The Majestic Theatre has been demolished. The building, which was on the southwest corner of Second Avenue and First Street, is to be replaced within two years by a twelve-story apartment building. This photo, taken in December, 2011, by Scott Lynch, shows a bulldozer bringing rubble from inside the building to Second Avenue.
This post from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation’s Off the Grid blog has some information about the building, and a photo from April, 2011. It says that the house was called the Woolworth Theatre when it first opened, and that by 1930 the theater was gone.
An item in the lower left corner of this page of the January 14, 1922, issue of Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide concerns the sale of the theater to the M&S circuit. That’s most likely when the theater’s name was changed to Majestic.
In its last decades, the building was the site of the Mars Bar, a famous East Village drinking establishment, the impending demise of which occasioned a plethora of posts to the Internet. I’ve read a number of these, and have yet to find one that mentions the theater the building once housed. It’s likely that nobody in the neighborhood now, bohemian or yuppie, remembers a theater that closed over eighty years ago.
I don’t know if the Mars Bar occupied any part of the building which had been part of the theater, or if it was confined to the storefronts along the First Street side. If it did extend into the theater’s space, the space must have been so changed that its former purpose was unrecognizable… or maybe the denizens of the bar were simply too drunk to see what it had been.
The January 21, 1922, issue of Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide published a list of major projects scheduled for 1922, one of which was a theater on Ogden Avenue north of 171st Street. The architect of the $100,000 project was listed as “Emilie De Rosa,” but I think it must have been meant to read Eugene DeRosa.
Ah, if the parcels actually back up to each other then I think I know what happened. Blinderman & Cohen announced that they were building a theater that would be at 80-82 Clinton Street and at 97-103 Attorney Street, and somebody at MPW mistakenly thought that it was two different projects. It was just the Clinton Theatre, running through the block to Attorney Street.
The difference in the numbers probably threw them off, just as it did me. I’d thought that 97-103 Attorney would be several doors farther north than the property behind 80-82 Clinton.
When I look at the satellite view of this theater, I wonder if the auditorium of the Jackson Theatre has not been demolished? The footprint of the existing apartment building looks much too small to have accommodated a theater of almost 800 seats, but there is plenty of vacant land behind it where there could once have been an auditorium. The land looks torn up, too, as though something had been removed from it.
My guess would be that the upper floors of the apartment house are just about as they have always been, and that the entrance to the theater passed all the way through the building to the auditorium behind it, most likely via the arch at left.
Jerome Jackson took over this house around the beginning of 1918, as noted in the January 5 issue of The Moving Picture World that year:
“Carrel theater in Eastern avenue, near Carrel street, operated by Shober Brothers, has been purchased by Jerome M. Jackson. Structure will be remodeled and seating capacity increased.”
The Shober Brothers had already enlarged the Carrell Theatre at least once, as reported in The Moving Picture World of September 4, 1915, which said that the house would have 570 seats once the project was completed.
An item in the September 4, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World said that C. J. Butler of Ishpeming had hired architect D. Fred Charlton to design his new theater there, and added that Charlton had been the architect of the Delft Theatres in Munising and Marquette.
Demetrius Frederick Charlton was, in 1916 when the Butler Theatre opened, in the partnership Charlton & Kuenzli with architect Edwin O. Kuenzli, but I don’t know when the partnership was formed. Charlton apparently used the name D. Fred Charlton professionally, as that is how he signed his application to practice architecture in Michigan, and how he was listed in the AIA'a American Architects Directory.
An item in the September 4, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World said that C. J. Butler of Ishpeming had hired architect D. Fred Charlton to design his new theater there, and added that Charlton had been the architect of the Delft Theatres in Munising and Marquette.
The September 4, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World noted that the new theater at 80-82 Beekman Avenue in North Tarrytown had opened, but failed to mention the name of the house. The article gave the name of the owner, Edward Pollock; listed the seating capacity as 800; said there was a stage 16x50 feet; even noted that the booth was equipped with two Powers 6-A machines, but the article left the theater itself unnamed.
