The Cambria Theatre was in operation prior to 1894. In that year it was purchased by Isaac Mishler, who rebuilt it and reopened it in 1895 as the New Cambria Theatre.
The State Street Theatre was built by Altoona, Pennsylvania theater magnate Isaac Mishler. The Historic American Buildings Survey report on the Mishler Theatre in Altoona (Google Documents quick view) mentions the State Street Theatre as a 1904 project designed by architect Albert E. Westover, who would later design the Mishler Theatre.
This twin might have been the house opened in 1968 as the Trans-Lux Inflight Cine. The 350-seat, single screen theater at Bartow, designed by architect John McNamara, was the first opened by the partnership formed the previous year by Trans-Lux and Inflight Motion Pictures, Inc. These theaters used a 16mm projection system originally developed for showing movies aboard airliners, but had all been converted to 35mm by the end of 1972. A number of the small, single-screen houses were later twinned.
The list of theaters opened the previous year that was published in the January 20, 1969, issue of Boxoffice included the Cine, Bartow, Florida, opened by Trans-Lux. Many sources on the Internet say that the Bartow Trans-Lux house opened in 1966, but the partnership was not even formed until 1967, as told in this article from Boxoffice of November 13, 1967, so the Internet sources must be wrong. I think I might have quoted this misinformation in one or more comments on other pages at Cinema Treasures myself before discovering that it was wrong.
A former Trans-Lux executive, Bob Maar, writing at Film-Tech Forum, says in the second reply on this forum page that the Trans-Lux Inflight Cine in Charlotte opened in June, 1968 (he also gives opening years for the other four Inflight operations in North Carolina, all of which were single-screeners.) Like the other early Inflight twins, the house had two auditoriums of 350 seats each.
This web page has an article from the November, 1961, issue of Modern Mechanix which describes the automated, 16mm projection system developed by Inflight Motion Pictures, Inc, for showing movies on airliners. A version of this system was used in the earthbound theaters which Inflight opened in partnership with Trans-Lux beginning in 1968. The first house, a 350-seat single-screener, was opened at Bartow, Florida, that year.
This article (upper left) in Boxoffice of November 13, 1967, tells about Trans-Lux’s plans for the Inflight chain. It notes that the theaters were being designed by architect John McNamara.
The John and Drew Eberson Archives at the Wolfsonian Institute lists the Trans-Lux Sunshine Theatre as a 1968 project by Drew Eberson. He was also the architect for the theater’s twinning, which the Mall site says took place in 1977.
John and Drew Eberson were designing projects for Trans-Lux during the 1950s, and Drew Eberson continued to design theaters for the chain, both new houses and remodeling and twinning jobs, through the 1970s. He also designed offices for Trans-Lux at Norwalk, Connecticut in 1968.
In the Independent Theatres listings of the Los Angeles Times for February 10, 1971, the Vista was showing a double feature of Cindy and Donna (IMDb) and Girly (IMDB).
These were more low-budget sexploitation movies than full-on porn, but they were the sort of thing the Vista was running regularly around that time. The theater went to gay porn for a while later in the ‘70s, and then in 1980 it became a revival house, first operated by Thomas Theatres out of San Francisco and then by Landmark, which operated it more as a revival/art house combination.
Landmark abandoned the revival format at the Vista in 1985. The August 24, 1986 Los Angeles Times has the house listed as the New Vista, showing a double feature of Top Gun and Real Genius. I don’t think the Vista ever went back to porn after its time as a revival house. It did show some gay-themed movies during those years, aimed at the large gay audience in Silver Lake and East Hollywood, but I don’t think any of them were porn.
The Furby Theatre went up in flames on February 28, 1952. There’s a photo and an abstract from a Winnipeg Free Press article on this page at GenDisasters. The newspaper article said the theater was 42 years old, which would make the opening year 1910, but I’ve seen other modern sources saying it opened in 1912. The Furby was definitely in operation by 1913, when it was mentioned in the November 22 issue of The Moving Picture World.
The architect for the 1917 remodeling of the Holman Theatre was Joseph Raoul Gariepy. He is already listed at Cinema Treasures as architect of the Rialto Theatre on Avenue du Parc. According to this page of the Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada he also designed the Cartier Theatre on Rue Notre-Dame Ouest in 1929 and, in 1917-18, a neighborhood house called the Maisonneuve Theatre, which was located on Avenue la Salle at Rue Ontario. The Cartier is listed at Cinema Treasures, but I can’t find the Maisonneuve, which would have been about a block from the modern Complexe Desjardins 4 Cinemas.
