The May 19, 1883, issue of The American Architect and Building News said that a theater to be built at the northeast corner of Broadway and 35th Street was being designed by architect John Sexton.
The Internet Broadway Database page for this theater says that it was designed by the architectural firm of Rose & Stone. This was the 1894 remodeling project, as noted in the June 16, 1894, issue of Real Estate Record and Builders Guide.
The original building as designed by Sexton was a single storey. In 1908, the building suffered a fire which led to the removal of the second floor added by Rose & Stone in 1894.
The Palace Theatre is on the right in this picture postcard featuring a nocturnal view of Ouellette Avenue in the 1950s.
The Allen Theatre in Windsor was one of several houses designed for the chain by architect C. Howard Crane. This was noted in an edition of the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Volume 28, published in 1920. The publication isn’t available online, so I don’t know if there are any illustrations or not.
Google Books lists two libraries that have copies, both in England (University of Leicester, David Wilson Library, Leicester, and University of the West of England, Frenchay Campus Library, Frenchay, Bristol.)
Does anyone know if the building at 2224 Broadway, Gary, now housing the Safe and Sound Senior Citizen Social Club, was once a movie theater? The front looks to be about 1940s vintage, though it might have been the result of a remodeling.
The Palm Theatre appears to have been on East Railroad Street a few doors north of Depot Street. Google’s camera car didn’t travel up that block of Railroad Street, but a building visible from the intersection looks like the one in the photo above. Google Street View is dated January, 2008.
A house called the Majestic Theatre as operating at Muncie as early as 1909, when it was mentioned in the March issue of The Nickelodeon. The address was not mentioned, so I don’t know if it was the same house that later became the Liberty. The building in Street View appears to date from the late 19th or very early 20th century, though, so it could well be the same theater.
Konrad Schiecke’s Historic Movie Theatres in Illinois, 1883-1960 says that the Metropole Theatre at 238 W. 31st Street opened in 1923. This might be correct. An article in the March, 1909, issue of The Nickelodeon mentions the Metropole Theatre, giving its location as Wentworth Avenue and 31st Street. That’s about a block east of 238 31st, so perhaps the house simply moved to a new location about 1923.
The William Swanson Company was operating a movie house called the Roseland Theatre in this neighborhood at least as early as September, 1908. I haven’t discovered the exact location of this early theater, so I don’t know if it was this same house and it was later expanded (it seated fewer than 600 in 1909), or if the 1914 Roseland was an entirely new theater that replaced the original.
Our Movie Houses: A History of Film and Cinematic Innovation in Central New York, by Norman O. Keim, says that the Crescent Theatre lasted only through the silent era. The Crescent was the first large theater built by the Cahill brothers on South Salina Street, and the first theater in Syracuse built specifically for movie exhibition.
Contracts had been awarded for a theater to be built at 711-713 Commercial Street in Atchison, according to an item in the May 23, 1914, issue of The American Contractor. Local architect J. G. Johnson had designed the project.
I’ve found a couple of web sites (including Wikipedia’s article on downtown Omaha) that say the Boyd Theatre was demolished in 1920, but I’ve also found an announcement of the plans to demolish the theater in the May 23, 1914, issue of The American Contractor. The item said that preliminary plans for the addition to the C.B. Nash Co. department store to be built on the theater’s site were in progress.
Although the Homestake Opera House was devastated by a major fire on April 2, 1984, leaving almost nothing but the brick walls standing, the citizens of Lead voted to have the building restored. The gradual restoration continues under the auspices of the theater’s current owners, the non-profit Historic Homestake Opera House Society, which bought the building from the city in 2005. The official web site has a history of the theater and some photos, as well as a calender of scheduled events.
The article Tinseltoes linked to says that the Homestake Opera House opened on August 31, 1914. Construction was already underway when the August 23, 1913, issue of The Construction News reported on the project:
“Lead, S. D.—Opera House. $20,000. Brk. Work under way. Gen. contr., Wm. Bartlett, Lead. S. D.. Arch., Shattuck & Hussey, 19 S. La Salle St., Chicago, Ill. Owner, Home Stake Mining Co. R. P. Blackstone, Lead, S. D.”
Shattuck & Hussey (principals Walter F. Shattuck and Harry H. Hussey) was a well-known Chicago firm that specialized primarily in the design of YMCA buildings.
The Truman history web page cited in earlier comments also says that the “Avon Theatre opened for the first time” in 1934. Could that have been another aka for this house? Prior to the 1950 census, Truman’s population was always below 1000, so I can’t imagine the town supporting two theaters at once. Either there must have been a name change, or the Cozy was closed and the Avon was a new theater that replaced it.