This house opened in 2001 with seven screens and 1,200 seats. I’ve been unable to discover if the additonal screens were new construction or resulted from splitting one or two of the original seven auditoriums. The Liberty Cinema was designed by the Alpharetta, Georgia, architectural firm Hiscutt & Associates, who have designed at least 14 cinema projects for Georgia Theatre Company II.
A July 7, 2001, Savannah Evening Post article about the opening of the Liberty 7 Cinemas said that Barron Godbee had encouraged the Georgia Theatre Company II to build the new multiplex after his company, Pal Amusements, had closed its twin-screen Brice Cinema, which had then been Hinesville’s only movie theater for over a decade, the previous year.
Earlier, Pal Amusements had operated two other theaters in Hinesville: the Pal Theatre, built on Main Street in 1940, and a drive-in built in the 1950s. The Brice Cinema had opened adjacent to the drive-in in the 1970s.
The original Georgia Theatre Company was sold to United Artists in 1986, but the Georgia Theatre Company II was founded in 1991 by members of the Stembler family, who had been connected with the original company. The Liberty 7 was the new company’s 23rd location, and brought their total number of screens to 201.
Incidental: The “Related Websites” link for this page isn’t working. Links to Georgia Theatre Company operations from some other CT pages also appear to be broken. The current web page for the Liberty Cinema 9 is here. The Georgia Theatre Company’s home page is here.
When this multiplex was Eastern Federal’s Movies at Crown Point, the expansion to 12 screens was designed by the Alpharetta, Georgia, architectural firm Hiscutt & Associates. There are three small photos on the firm’s web site.
The conversion of the Merchants Walk Cinemas into a stadium-style multiplex for Georgia Theatre Company II was designed by Alpharetta, Georgia, architectural firm Hiscutt & Associates.
The Glynn Place 11 was designed by Hiscutt & Associates, and is one of more than a dozen cinema projects the Alpharetta, Georgia, firm has designed for the Georgia Theatre Company II.
Thanks for letting me know about UT’s online collection of Sanborn Maps, Larry. I wasn’t aware it was available.
The 1910 map shows buildings labeled “Picture Show” at both 1004 and 1010 S Main Street. The Odeon could have been one or the other of those, assuming the maps were not drawn before the theater opened that year. Unfortunately, the 1911 map set is missing the sheet the Odeon would be on, so I can’t check to see if it changed between 1910 and 1911. The 1911 set is the most recent the collection has available of Fort Worth.
The Fort Worth Library’s Sanborn collection is available online only to card holders of the library, and as I don’t live in Texas I can’t get access to it. The UT collection should prove be a helpful resource, though.
The building occupied by Fitness Active now has the address 10125 Whittwood Drive, so that must be just about where the theater was located. The March 15, 1965, Boxoffice article about the Whittwood Theatre can be seen at this link. An additional photo of the auditorium is on the subsequent page of the magazine.
Here’s a bit of information about this theater that I found on the web site of Georgia’s Department of Community Affairs (though it’s only in a Google cache, not on the current web page.) There’s no date on the page, so I don’t know how long ago it was posted:
“Mr. [Clint] Williams has also renovated the old Brice (Pal) Theatre back to its grandeur. The theatre hosts local performers and can also be utilized a meeting facility with state-of-the-art audio/visual equipment. Adjacent to the theatre sits a small coffee shop which once functioned as a dentist office and apartment many years ago. With recent renovations, it is a meeting place for local residents for morning coffee or Saturday night music gatherings.”
Probably another operation hanging by a thread, then. I hope they manage to find a ladder.
I’ve also come across references to a Brice Cinema (presumably owned by the same Mr. Brice who owned the Pal) at 1101 E. First Street in Vidalia, but I haven’t found out any details except that it’s closed, and that the building was renovated in 1969 with plans by Savannah architect Allan H. Eitel. It’s unclear if it was already a theater that was renovated, or an existing building with some other use that was converted into a theater.
Apparently the Sweet Onion Cinemas (which has instantly become one of my favorite theater names ever), with five screens, is the only movie theater now operating in Vidalia.