The 1924 Stratford City Directory has a listing for the Majestic Theatre (rebuilding) at 97-99 Downie Street. The December 12, 1923, issue of Contract Record and Engineering Review had an item about this rebuilding project, datelined Stratford:
“Partridge Bros., Ontario Street, have the plumbing and heating contract in connection with addition and remodelling ‘Majestic Theatre’ to cost $40,000, owned by A. Brandenberger, Wellington St.”
A. Brandenberger must have been Albert Brandenberger, who is mentioned in several editions of Julius Cahn’s guide as manager of the Opera House in Stratford, with which he was connected at least as early as 1900.
The 1900-1901 and 1910-1911 editions of Cahn’s guide listed the theater the Opera House, but the 1910 edition includes the line “Dates to read Theatre Albert, Stratford.” The house is also called the Theatre Albert in the October 5, 1907, issue of The Billboard, so the names must have been used interchangeably.
Then the 1913-1914 edition of Cahn’s guide lists the theater as Griffin’s Opera House, so Albert Brandenberger must have given up control of the house for a time. Despite the retention of the Opera House appellation, a biography of John Griffin in the 1915 edition of Who’s Who in Canada says that the Griffin Amusement Company ran a chain of movie and vaudeville houses in Ontario, so this house might have been showing movies at least as early as 1913.
The September 2, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had this item about the Majestic Theatre in Stratford:
“Toronto, Ont.—Announcement has been made that the Majestic theater at Stratford, Ont., one of the largest and best equipped houses in Western Ontario, has been purchased by Stratford interests from the Canadian Theaters, Limited, which owns a string of theaters in Ontario and Quebec. A. Brandenberger is now the manager of the Majestic.”
It’s possible that the Griffin circuit had changed the name of the theater to Majestic sometime before it was sold to the “Stratford interests”, which presumably included former (and restored) manager Brandenberger.
Stratford: Its Heritage and Its Festival, by Carolynn Bart-Riedstra and Lutzen Riedstra, says that before it became the Majestic the Avon had been called Theatre Albert and was also known as the Griffin Theatre for a while, so there is confirmation that all these earlier reports refer to the same house.
All the period references I’ve found to the architect of this theater (and there are quite a few) list him as J. Hunt Stanford. His first name was Joseph. There is a brief biographical sketch of him on this web page, which also displays a bookplate from his personal library.
The December 19, 1923, issue of Contract Record and Engineering Review had a notice about this theater:
“Foundations are going in for $100,000 theatre north east corner Woodbine and
Danforth Aves. for Danforth-Woodbine Theatre Ltd. Architect, J. Hunt Stanford & Son, 67 Yonge Arcade. Carpentry by day labor. Roofing, plumbing, heating, electric, plastering and painting to day labor.
J. Hunt Stanford & Son was formed in 1922, when Leo Hunt Stanford joined his father’s practice.
The NorView Theatre appears to have been dismantled in 1957. The History of Kempsville Masonic Lodge has this line referring to an event related to the opening of the Masons' new lodge hall in 1957: “Brother Talbot tore his hand on removing our first set of chairs from the old Norview Theatre.”
I’ve been unable to find any mention of the NorView Theatre in any of the trade publications of the 1940s and 1950s to which I have access, but the architectural style of the building is certainly characteristic of that period.
There is a problem with the address currently given for this theater. Albano Cleaners, the first building on the block north of Chesapeake Boulevard, has an address of 6132 N. Sewells Point Road. The block south of Chesapeake Boulevard is numbered 3600. There is today no 5200 block of Sewells Point Road.
This comment on a HamptonRoads.com article about High’s Ice Cream shops has this line: “Away back in the 1940s, High’s had a store in Norview at Hugo Street, just two doors south of the Norview Theatre.” This has led me to believe that the NorView Theatre was in what is now a rather nondescript, single-story brick building painted a yellowish cream color, about a block north of where Street View is currently set.
Satellite View shows an auditorium-sized structure behind it, backing up to Chesapeake Boulevard. I can’t determine the address of the building from Street View, and there’s no external indication of what it now houses, but the theater’s entrance was probably directly across the street from what is now Sabor Catracho Restaurant, for which the Internet provides the address 6163 Sewells Point Road. That means the modern address for the theater building would be approximately 6162-6164 Sewells Point Road.
The 1938 Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to back on August 27 says that the architect for the streamline modern remodeling of the De Luxe Theatre was Mark D. Kalischer.
The July 2, 1929, issue of The Film Daily ran the following obituary for architect Nicola Petti:
“Cleveland — Nocoli [sic] Petti, local architect who designed ten local picture theaters, is dead after a brief illness. He was 49 years old. Among the houses designed by Petti are the Uptown, Variety, Kinsman, Cedar-Lee and Imperial. He is survived by three sons and two daughters.”
