It’s probably the fact that West State Street no longer exists between Orange Street and Eureka Street that has caused Google Maps to put its pin icon on East State Street. I’ve set Street View to look down the former alignment of the mostly-obliterated thoroughfare. The Loma Theatre was probably three to four hundred feet west of the intersection.
There was a Park Theatre operating in Philadelphia in 1922, when the October 22 issue of The Film Daily ran an ad for Warner Brothers with photos of several Warner houses in the city. The Park is at the right of this page.
This house appears to have been called the Dazzleland Theatre earlier in its history, rather than later. The October 22, 1922, issue of The Film Daily has an ad for Warner Brothers featuring inset photos of Philadelphia theaters running Warner pictures, and the theater pictured at lower left on this page has the name New Dazzleland above the entrance.
The Dazzleland Theatre is also mentioned in a 1916 issue of The Moving Picture World, as well as in the 1917 Cahn guide and the 1924 Film Daily Yearbook. Most likely it opened as the Dazzleland and was renamed the Cameo with the 1925 or the 1929 remodeling.
A letter from J. L. Derfus in the November 20, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World says that “[t]he Empress runs only once in a while, or twice in a long, long while.” The town’s other two movie houses, the Grand and the Majestic, were operating seven days a week.
Philadelphia Architects and Buildings says that the Strand Theatre in Doylestown was built in 1921. At least one other source makes the same claim, but other sources say it was built in 1925.
I have found the Strand Theatre mentioned as early as 1921, but The Gleaner, an annual publication of the National Farm School, located near Doylestown, has courtesy advertisements from a Doylestown house called the New Strand Theatre in its 1925, 1926, and 1927 editions. By 1928, the ads are simply from the Strand Theatre. My guess would be that there was an earlier Strand Theatre, perhaps opened in 1921, that was replaced by the New Strand Theatre in 1925.
When Google’s camera car went by in 2007, the Midtown Theatre building was sporting the signage of Atlantis, a night club that was closed in 2011. I’ve been unable to discover if the building has since been reoccupied, but it might be an establishment called the Sports Bar & Grill, unless the multiple search results are a bunch of old pages from before it became the Atlantis (somebody should come up with a way of cleaning the Internet.)
The ornate facade of the building is largely unchanged from the way it looked in this 1920 photo of the Crown Theatre from the Erik Overbey collection at the University of South Alabama.
The FOE lodge hall is at 1167 Parsons, so the site of the Capitol Theatre must have been the lot that is now occupied by a drive-up ATM for National City Bank (unless addresses have shifted and the lodge hall is the theater building.)
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History actually says that the Miles Theatre opened on October 26, 1913. Items in trade journals from the period indicate that the house was under construction for over a year.
The Cleveland Landmarks Commission identifies Lewis W. Thomas as the architect of the Miles Theatre.
If the State Theatre was indeed built post-war, then it must have been a replacement for an earlier theater. There is a reference from July 24, 1945, indicating that Frank Panero was then operating theaters in Delano, Wasco, McFarland, Sanger, and Shafter.
A list of new theaters in California from the September 21, 1936, issue of The Film Daily includes a Shafter Theatre at Shafter. I now suspect that the 1937 theater project that I cited in an earlier comment was never carried out, and Panero waited until after the war to build a new house there. But it’s possible that the Shafter Theatre was the house he was operating in July, 1945.
The September 18, 1936, issue of The Film Daily said that the Hartman Theatre, which had been closed all summer, would reopen with a stage production on the 29th of that month, and would follow its policy of the previous season, alternating stage productions with movies.
In the mid-1930s, the Thurmania Theatre was being operated by Clarence A. MacDonald, who also operated the Southland and Arlington Theatres. The September 9, 1936, issue of The Film Daily had an item about Mr. MacDonald’s rather peculiar new policy regarding newsreels:
“Cut Politics from Reels
“Columbus, O. — Holding that most political sequences are merely propaganda, Clarence MacDonald, owner of the Arlington, Southland and Thurmania theaters, has ordered all political scenes deleted from the newsreels shown in his houses. MacDonald follows the action of J. Real Neth, prominent local theater owner, who recently eliminated politics from his newsreels.”
The six-screen Citadel Mall Cinemas was demolished in September, 2008. It was replaced by the Citadel Mall Stadium 16, which opened on October 2, 2009.
Architect J. Arthur Drielsma designed the renovation of the Music Hall for Herbert Rosener that is featured in the 1960 Boxoffice article that Tinseltoes linked to earlier. The project involved completely rebuilding the gutted interior as well as redesigning the front.
So far, Laemmle has managed to keep this house open a year beyond its reported closing date. The slack real estate market probably has something to do with that.
