 1915, edition of Safety Engineering reported that the fire at the Empire Theatre in Holyoke took place on April 22. The fire, which started at the rear of the stage, caused $50,000 damage.
The reason the Olympia Theatre was shown in brown on the Sanborn map that Ron Newman linked to on March 1, 2006, is because it was still under construction at the time the map was drawn. The April 22, 1916, issue of The American contractor reported that architect William Mowll was preparing plans for the Olympia Theatre Company’s new house at Cambridge. The firm of Mowll & Rand also designed the company’s Olympia Theatre at New Bedford, opened the same year.
The Bijou Theatre was in operation by 1913, the year in which it was taken over by Frank Rainault, according to his biography in the Encyclopedia of Massachusetts published in 1916. Shortly before the Encyclopedia was published, Rainault had the Bijou remodeled and expanded. According to items in The American Contractor that year, plans for the project were drawn by Holyoke architect Oscar Beauchemin.
This web page says that the Empire Theatre opened on November 2, 1893. A Springfield Republican article about the event noted that the theater was designed by J. B. McElfatrick & Son, and that the Empire resembled the Court Square Theatre in Springfield, designed by the same firm and opened the previous year.
An 1893 Springfield Republican article about the opening of the Empire Theatre in Holyoke noted that the new house resembled the Court Square Theatre, which had been designed by the same architectural firm, J.B. McElfatrick & Son.
The Empire Theatre was one of two houses listed for Holyoke in the 1906-1907 Cahn guide. It was a ground floor house with 1,050 seats. T. F. Murray was the manager.
The Empire Theatre was listed (without an address) in the District Police Report for the year ending on October 31, 1913. It was one of eight theaters listed for Holyoke.
The January 22, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World carried this item:
The only mention of the Star Theatre I’ve found in the trade publications is in the March 18, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World, which says that the Star had just been purchased by Oliver Bernest. The seller’s name was not given.No theater was listed for the address 147 High Street, or any nearby address, in the 1922 New England Business Directory, which had a total of ten theaters listed. If the Star was indeed the theater built on the site of the Empire, and it had 1,600 seats, I can’t imagine why it closed so soon. Maybe Murray’s rebuilding plans fell through and something more modest was built.
A 1982 Reconnaissance Survey Town Report from the Massachusetts Historical Commission gives the construction year of the Strand Theatre at Holyoke as 1915, and gives the name of the architect as G.P.B. Alderman (George Perkins Bissell Alderman.)
The February 26, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World ran an item saying that two new theaters had recently opened in Holyoke. The larger of them, with 900 seats, was the Strand, operated by Alexander Cameron. The Strand was showing Paramount and General Film releases.
The Strand is listed under Public Halls rather than Theatres in the District Police Report for the year ending October 31, 1916.
This weblog post has a 1922 photo of Maple Street with the Strand Theatre at far right.