The July 2, 1929, issue of The Film Daily ran the following obituary for architect Nicola Petti:
“Cleveland — Nocoli [sic] Petti, local architect who designed ten local picture theaters, is dead after a brief illness. He was 49 years old. Among the houses designed by Petti are the Uptown, Variety, Kinsman, Cedar-Lee and Imperial. He is survived by three sons and two daughters.”
The Cleveland Landmarks Commission’s list of buildings designed by architect Nicola Petti includes the State Theatre in Toledo. The design was done in 1927.
The Cleveland Landmarks Commission’s list of buildings designed by architect Nicola Petti includes an unnamed theater on Park Avenue in Mansfield. The project was designed in 1927, but the list notes that it has been demolished.
As this is the only theater on Park Avenue that is listed at Cinema Treasures, and I’ve found no evidence that there was ever another theater on that street, perhaps the Landmarks Commission was mistaken about the Petti-designed theater having been demolished and it was indeed this house.
CinemaTour does attribute the design of the Renaissance Theatre to Petti, but doesn’t cite a source. The building is listed on the NRHP, but the Register’s web site says that the document with the theater’s information has not yet been digitized.
The October, 1920, issue of Western Magazine said: “Pipestone’s new $100,000 theater, the Orpheum, will be formally opened September 1.” Why an event taking place in September was written of in the future tense in October I don’t know.
Street View is set to the wrong location. The Broadway Theatre was at the northwest corner of Broadway and College Street, as shown in the 1940 photo kencmcintyre linked to on August 16, 2006. The facade was remodeled (probably part of Liebenberg & Kaplan’s work of the later 1940s) after that photo was taken, but the building still stands and still has the name Broadway emblazoned across the front above the upper floor windows.
The finding aid to the Liebenberg & Kaplan papers at the University of Minnesota lists the Broadway Theatre in Albert Lea as a 1927 project, with additional work done in the period 1942-1947.
A remodeling of the Bismarck Theatre is listed as a 1929 project in the finding aid to the Liebenberg & Kaplan papers at the University of Minnesota. I’ve been unable to discover who designed the 1937 remodeling.
The Bijou Theatre in Minneapolis is listed as a project in both 1927 and 1931-1933 in the finding aid for the Liebenberg & Kaplan papers at the University of Minnesota. Any extensive alterations must have been confined mostly to the interior, as the facade remained little changed over the years aside from the replacement of the corner towers seen in this early photo with a mansard that was hardly less old fashioned, and the addition of a modern theater marquee.
The Cambria Theatre was in operation prior to 1894. In that year it was purchased by Isaac Mishler, who rebuilt it and reopened it in 1895 as the New Cambria Theatre.
The State Street Theatre was built by Altoona, Pennsylvania theater magnate Isaac Mishler. The Historic American Buildings Survey report on the Mishler Theatre in Altoona (Google Documents quick view) mentions the State Street Theatre as a 1904 project designed by architect Albert E. Westover, who would later design the Mishler Theatre.
This twin might have been the house opened in 1968 as the Trans-Lux Inflight Cine. The 350-seat, single screen theater at Bartow, designed by architect John McNamara, was the first opened by the partnership formed the previous year by Trans-Lux and Inflight Motion Pictures, Inc. These theaters used a 16mm projection system originally developed for showing movies aboard airliners, but had all been converted to 35mm by the end of 1972. A number of the small, single-screen houses were later twinned.
The list of theaters opened the previous year that was published in the January 20, 1969, issue of Boxoffice included the Cine, Bartow, Florida, opened by Trans-Lux. Many sources on the Internet say that the Bartow Trans-Lux house opened in 1966, but the partnership was not even formed until 1967, as told in this article from Boxoffice of November 13, 1967, so the Internet sources must be wrong. I think I might have quoted this misinformation in one or more comments on other pages at Cinema Treasures myself before discovering that it was wrong.
A former Trans-Lux executive, Bob Maar, writing at Film-Tech Forum, says in the second reply on this forum page that the Trans-Lux Inflight Cine in Charlotte opened in June, 1968 (he also gives opening years for the other four Inflight operations in North Carolina, all of which were single-screeners.) Like the other early Inflight twins, the house had two auditoriums of 350 seats each.
This web page has an article from the November, 1961, issue of Modern Mechanix which describes the automated, 16mm projection system developed by Inflight Motion Pictures, Inc, for showing movies on airliners. A version of this system was used in the earthbound theaters which Inflight opened in partnership with Trans-Lux beginning in 1968. The first house, a 350-seat single-screener, was opened at Bartow, Florida, that year.