Here is a still from the 1959 movie A Bucket of Blood, with a view of Third Street west from a point on Hope Street above the Third Street tunnel’s west portal. The Tunnel Theatre building is just right of center at the bottom. By 1959 the theater was no longer in operation, and the facade had lost the ornate detailing it still had in William Reagh’s 1940 photo, but it can be recognized by the tall arch that had been its entrance. The shot is dark and a bit blurry, but it gives the best view of the Tunnel Theatre I’ve seen yet.
The Pal Theatre web site is now at this URL, but it looks like hasn’t been updated for at least a few months, and possibly for more than a year. The “Upcoming Events” section has dates listed for October, November and December, but no year listed, so they could be from 2011 or even 2010. It doesn’t list any movies at all.
It also gives different telephone numbers from the one listed in our “phone numbers” field above, but I haven’t called them as it would be a long distance call for me. Maybe someone local (or with Internet phone service) could check them to see if the numbers are even connected. The theater might have shut down.
This web page (which I think might be the one vastor linked to, but the URL has apparently been changed, and the Mystery photo he mentioned is now at the bottom of the page) says that there were two theaters in Memphis called the Bijou, and neither one was at 275 S. Main (the Bijou is the second theater listed on the page, so is very near the top.)
The first Bijou (the one in the photo currently heading this page) was listed as the Auditorium, at 272-282 S. Main, in directories starting in 1894, and is listed as the Bijou, SE corner of Linden and Main in directories from 1904 to 1911, when the building burned down. (The destruction of the Bijou by fire is also mentioned in a 1912 book called Standard History of Memphis, Tennessee From a Study of the Original Sources, edited by Judge J. P, Young.)
The second Bijou was listed at 146 S. Main only in a 1922 directory, but the web page says it was opened about 1918 and closed around 1940. This might have been the house that Chuck found listed as a “Negro Theatre.” However, I found a list of theater fires in 1913 compiled by the journal Safety Engineering, and it listed a fire at the Bijou Theatre in Memphis on June 4 that year. Possibly the second Bijou opened before 1918, or perhaps the house that opened around 1918 was the third of the name.
Other sources indicate that the Chisca Hotel was built on the site of the first Bijou in 1913. The address of the Chisca is 272 S. Main, but I think the correct address of the Bijou was probably 270 S. Main.
On June 8, 9, and 10, 1909, an organization called United Confederate Veterans held its nineteenth annual meeting and reunion at the Bijou Theatre in Memphis. The minutes were published in a book, which includes a small photo of the theater. A scan is available from Google Books at this link (you might have to scroll a bit to see the photo.) In this photo, the building next door to the right (south) displays the address 272, which is what makes me think the original Bijou was probably at 270 S. Main.
A photo of the Bijou which appears to be identical to the one currently at the top of this Cinema Treasures page was published in the April, 1906, issue of the Monthly Journal of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (Google Books scan here.) The adjacent text, which is about Hawaii, has nothing to do with the photo. Scroll up a bit in the scan to see a photo of the second Lyceum Theatre as well.
The March, 1906, issue of The Bridgemen’s Magazine published a brief item datelined Memphis saying: “The Wells Amusement Co. intends rebuilding the Bijou Theatre, at a cost of $125,000.” I don’t know if this was done or not. The front looks pretty much the same in the 1909 photo I linked to as it does in the photo published in April, 1906. Perhaps there was some reconstruction but it didn’t affect the facade.
The Bijou is listed in the 1906-07 edition of Julius Chan’s guide as having 2000 seats, so it was one of Memphis' major theaters. I’ve found no indication that it ever operated as a regular movie house, but the web page I linked to at the beginning of this comment said that, as the Auditorium, the house presented the first exhibit of the Cinematograph in Memphis in 1897.
I wonder if this theater could have been in the building that is now the Dinuba Lanes Bowling Center, at 250 S. L Street? It occupies three old buildings, but at the rear of the northernmost building is a taller section that could have been a stage house.
Here is a larger version of the photo drb linked to. The movie on the marquee, George White’s Scandals with Joan Davis and Jack Haley, was released in 1945.
This web page features a late 1940s photo of 6th Street with the Beaumont Theatre at the center. Comparing it to current Street View, the front has been substantially altered.