This photo of the Boyd Theatre probably dates from the late 1890s or early 1900s. Using maximum zoom, it can be seen that the posters in front of the theater advertise Anna Held, who Florenz Ziegfeld brought to the United States in 1896.
The facade of the theater exemplifies the commercial phase of the Romanesque Revival style of architecture. An article about the soon-to-open theater in the August 31, 1891, issue of the Omaha Daily Bee said that the interior of the house was also done in what it called the “modern Romanesque” style.
The Boyd Theatre was designed in the St. Louis office of J. B. McElfatrick & Sons. This office was headed by John McElfatrick’s elder son, J. Morgan McElfatrick, who died August 28, 1891, a few days before the Boyd Theatre opened. He was 38 years old.
A scan of the Daily Bee article is online here as part of the Library of Congress’s “Chronicling America” collection.
In this weblog post, a former patron of the Co-Ed Theatre offers a brief reminiscence of it. The page also has an interior photo of the restaurant that now occupies the building. The floor still slopes downward toward the end that had the screen.
This is a rather belated reply to KJB2012’s question about the origin of the Nixon Theatre’s name. The original owner of the Nixon Theatre was Samuel F. Nixon-Nirdlinger, a theater operator based in Philadelphia in the late 19th and early 20th century. He owned several theaters in Pennsylvania, and in 1896 was one of the six founders of the notorious Theatrical Syndicate, which for many years controlled bookings for most of the legitimate theaters in the United States.
The April 29, 1916, issue of The American Contractor identified the architect of F.J. Dion’s new Orpheum Theatre at Franklin as Harvey Brakeman, Sandy Lake, Pennsylvania.
This RootsWeb page about the Metsker family mentions Clay Metsker’s Rialto Theatre, and says that the groundbreaking for the project took place on April 5, 1920.
On April 21, 2009, the South Bend Tribune reported that a fire the previous Sunday had caused $500,000 damage to the Rialto Theatre building and adjacent structures in Plymouth. The owner of the building said that repairs would probably take 45 days, but in the Google Street View of the building, dated August, 2009, one of the storefronts still had its windows covered up, though the other store in the building was already open again.
The article gives the address of the building as 207 N. Michigan Street, but it also covers the lot at 209. The ground floor has been converted entirely to retail use. I’ve been unable to find a closing date.
The Rodgers Theatre has been closed since 2006. The most recent article I can find about it is this one from the Corning Observer of January 31 this year. It says that the renovations are proceeding, and at that time new bathrooms were being built.
The Rodgers Theatre was donated to the City of Corning by Daniel and Wealthy Rodgers in 1991, along with an endowment of $50,000 toward its maintenance. The current renovations are being paid for by funds from various sources, including grants, municipal funds, and donations. The goal is to convert the building into a community center with a movie theater included.
The article says that the Rodgers Theatre was built in 1935. Unless information has been lost over the years and it was actually built earlier, that means the house would not be the 1928 project mentioned on the California Index card that I cited in my comment of September 26, 2008.
The Iowa Library Quarterly for January, February and March, 1914, says that the Tuesday Club, a women’s organization in Storm Lake, had raised funds for their local library by holding a candy and popcorn sale at the World, Princess, and Palace Theatres.
Under the theater name in the first photo Bill linked to there is a plaque reading “Clay W. Metsker, Owner”. The Rialto must have been the project mentioned in the May 8, 1920, issue of Indiana Construction Recorder, which said that a two story theater, 42x126 feet, was being built at Plymouth for C.W. Metsker. The architect was R.L. Simmons of Elkhart.
The Rialto Theatre building is listed on LoopNet as being at 209 N. Michigan Street, but it is currently off the market.
This article from the Rochester Sentinal says that Charles Krieghbaum bought the Paramount Theatre after he arrived in Rochester in 1922. In 1924 he opened the much larger Char-Bell Theatre, now called the Times Theatre. The article doesn’t say whether or not he continued to operate the Paramount for the last year of its life or if he sold it to another operator.
Part one of the Sentinal article about Rochester’s movie houses says that the Paramount replaced the My Show Theatre. Presumably the My Show occupied the same storefront as the Paramount (now the north half of the B&B Men’s Wear store), but the article doesn’t specify that.
The Paramount Theatre was mentioned in the February 5, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World, which said that brothers Clyde and Sydney Wilson had bought the house from Ray Blausser. The Wilsons had also bought another Rochester house, the Kai-Gee Theatre, from Roy Shanks.
I’ve uploaded a 1910 photo of Clune’s Broadway Theatre to the photo section. It looks like the theater was not open yet when the photo was taken, though construction had apparently been completed.