This article (upper left) in Boxoffice of November 13, 1967, tells about Trans-Lux’s plans for the Inflight chain. It notes that the theaters were being designed by architect John McNamara.
This capsule history of Clearwater’s Sunshine Mall at Mall Hall of Fame says that the “…single-screen, Trans-Lux Theatre showed its first feature in mid-October 1968.”
The John and Drew Eberson Archives at the Wolfsonian Institute lists the Trans-Lux Sunshine Theatre as a 1968 project by Drew Eberson. He was also the architect for the theater’s twinning, which the Mall site says took place in 1977.
John and Drew Eberson were designing projects for Trans-Lux during the 1950s, and Drew Eberson continued to design theaters for the chain, both new houses and remodeling and twinning jobs, through the 1970s. He also designed offices for Trans-Lux at Norwalk, Connecticut in 1968.
In the Independent Theatres listings of the Los Angeles Times for February 10, 1971, the Vista was showing a double feature of Cindy and Donna (IMDb) and Girly (IMDB).
These were more low-budget sexploitation movies than full-on porn, but they were the sort of thing the Vista was running regularly around that time. The theater went to gay porn for a while later in the ‘70s, and then in 1980 it became a revival house, first operated by Thomas Theatres out of San Francisco and then by Landmark, which operated it more as a revival/art house combination.
Landmark abandoned the revival format at the Vista in 1985. The August 24, 1986 Los Angeles Times has the house listed as the New Vista, showing a double feature of Top Gun and Real Genius. I don’t think the Vista ever went back to porn after its time as a revival house. It did show some gay-themed movies during those years, aimed at the large gay audience in Silver Lake and East Hollywood, but I don’t think any of them were porn.
The Furby Theatre went up in flames on February 28, 1952. There’s a photo and an abstract from a Winnipeg Free Press article on this page at GenDisasters. The newspaper article said the theater was 42 years old, which would make the opening year 1910, but I’ve seen other modern sources saying it opened in 1912. The Furby was definitely in operation by 1913, when it was mentioned in the November 22 issue of The Moving Picture World.
The architect for the 1917 remodeling of the Holman Theatre was Joseph Raoul Gariepy. He is already listed at Cinema Treasures as architect of the Rialto Theatre on Avenue du Parc. According to this page of the Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada he also designed the Cartier Theatre on Rue Notre-Dame Ouest in 1929 and, in 1917-18, a neighborhood house called the Maisonneuve Theatre, which was located on Avenue la Salle at Rue Ontario. The Cartier is listed at Cinema Treasures, but I can’t find the Maisonneuve, which would have been about a block from the modern Complexe Desjardins 4 Cinemas.
According to this page of the Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada, the Cartier Theatre was designed by architect Joseph Raoul Gariepy.
The 1924 Stratford City Directory has a listing for the Majestic Theatre (rebuilding) at 97-99 Downie Street. The December 12, 1923, issue of Contract Record and Engineering Review had an item about this rebuilding project, datelined Stratford:
A. Brandenberger must have been Albert Brandenberger, who is mentioned in several editions of Julius Cahn’s guide as manager of the Opera House in Stratford, with which he was connected at least as early as 1900.The 1900-1901 and 1910-1911 editions of Cahn’s guide listed the theater the Opera House, but the 1910 edition includes the line “Dates to read Theatre Albert, Stratford.” The house is also called the Theatre Albert in the October 5, 1907, issue of The Billboard, so the names must have been used interchangeably.
Then the 1913-1914 edition of Cahn’s guide lists the theater as Griffin’s Opera House, so Albert Brandenberger must have given up control of the house for a time. Despite the retention of the Opera House appellation, a biography of John Griffin in the 1915 edition of Who’s Who in Canada says that the Griffin Amusement Company ran a chain of movie and vaudeville houses in Ontario, so this house might have been showing movies at least as early as 1913.
The September 2, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had this item about the Majestic Theatre in Stratford:
It’s possible that the Griffin circuit had changed the name of the theater to Majestic sometime before it was sold to the “Stratford interests”, which presumably included former (and restored) manager Brandenberger.Stratford: Its Heritage and Its Festival, by Carolynn Bart-Riedstra and Lutzen Riedstra, says that before it became the Majestic the Avon had been called Theatre Albert and was also known as the Griffin Theatre for a while, so there is confirmation that all these earlier reports refer to the same house.