The Majestic Theatre has been demolished. The building, which was on the southwest corner of Second Avenue and First Street, is to be replaced within two years by a twelve-story apartment building. This photo, taken in December, 2011, by Scott Lynch, shows a bulldozer bringing rubble from inside the building to Second Avenue.
This post from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation’s Off the Grid blog has some information about the building, and a photo from April, 2011. It says that the house was called the Woolworth Theatre when it first opened, and that by 1930 the theater was gone.
An item in the lower left corner of this page of the January 14, 1922, issue of Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide concerns the sale of the theater to the M&S circuit. That’s most likely when the theater’s name was changed to Majestic.
In its last decades, the building was the site of the Mars Bar, a famous East Village drinking establishment, the impending demise of which occasioned a plethora of posts to the Internet. I’ve read a number of these, and have yet to find one that mentions the theater the building once housed. It’s likely that nobody in the neighborhood now, bohemian or yuppie, remembers a theater that closed over eighty years ago.
I don’t know if the Mars Bar occupied any part of the building which had been part of the theater, or if it was confined to the storefronts along the First Street side. If it did extend into the theater’s space, the space must have been so changed that its former purpose was unrecognizable… or maybe the denizens of the bar were simply too drunk to see what it had been.
The January 21, 1922, issue of Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide published a list of major projects scheduled for 1922, one of which was a theater on Ogden Avenue north of 171st Street. The architect of the $100,000 project was listed as “Emilie De Rosa,” but I think it must have been meant to read Eugene DeRosa.
Ah, if the parcels actually back up to each other then I think I know what happened. Blinderman & Cohen announced that they were building a theater that would be at 80-82 Clinton Street and at 97-103 Attorney Street, and somebody at MPW mistakenly thought that it was two different projects. It was just the Clinton Theatre, running through the block to Attorney Street.
The difference in the numbers probably threw them off, just as it did me. I’d thought that 97-103 Attorney would be several doors farther north than the property behind 80-82 Clinton.
The January 5, 1918, issue of The Moving Picture World reported that the Liberty Theatre was then under construction at Emmett, Idaho.
The Moving Picture World of January 5, 1918, had this item, datelined New York, N. Y.:
Cinema Treasures has no theater listed at the Attorney Street address. Does anyone know if that second project was carried out or not?When I look at the satellite view of this theater, I wonder if the auditorium of the Jackson Theatre has not been demolished? The footprint of the existing apartment building looks much too small to have accommodated a theater of almost 800 seats, but there is plenty of vacant land behind it where there could once have been an auditorium. The land looks torn up, too, as though something had been removed from it.
My guess would be that the upper floors of the apartment house are just about as they have always been, and that the entrance to the theater passed all the way through the building to the auditorium behind it, most likely via the arch at left.
Jerome Jackson took over this house around the beginning of 1918, as noted in the January 5 issue of The Moving Picture World that year:
The Shober Brothers had already enlarged the Carrell Theatre at least once, as reported in The Moving Picture World of September 4, 1915, which said that the house would have 570 seats once the project was completed.An item in the September 4, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World said that C. J. Butler of Ishpeming had hired architect D. Fred Charlton to design his new theater there, and added that Charlton had been the architect of the Delft Theatres in Munising and Marquette.
Demetrius Frederick Charlton was, in 1916 when the Butler Theatre opened, in the partnership Charlton & Kuenzli with architect Edwin O. Kuenzli, but I don’t know when the partnership was formed. Charlton apparently used the name D. Fred Charlton professionally, as that is how he signed his application to practice architecture in Michigan, and how he was listed in the AIA'a American Architects Directory.
An item in the September 4, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World said that C. J. Butler of Ishpeming had hired architect D. Fred Charlton to design his new theater there, and added that Charlton had been the architect of the Delft Theatres in Munising and Marquette.
The September 4, 1915, issue of The Moving Picture World noted that the new theater at 80-82 Beekman Avenue in North Tarrytown had opened, but failed to mention the name of the house. The article gave the name of the owner, Edward Pollock; listed the seating capacity as 800; said there was a stage 16x50 feet; even noted that the booth was equipped with two Powers 6-A machines, but the article left the theater itself unnamed.