The May 19, 1883, issue of The American Architect and Building News said that a theater to be built at the northeast corner of Broadway and 35th Street was being designed by architect John Sexton.
The Internet Broadway Database page for this theater says that it was designed by the architectural firm of Rose & Stone. This was the 1894 remodeling project, as noted in the June 16, 1894, issue of Real Estate Record and Builders Guide.
The original building as designed by Sexton was a single storey. In 1908, the building suffered a fire which led to the removal of the second floor added by Rose & Stone in 1894.
The Palace Theatre is on the right in this picture postcard featuring a nocturnal view of Ouellette Avenue in the 1950s.
The Allen Theatre in Windsor was one of several houses designed for the chain by architect C. Howard Crane. This was noted in an edition of the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Volume 28, published in 1920. The publication isn’t available online, so I don’t know if there are any illustrations or not.
Google Books lists two libraries that have copies, both in England (University of Leicester, David Wilson Library, Leicester, and University of the West of England, Frenchay Campus Library, Frenchay, Bristol.)
Does anyone know if the building at 2224 Broadway, Gary, now housing the Safe and Sound Senior Citizen Social Club, was once a movie theater? The front looks to be about 1940s vintage, though it might have been the result of a remodeling.
The Palm Theatre appears to have been on East Railroad Street a few doors north of Depot Street. Google’s camera car didn’t travel up that block of Railroad Street, but a building visible from the intersection looks like the one in the photo above. Google Street View is dated January, 2008.
The Palm Theatre at Meigs, Georgia, is mentioned in the 1940 International Motion Picture Almanac.
A house called the Majestic Theatre as operating at Muncie as early as 1909, when it was mentioned in the March issue of The Nickelodeon. The address was not mentioned, so I don’t know if it was the same house that later became the Liberty. The building in Street View appears to date from the late 19th or very early 20th century, though, so it could well be the same theater.
Konrad Schiecke’s Historic Movie Theatres in Illinois, 1883-1960 says that the Metropole Theatre at 238 W. 31st Street opened in 1923. This might be correct. An article in the March, 1909, issue of The Nickelodeon mentions the Metropole Theatre, giving its location as Wentworth Avenue and 31st Street. That’s about a block east of 238 31st, so perhaps the house simply moved to a new location about 1923.
The William Swanson Company was operating a movie house called the Roseland Theatre in this neighborhood at least as early as September, 1908. I haven’t discovered the exact location of this early theater, so I don’t know if it was this same house and it was later expanded (it seated fewer than 600 in 1909), or if the 1914 Roseland was an entirely new theater that replaced the original.
Our Movie Houses: A History of Film and Cinematic Innovation in Central New York, by Norman O. Keim, says that the Crescent Theatre lasted only through the silent era. The Crescent was the first large theater built by the Cahill brothers on South Salina Street, and the first theater in Syracuse built specifically for movie exhibition.
Contracts had been awarded for a theater to be built at 711-713 Commercial Street in Atchison, according to an item in the May 23, 1914, issue of The American Contractor. Local architect J. G. Johnson had designed the project.
I’ve found a couple of web sites (including Wikipedia’s article on downtown Omaha) that say the Boyd Theatre was demolished in 1920, but I’ve also found an announcement of the plans to demolish the theater in the May 23, 1914, issue of The American Contractor. The item said that preliminary plans for the addition to the C.B. Nash Co. department store to be built on the theater’s site were in progress.
Although the Homestake Opera House was devastated by a major fire on April 2, 1984, leaving almost nothing but the brick walls standing, the citizens of Lead voted to have the building restored. The gradual restoration continues under the auspices of the theater’s current owners, the non-profit Historic Homestake Opera House Society, which bought the building from the city in 2005. The official web site has a history of the theater and some photos, as well as a calender of scheduled events.
The article Tinseltoes linked to says that the Homestake Opera House opened on August 31, 1914. Construction was already underway when the August 23, 1913, issue of The Construction News reported on the project:
Shattuck & Hussey (principals Walter F. Shattuck and Harry H. Hussey) was a well-known Chicago firm that specialized primarily in the design of YMCA buildings.The Truman history web page cited in earlier comments also says that the “Avon Theatre opened for the first time” in 1934. Could that have been another aka for this house? Prior to the 1950 census, Truman’s population was always below 1000, so I can’t imagine the town supporting two theaters at once. Either there must have been a name change, or the Cozy was closed and the Avon was a new theater that replaced it.
This photo of the Boyd Theatre probably dates from the late 1890s or early 1900s. Using maximum zoom, it can be seen that the posters in front of the theater advertise Anna Held, who Florenz Ziegfeld brought to the United States in 1896.