All the period references I’ve found to the architect of this theater (and there are quite a few) list him as J. Hunt Stanford. His first name was Joseph. There is a brief biographical sketch of him on this web page, which also displays a bookplate from his personal library.
The December 19, 1923, issue of Contract Record and Engineering Review had a notice about this theater:
J. Hunt Stanford & Son was formed in 1922, when Leo Hunt Stanford joined his father’s practice.The NorView Theatre appears to have been dismantled in 1957. The History of Kempsville Masonic Lodge has this line referring to an event related to the opening of the Masons' new lodge hall in 1957: “Brother Talbot tore his hand on removing our first set of chairs from the old Norview Theatre.”
I’ve been unable to find any mention of the NorView Theatre in any of the trade publications of the 1940s and 1950s to which I have access, but the architectural style of the building is certainly characteristic of that period.
There is a problem with the address currently given for this theater. Albano Cleaners, the first building on the block north of Chesapeake Boulevard, has an address of 6132 N. Sewells Point Road. The block south of Chesapeake Boulevard is numbered 3600. There is today no 5200 block of Sewells Point Road.
This comment on a HamptonRoads.com article about High’s Ice Cream shops has this line: “Away back in the 1940s, High’s had a store in Norview at Hugo Street, just two doors south of the Norview Theatre.” This has led me to believe that the NorView Theatre was in what is now a rather nondescript, single-story brick building painted a yellowish cream color, about a block north of where Street View is currently set.
Satellite View shows an auditorium-sized structure behind it, backing up to Chesapeake Boulevard. I can’t determine the address of the building from Street View, and there’s no external indication of what it now houses, but the theater’s entrance was probably directly across the street from what is now Sabor Catracho Restaurant, for which the Internet provides the address 6163 Sewells Point Road. That means the modern address for the theater building would be approximately 6162-6164 Sewells Point Road.
The 1938 Boxoffice article Tinseltoes linked to back on August 27 says that the architect for the streamline modern remodeling of the De Luxe Theatre was Mark D. Kalischer.
The July 2, 1929, issue of The Film Daily ran the following obituary for architect Nicola Petti:
The July 2, 1929, issue of The Film Daily ran the following obituary for architect Nicola Petti:
The Cleveland Landmarks Commission’s list of buildings designed by architect Nicola Petti includes the State Theatre in Toledo. The design was done in 1927.
The Cleveland Landmarks Commission’s list of buildings designed by architect Nicola Petti includes an unnamed theater on Park Avenue in Mansfield. The project was designed in 1927, but the list notes that it has been demolished.
As this is the only theater on Park Avenue that is listed at Cinema Treasures, and I’ve found no evidence that there was ever another theater on that street, perhaps the Landmarks Commission was mistaken about the Petti-designed theater having been demolished and it was indeed this house.
CinemaTour does attribute the design of the Renaissance Theatre to Petti, but doesn’t cite a source. The building is listed on the NRHP, but the Register’s web site says that the document with the theater’s information has not yet been digitized.
The October, 1920, issue of Western Magazine said: “Pipestone’s new $100,000 theater, the Orpheum, will be formally opened September 1.” Why an event taking place in September was written of in the future tense in October I don’t know.
The current related website link doesn’t have any information about upcoming events at the Orpheum, but the site Friends of the Orpheum does.
The Brynwood Theatre is listed, but undated, in the finding aid to the Liebenberg & Kaplan papers at the University of Minnesota.
Street View is set to the wrong location. The Broadway Theatre was at the northwest corner of Broadway and College Street, as shown in the 1940 photo kencmcintyre linked to on August 16, 2006. The facade was remodeled (probably part of Liebenberg & Kaplan’s work of the later 1940s) after that photo was taken, but the building still stands and still has the name Broadway emblazoned across the front above the upper floor windows.
The finding aid to the Liebenberg & Kaplan papers at the University of Minnesota lists the Broadway Theatre in Albert Lea as a 1927 project, with additional work done in the period 1942-1947.
The finding aid to the Libernberg & Kaplan papers at the University of Minnesota lists the Brainerd Theatre as a 1937 project.
A remodeling of the Bismarck Theatre is listed as a 1929 project in the finding aid to the Liebenberg & Kaplan papers at the University of Minnesota. I’ve been unable to discover who designed the 1937 remodeling.
The Bijou Theatre in Minneapolis is listed as a project in both 1927 and 1931-1933 in the finding aid for the Liebenberg & Kaplan papers at the University of Minnesota. Any extensive alterations must have been confined mostly to the interior, as the facade remained little changed over the years aside from the replacement of the corner towers seen in this early photo with a mansard that was hardly less old fashioned, and the addition of a modern theater marquee.