Do we have the right address for this theater, or has Google Maps gone off the rails? I’m sure the Goodale Theatre was not a showboat moored in the Olentangy River, but that’s where Google Maps puts it. What’s left of Delaware Avenue almost intersects W. Goodale Street in the latter’s 300 block. To further confuse things, CinemaTour places the Goodale Theatre on High Street, but without an address. I’m puzzled.
The Hartman Theatre was designed by the noted Columbus architectural firm Richards, McCarty & Bulford.
Here is an early photo of the Hartman Theatre from the Knowlton School of Architecture web site. Thumbnail links to two additional photos of the theater and one of the adjacent office building appear at the bottom of the page.
The Hartman Theatre was built by Dr. Samuel Hartman, who had made a fortune from an alcohol-heavy elixir called Peruna, the formula for which was, he claimed, revealed to him in a dream about a long-dead American Indian chief of that name. The theater must have been one of the more impressive monuments financed by America’s legion of tipplers-in-denial. It’s too bad this impressive building didn’t last much longer than a heavy drinker’s liver.
The site of the Hartman Theatre and its adjacent office block, now occupied by a larger modern office building, is across the street from another Richards, McCarty & Bulford project, the Romanesque Revival style U.S. Post Office and Federal Courthouse, built in 1883-1887 and, happily, still standing.
Two Injured in San Antonio, TX Movie Theater Shooting. The Village Voice headline is a bit misleading. The gunman was shot in the theater, where an off-duty deputy who was moonlighting as mall security chased him, but the gunman shot his only victim in the parking lot before running into the theater. Nobody was killed (off-screen, at least. What the on-screen death toll was that night I don’t know.)
A number of shootings happen in the United States every day, so odds are that a theater will be the scene of one now and then. I doubt that this incident indicates that the Mayan Palace 14 is any more dangerous than the average public place in San Antonio. I’m sure that far more people are killed or injured in automobile accidents while driving to and from theaters than are killed or injured by being shot in theaters.
Here is Don Rittner’s 2010 weblog post about Proctor’s Theatre in Troy. In addition to several photos of Troy’s theater, it has considerable information about Fred Proctor’s career, and photos of several other Proctor theaters.
The partner of architect William D. Coates was Harrison B. Traver. Both studied in Philadelphia with the Beaux-Arts trained classicist Paul Cret around 1906-1907. They formed a partnership in San Francisco in 1911, and moved their office to Fresno in 1914. When the partnership was dissolved in 1925, Traver moved to Los Angeles and Coates continued to practice in Fresno. As far as I’ve been able to determine, the Liberty was the only theater they designed during their partnership.
An article about three Australian theaters in the October 5, 1929, issue of Motion Picture News was illustrated primarily with photos of the interior of the Plaza. Here is the first page. Images can be enlarged by clicking on the + sign in the toolbar at lower right of the web page.
Three pages about the State Theatre, with photos, appeared in an article about new Australian theaters in the October 5, 1929, issue of Motion Picture News.
For some reason, Google has put the Street View for this address on Watts Street, at the back of the building. If Street View is moved around to Broad Street, you can see the fairly well preserved Gothic upper facade of the Bluebird Theatre. The ground floor has been covered in what looks like a rusticated fake stone of the sort that was popular in the 1950s.
The “New Construction Work” column of the August 5, 1914, issue of Paint, Oil and Drug Review has an item about a new movie theater to be built at 2209-2211 N. Broad Street:
“Philadelphia, Pa.—Film theater, 2209-11 North Broad Street, to Harry Gill, Jr., 2515 Germantown Avenue, for Kahn & Greenberg; cost $18,000; Mahlon H. Dickinson, Architect; permit granted.”
Architect Mahlon Dickinson is also supposed to have designed a 499-seat theater called the Owl, which Irvin Glazer’s Philadelphia Theatres, A-Z says operated from August, 1913, to 1928. Web site Philadelphia Architects and Buildings gives the address of the Owl Theatre as 2300-2302 Grays Ferry Avenue, but as near as I can tell, that address was part of the grounds of the Naval Home, which was established in the 19th century and operated there until the 1970s.
It makes me wonder if the Owl’s reported address might be mistaken. There’s a building in the 2200 block of Grays Ferry Avenue that looks as though it might have been a theater at one time (Google Street View.) I wonder if that could have been the Owl? The Glazer collection is supposed to have a photo of the Owl, but it doesn’t appear to be available on the Internet.
Neither of my links to Historic Aerials is working. Go to their hom page and paste this address into the Search field:
4201 Shadow Lane, Santa Rosa, CA
Then pick “T1955” from the column in the upper left corner of the aerial view the site fetches, and you get the 1955 map. Zoom in using the row of circles at the lower right corner of the map. Selecting the fifth or sixth circle from the left gives a good scale.