This house opened in 2001 with seven screens and 1,200 seats. I’ve been unable to discover if the additonal screens were new construction or resulted from splitting one or two of the original seven auditoriums. The Liberty Cinema was designed by the Alpharetta, Georgia, architectural firm Hiscutt & Associates, who have designed at least 14 cinema projects for Georgia Theatre Company II.
A July 7, 2001, Savannah Evening Post article about the opening of the Liberty 7 Cinemas said that Barron Godbee had encouraged the Georgia Theatre Company II to build the new multiplex after his company, Pal Amusements, had closed its twin-screen Brice Cinema, which had then been Hinesville’s only movie theater for over a decade, the previous year.
Earlier, Pal Amusements had operated two other theaters in Hinesville: the Pal Theatre, built on Main Street in 1940, and a drive-in built in the 1950s. The Brice Cinema had opened adjacent to the drive-in in the 1970s.
The original Georgia Theatre Company was sold to United Artists in 1986, but the Georgia Theatre Company II was founded in 1991 by members of the Stembler family, who had been connected with the original company. The Liberty 7 was the new company’s 23rd location, and brought their total number of screens to 201.
Incidental: The “Related Websites” link for this page isn’t working. Links to Georgia Theatre Company operations from some other CT pages also appear to be broken. The current web page for the Liberty Cinema 9 is here. The Georgia Theatre Company’s home page is here.
When this multiplex was Eastern Federal’s Movies at Crown Point, the expansion to 12 screens was designed by the Alpharetta, Georgia, architectural firm Hiscutt & Associates. There are three small photos on the firm’s web site.
The conversion of the Merchants Walk Cinemas into a stadium-style multiplex for Georgia Theatre Company II was designed by Alpharetta, Georgia, architectural firm Hiscutt & Associates.
The Glynn Place 11 was designed by Hiscutt & Associates, and is one of more than a dozen cinema projects the Alpharetta, Georgia, firm has designed for the Georgia Theatre Company II.
The expansion of the Movies at Mount Berry Square to nine screens was designed by Alpharetta, Georgia, architectural firm Hiscutt & Associates.
Thanks for letting me know about UT’s online collection of Sanborn Maps, Larry. I wasn’t aware it was available.
The 1910 map shows buildings labeled “Picture Show” at both 1004 and 1010 S Main Street. The Odeon could have been one or the other of those, assuming the maps were not drawn before the theater opened that year. Unfortunately, the 1911 map set is missing the sheet the Odeon would be on, so I can’t check to see if it changed between 1910 and 1911. The 1911 set is the most recent the collection has available of Fort Worth.
The Fort Worth Library’s Sanborn collection is available online only to card holders of the library, and as I don’t live in Texas I can’t get access to it. The UT collection should prove be a helpful resource, though.
The building occupied by Fitness Active now has the address 10125 Whittwood Drive, so that must be just about where the theater was located. The March 15, 1965, Boxoffice article about the Whittwood Theatre can be seen at this link. An additional photo of the auditorium is on the subsequent page of the magazine.
Here’s a bit of information about this theater that I found on the web site of Georgia’s Department of Community Affairs (though it’s only in a Google cache, not on the current web page.) There’s no date on the page, so I don’t know how long ago it was posted:
Here is a fairly recent photo of the Blue Marquee.Probably another operation hanging by a thread, then. I hope they manage to find a ladder.
I’ve also come across references to a Brice Cinema (presumably owned by the same Mr. Brice who owned the Pal) at 1101 E. First Street in Vidalia, but I haven’t found out any details except that it’s closed, and that the building was renovated in 1969 with plans by Savannah architect Allan H. Eitel. It’s unclear if it was already a theater that was renovated, or an existing building with some other use that was converted into a theater.
Apparently the Sweet Onion Cinemas (which has instantly become one of my favorite theater names ever), with five screens, is the only movie theater now operating in Vidalia.