The facade of the theater exemplifies the commercial phase of the Romanesque Revival style of architecture. An article about the soon-to-open theater in the August 31, 1891, issue of the Omaha Daily Bee said that the interior of the house was also done in what it called the “modern Romanesque” style.
The Boyd Theatre was designed in the St. Louis office of J. B. McElfatrick & Sons. This office was headed by John McElfatrick’s elder son, J. Morgan McElfatrick, who died August 28, 1891, a few days before the Boyd Theatre opened. He was 38 years old.
A scan of the Daily Bee article is online here as part of the Library of Congress’s “Chronicling America” collection.
In this weblog post, a former patron of the Co-Ed Theatre offers a brief reminiscence of it. The page also has an interior photo of the restaurant that now occupies the building. The floor still slopes downward toward the end that had the screen.
This is a rather belated reply to KJB2012’s question about the origin of the Nixon Theatre’s name. The original owner of the Nixon Theatre was Samuel F. Nixon-Nirdlinger, a theater operator based in Philadelphia in the late 19th and early 20th century. He owned several theaters in Pennsylvania, and in 1896 was one of the six founders of the notorious Theatrical Syndicate, which for many years controlled bookings for most of the legitimate theaters in the United States.
The April 29, 1916, issue of The American Contractor identified the architect of F.J. Dion’s new Orpheum Theatre at Franklin as Harvey Brakeman, Sandy Lake, Pennsylvania.
This RootsWeb page about the Metsker family mentions Clay Metsker’s Rialto Theatre, and says that the groundbreaking for the project took place on April 5, 1920.
On April 21, 2009, the South Bend Tribune reported that a fire the previous Sunday had caused $500,000 damage to the Rialto Theatre building and adjacent structures in Plymouth. The owner of the building said that repairs would probably take 45 days, but in the Google Street View of the building, dated August, 2009, one of the storefronts still had its windows covered up, though the other store in the building was already open again.
The article gives the address of the building as 207 N. Michigan Street, but it also covers the lot at 209. The ground floor has been converted entirely to retail use. I’ve been unable to find a closing date.
The Rodgers Theatre has been closed since 2006. The most recent article I can find about it is this one from the Corning Observer of January 31 this year. It says that the renovations are proceeding, and at that time new bathrooms were being built.
The Rodgers Theatre was donated to the City of Corning by Daniel and Wealthy Rodgers in 1991, along with an endowment of $50,000 toward its maintenance. The current renovations are being paid for by funds from various sources, including grants, municipal funds, and donations. The goal is to convert the building into a community center with a movie theater included.
The article says that the Rodgers Theatre was built in 1935. Unless information has been lost over the years and it was actually built earlier, that means the house would not be the 1928 project mentioned on the California Index card that I cited in my comment of September 26, 2008.
The Iowa Library Quarterly for January, February and March, 1914, says that the Tuesday Club, a women’s organization in Storm Lake, had raised funds for their local library by holding a candy and popcorn sale at the World, Princess, and Palace Theatres.
Under the theater name in the first photo Bill linked to there is a plaque reading “Clay W. Metsker, Owner”. The Rialto must have been the project mentioned in the May 8, 1920, issue of Indiana Construction Recorder, which said that a two story theater, 42x126 feet, was being built at Plymouth for C.W. Metsker. The architect was R.L. Simmons of Elkhart.
The Rialto Theatre building is listed on LoopNet as being at 209 N. Michigan Street, but it is currently off the market.
This article from the Rochester Sentinal says that Charles Krieghbaum bought the Paramount Theatre after he arrived in Rochester in 1922. In 1924 he opened the much larger Char-Bell Theatre, now called the Times Theatre. The article doesn’t say whether or not he continued to operate the Paramount for the last year of its life or if he sold it to another operator.
Part one of the Sentinal article about Rochester’s movie houses says that the Paramount replaced the My Show Theatre. Presumably the My Show occupied the same storefront as the Paramount (now the north half of the B&B Men’s Wear store), but the article doesn’t specify that.
The Paramount Theatre was mentioned in the February 5, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World, which said that brothers Clyde and Sydney Wilson had bought the house from Ray Blausser. The Wilsons had also bought another Rochester house, the Kai-Gee Theatre, from Roy Shanks.
I’ve uploaded a 1910 photo of Clune’s Broadway Theatre to the photo section. It looks like the theater was not open yet when the photo was taken, though construction had apparently been completed.
The architects of the original Colonial No. 2 Theatre, 1910-1939, were Eaton & Bates.