It’s probably the fact that West State Street no longer exists between Orange Street and Eureka Street that has caused Google Maps to put its pin icon on East State Street. I’ve set Street View to look down the former alignment of the mostly-obliterated thoroughfare. The Loma Theatre was probably three to four hundred feet west of the intersection.
There was a Park Theatre operating in Philadelphia in 1922, when the October 22 issue of The Film Daily ran an ad for Warner Brothers with photos of several Warner houses in the city. The Park is at the right of this page.
This house appears to have been called the Dazzleland Theatre earlier in its history, rather than later. The October 22, 1922, issue of The Film Daily has an ad for Warner Brothers featuring inset photos of Philadelphia theaters running Warner pictures, and the theater pictured at lower left on this page has the name New Dazzleland above the entrance.
The Dazzleland Theatre is also mentioned in a 1916 issue of The Moving Picture World, as well as in the 1917 Cahn guide and the 1924 Film Daily Yearbook. Most likely it opened as the Dazzleland and was renamed the Cameo with the 1925 or the 1929 remodeling.
A letter from J. L. Derfus in the November 20, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World says that “[t]he Empress runs only once in a while, or twice in a long, long while.” The town’s other two movie houses, the Grand and the Majestic, were operating seven days a week.
An eBay seller had a program from the Park Theatre in Lehighton dated 1924 (no longer available.)
Philadelphia Architects and Buildings says that the Strand Theatre in Doylestown was built in 1921. At least one other source makes the same claim, but other sources say it was built in 1925.
I have found the Strand Theatre mentioned as early as 1921, but The Gleaner, an annual publication of the National Farm School, located near Doylestown, has courtesy advertisements from a Doylestown house called the New Strand Theatre in its 1925, 1926, and 1927 editions. By 1928, the ads are simply from the Strand Theatre. My guess would be that there was an earlier Strand Theatre, perhaps opened in 1921, that was replaced by the New Strand Theatre in 1925.
When Google’s camera car went by in 2007, the Midtown Theatre building was sporting the signage of Atlantis, a night club that was closed in 2011. I’ve been unable to discover if the building has since been reoccupied, but it might be an establishment called the Sports Bar & Grill, unless the multiple search results are a bunch of old pages from before it became the Atlantis (somebody should come up with a way of cleaning the Internet.)
The ornate facade of the building is largely unchanged from the way it looked in this 1920 photo of the Crown Theatre from the Erik Overbey collection at the University of South Alabama.
The FOE lodge hall is at 1167 Parsons, so the site of the Capitol Theatre must have been the lot that is now occupied by a drive-up ATM for National City Bank (unless addresses have shifted and the lodge hall is the theater building.)
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History actually says that the Miles Theatre opened on October 26, 1913. Items in trade journals from the period indicate that the house was under construction for over a year.
The Cleveland Landmarks Commission identifies Lewis W. Thomas as the architect of the Miles Theatre.
If the State Theatre was indeed built post-war, then it must have been a replacement for an earlier theater. There is a reference from July 24, 1945, indicating that Frank Panero was then operating theaters in Delano, Wasco, McFarland, Sanger, and Shafter.
A list of new theaters in California from the September 21, 1936, issue of The Film Daily includes a Shafter Theatre at Shafter. I now suspect that the 1937 theater project that I cited in an earlier comment was never carried out, and Panero waited until after the war to build a new house there. But it’s possible that the Shafter Theatre was the house he was operating in July, 1945.
The September 18, 1936, issue of The Film Daily said that the Hartman Theatre, which had been closed all summer, would reopen with a stage production on the 29th of that month, and would follow its policy of the previous season, alternating stage productions with movies.
In the mid-1930s, the Thurmania Theatre was being operated by Clarence A. MacDonald, who also operated the Southland and Arlington Theatres. The September 9, 1936, issue of The Film Daily had an item about Mr. MacDonald’s rather peculiar new policy regarding newsreels:
The Former Southland Theatre building at 1570 S. High Street now houses the Restoration Christian Center, a non-denominational church.
The six-screen Citadel Mall Cinemas was demolished in September, 2008. It was replaced by the Citadel Mall Stadium 16, which opened on October 2, 2009.
The Northwoods Stadium Cinemas has been operating with 13 screens for over a year now.
Architect J. Arthur Drielsma designed the renovation of the Music Hall for Herbert Rosener that is featured in the 1960 Boxoffice article that Tinseltoes linked to earlier. The project involved completely rebuilding the gutted interior as well as redesigning the front.
So far, Laemmle has managed to keep this house open a year beyond its reported closing date. The slack real estate market probably has something to do with that.