Here is a still from the 1959 movie A Bucket of Blood, with a view of Third Street west from a point on Hope Street above the Third Street tunnel’s west portal. The Tunnel Theatre building is just right of center at the bottom. By 1959 the theater was no longer in operation, and the facade had lost the ornate detailing it still had in William Reagh’s 1940 photo, but it can be recognized by the tall arch that had been its entrance. The shot is dark and a bit blurry, but it gives the best view of the Tunnel Theatre I’ve seen yet.
The Pal Theatre web site is now at this URL, but it looks like hasn’t been updated for at least a few months, and possibly for more than a year. The “Upcoming Events” section has dates listed for October, November and December, but no year listed, so they could be from 2011 or even 2010. It doesn’t list any movies at all.
It also gives different telephone numbers from the one listed in our “phone numbers” field above, but I haven’t called them as it would be a long distance call for me. Maybe someone local (or with Internet phone service) could check them to see if the numbers are even connected. The theater might have shut down.
This web page (which I think might be the one vastor linked to, but the URL has apparently been changed, and the Mystery photo he mentioned is now at the bottom of the page) says that there were two theaters in Memphis called the Bijou, and neither one was at 275 S. Main (the Bijou is the second theater listed on the page, so is very near the top.)
The first Bijou (the one in the photo currently heading this page) was listed as the Auditorium, at 272-282 S. Main, in directories starting in 1894, and is listed as the Bijou, SE corner of Linden and Main in directories from 1904 to 1911, when the building burned down. (The destruction of the Bijou by fire is also mentioned in a 1912 book called Standard History of Memphis, Tennessee From a Study of the Original Sources, edited by Judge J. P, Young.)
The second Bijou was listed at 146 S. Main only in a 1922 directory, but the web page says it was opened about 1918 and closed around 1940. This might have been the house that Chuck found listed as a “Negro Theatre.” However, I found a list of theater fires in 1913 compiled by the journal Safety Engineering, and it listed a fire at the Bijou Theatre in Memphis on June 4 that year. Possibly the second Bijou opened before 1918, or perhaps the house that opened around 1918 was the third of the name.
Other sources indicate that the Chisca Hotel was built on the site of the first Bijou in 1913. The address of the Chisca is 272 S. Main, but I think the correct address of the Bijou was probably 270 S. Main.
On June 8, 9, and 10, 1909, an organization called United Confederate Veterans held its nineteenth annual meeting and reunion at the Bijou Theatre in Memphis. The minutes were published in a book, which includes a small photo of the theater. A scan is available from Google Books at this link (you might have to scroll a bit to see the photo.) In this photo, the building next door to the right (south) displays the address 272, which is what makes me think the original Bijou was probably at 270 S. Main.
A photo of the Bijou which appears to be identical to the one currently at the top of this Cinema Treasures page was published in the April, 1906, issue of the Monthly Journal of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (Google Books scan here.) The adjacent text, which is about Hawaii, has nothing to do with the photo. Scroll up a bit in the scan to see a photo of the second Lyceum Theatre as well.
The March, 1906, issue of The Bridgemen’s Magazine published a brief item datelined Memphis saying: “The Wells Amusement Co. intends rebuilding the Bijou Theatre, at a cost of $125,000.” I don’t know if this was done or not. The front looks pretty much the same in the 1909 photo I linked to as it does in the photo published in April, 1906. Perhaps there was some reconstruction but it didn’t affect the facade.
The Bijou is listed in the 1906-07 edition of Julius Chan’s guide as having 2000 seats, so it was one of Memphis' major theaters. I’ve found no indication that it ever operated as a regular movie house, but the web page I linked to at the beginning of this comment said that, as the Auditorium, the house presented the first exhibit of the Cinematograph in Memphis in 1897.
The Liberty Theatre has been demolished.
I wonder if this theater could have been in the building that is now the Dinuba Lanes Bowling Center, at 250 S. L Street? It occupies three old buildings, but at the rear of the northernmost building is a taller section that could have been a stage house.
Here is a larger version of the photo drb linked to. The movie on the marquee, George White’s Scandals with Joan Davis and Jack Haley, was released in 1945.
This web page features a late 1940s photo of 6th Street with the Beaumont Theatre at the center. Comparing it to current Street View, the front has been substantially altered.