Do we have the right address for this theater, or has Google Maps gone off the rails? I’m sure the Goodale Theatre was not a showboat moored in the Olentangy River, but that’s where Google Maps puts it. What’s left of Delaware Avenue almost intersects W. Goodale Street in the latter’s 300 block. To further confuse things, CinemaTour places the Goodale Theatre on High Street, but without an address. I’m puzzled.
The Hartman Theatre was designed by the noted Columbus architectural firm Richards, McCarty & Bulford.
Here is an early photo of the Hartman Theatre from the Knowlton School of Architecture web site. Thumbnail links to two additional photos of the theater and one of the adjacent office building appear at the bottom of the page.
Here is an additional photo from the Columbus Metropolitan Library.
The Hartman Theatre was built by Dr. Samuel Hartman, who had made a fortune from an alcohol-heavy elixir called Peruna, the formula for which was, he claimed, revealed to him in a dream about a long-dead American Indian chief of that name. The theater must have been one of the more impressive monuments financed by America’s legion of tipplers-in-denial. It’s too bad this impressive building didn’t last much longer than a heavy drinker’s liver.
The site of the Hartman Theatre and its adjacent office block, now occupied by a larger modern office building, is across the street from another Richards, McCarty & Bulford project, the Romanesque Revival style U.S. Post Office and Federal Courthouse, built in 1883-1887 and, happily, still standing.
Two Injured in San Antonio, TX Movie Theater Shooting. The Village Voice headline is a bit misleading. The gunman was shot in the theater, where an off-duty deputy who was moonlighting as mall security chased him, but the gunman shot his only victim in the parking lot before running into the theater. Nobody was killed (off-screen, at least. What the on-screen death toll was that night I don’t know.)
A number of shootings happen in the United States every day, so odds are that a theater will be the scene of one now and then. I doubt that this incident indicates that the Mayan Palace 14 is any more dangerous than the average public place in San Antonio. I’m sure that far more people are killed or injured in automobile accidents while driving to and from theaters than are killed or injured by being shot in theaters.
Here is Don Rittner’s 2010 weblog post about Proctor’s Theatre in Troy. In addition to several photos of Troy’s theater, it has considerable information about Fred Proctor’s career, and photos of several other Proctor theaters.
The partner of architect William D. Coates was Harrison B. Traver. Both studied in Philadelphia with the Beaux-Arts trained classicist Paul Cret around 1906-1907. They formed a partnership in San Francisco in 1911, and moved their office to Fresno in 1914. When the partnership was dissolved in 1925, Traver moved to Los Angeles and Coates continued to practice in Fresno. As far as I’ve been able to determine, the Liberty was the only theater they designed during their partnership.
An article about three Australian theaters in the October 5, 1929, issue of Motion Picture News was illustrated primarily with photos of the interior of the Plaza. Here is the first page. Images can be enlarged by clicking on the + sign in the toolbar at lower right of the web page.
Three pages about the State Theatre, with photos, appeared in an article about new Australian theaters in the October 5, 1929, issue of Motion Picture News.
First page
Second page
Third page.
For some reason, Google has put the Street View for this address on Watts Street, at the back of the building. If Street View is moved around to Broad Street, you can see the fairly well preserved Gothic upper facade of the Bluebird Theatre. The ground floor has been covered in what looks like a rusticated fake stone of the sort that was popular in the 1950s.
The “New Construction Work” column of the August 5, 1914, issue of Paint, Oil and Drug Review has an item about a new movie theater to be built at 2209-2211 N. Broad Street:
Architect Mahlon Dickinson is also supposed to have designed a 499-seat theater called the Owl, which Irvin Glazer’s Philadelphia Theatres, A-Z says operated from August, 1913, to 1928. Web site Philadelphia Architects and Buildings gives the address of the Owl Theatre as 2300-2302 Grays Ferry Avenue, but as near as I can tell, that address was part of the grounds of the Naval Home, which was established in the 19th century and operated there until the 1970s.It makes me wonder if the Owl’s reported address might be mistaken. There’s a building in the 2200 block of Grays Ferry Avenue that looks as though it might have been a theater at one time (Google Street View.) I wonder if that could have been the Owl? The Glazer collection is supposed to have a photo of the Owl, but it doesn’t appear to be available on the Internet.
Neither of my links to Historic Aerials is working. Go to their hom page and paste this address into the Search field:
4201 Shadow Lane, Santa Rosa, CA
Then pick “T1955” from the column in the upper left corner of the aerial view the site fetches, and you get the 1955 map. Zoom in using the row of circles at the lower right corner of the map. Selecting the fifth or sixth circle from the left gives a good scale.