OldJody: You were seeing Warnor’s Theatre in the Street View photo because the 1100 block of Fulton Street is a pedestrian mall and not accessible to Google’s camera truck. The Strand was an entirely different house on Fulton Street south of Fresno Street.
Google would have done better to show the view at the corner of Fulton Mall and Fresno Street. I’ve adjusted Street View to that location and updated it, to prevent further confusion. The Strand would have been on the left side of the mall as you look south from Fresno Street. The pin icon on the Google map is still in the wrong location, at Tuolumne Street.
I’m not sure how long ago the Strand was closed. The only photo I can find showing a Strand Theatre in Fresno is this one, taken way back when Fulton Street was still called J Street. I’m not even sure it’s the same Strand Theatre, as everything on Fulton Street has changed since then.
A list of U.S. radio stations broadcasting as of May, 1923, includes station WOAG, located in the Apollo Theatre, Belvidere, Illinois. A chronology of early radio says that WOAG began broadcasting in October, 1922. The Federal government began licensing radio stations for commercial broadcasts in late 1920, so WOAG was one of the fairly early ones.
I’ve come across references to a late 19th-early 20th century theater in Belvidere called the Derthick Opera House. Some sources say that it was next to the river. I think it might have been on the same site as the Apollo. The November, 1917, issue of Safety Engineering reported that the “Dorthic” Opera House at Belvidere, Illinois, had been destroyed by fire on October 1, 1917. This publication also said that the theater was next to the river.
The December 6, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World said that the Zimperhoff Brothers, of Chicago, had been negotiating a two-year leas on the “Derthofk” Opera House in Belvidere, with the intention of operating it as a movie house. I’ve been unable to discover if they got the lease, but given the state of the theater business in the 1910s, odds are good that the Derthick did show movies in its last years.
It’s possible that the Hetrick dated from the very early 20th century. The earliest reference to it I can find in Julius Chan’s guides is in the edition of 1904-1905.
The Hetrick Theatre dated to the late 19th century, and was also known as the Hetrick Opera House. The 1904 Cahn Guide lists it as a 1,050-seat second-floor theater. This photo shows that it was a three-story building in the Romanesque Revival style.
The Emporia Gazette of July 20, 1925, reported that half a block of business buildings at Chanute, Illinois, had been destroyed on July 10 by fire that had started in the Hetrick Theatre. The total loss was estimated at $500,000.
If the Capri was on the same site as the theater it replaced, the La Nora, then it must have been at the same address of 114 N. Cuyler Street. The building at that address is currently occupied by the Heard & Jones Health Mart, a drug store and pharmacy. It’s a midcentury modern building and looks to be about 1961 vintage, and it could have been a theater.
There’s another building in Pampa, at the northeast corner of Cuyler and Francis Avenue, which looks like it was once a theater. It has a vertical sign with spots for five letters, but all are missing except the bottom one, and that’s an E. If the E is original, it might have been the State Theatre, but the letter might have been left by some other occupant, so the building could also have been the Capri. The Overview here doesn’t make it clear if the Capri was on the same site as the La Noya or not, and the State is not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.
Cinema Treasures currently says that the Southern Theatre has been demolished, but I wonder if the building is still standing? A May, 2011, obituary for Mr. Raymond L. Spayne says that he was the owner and operator of the Southern Theater and Southern Tap Room in Akron.
The Southern Tap Room is located at 1169 Grant Street. Here’s a photo. The door to the upstairs of the building has the address 1165. There is an adjacent storefront, with no address on display, that might have been the theater entrance at one time. The building looks a bit too small for the listed seating capacity of 550, though.
If the theater was not in the same building as the bar, then it must have been on what is now a parking lot next door. The driveway apron there looks very old and worn, so if the theater was on that lot it must have been demolished ages ago.
212 E. Main Street is now occupied by offices of the City of Cuero.
The little building next door to the theater looks to small to have been the Palace/Rex Theatre that was operating in the 1920s and 1930s, so that house must have been where the parking lot is now.
The aka Normana Theatre still needs to be added to the additional info.
A book called “Rantoul and Chanute Air Force Base” by Mark D. Hanson says that this house was operating in the 1920s as the Blackstone Theatre. Another house also called the Home Theatre was closed down when the Blackstone was renamed the New Home Theatre. The book doesn’t say when the renaming took place, nor when the “New” was dropped, but a 1942 photo in the book shows the same marquee that is currently on the building.
If you move Street View down 17th Avenue to the alley, you can see some glass block windows at the corner of the building. These would not have been installed as late as 1956, so they must be part of the original design. That indicates that the theater was probably built in the 1930s, when the streamline modern style first came into vogue. The upstairs corner windows with steel sash were also characteristic of the 1930s style.
If there’s a record of this theater existing in 1934, that’s probably the year it opened. A book called “A Guide to Historic Hollywood: A Tour Through Place and Time” by Joan Mickelson says that a Hollywood Theatre built in 1923 at 1921 Hollywood Boulevard was remodeled and reopened as the Ritz Theatre in 1935. Presumably the name change was prompted by the opening of this new house.
The Grand Theatre page at PSTOS says that the house was located on Cedar Street. A 1915 magazine item gave the location as Cedar and 5th. One of the photos at PSTOS shows that the theater building was the first structure in the 500 block, so the entrance was probably 503 Cedar. The site is now a parking lot.
The Grand Theatre was built in 1915, and opened November 10 that year. An article about the opening of the house appeared in the January 1, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. The Grand Theatre was designed by Spokane architect Lewis R. Stritesky.
Construction must have been rapid, as an announcement that Stritesky was preparing plans for the theater appeared in The Moving Picture World of August 14, 1915. Originally intended as a movie house, stage facilities were added to the plans when the town’s Masonic Temple Opera House was destroyed by fire.
The July, 1921, issue of Architecture and Building has a brief article about the Central Theatre and a portfolio of several photographs. I now think that E. C. Horne and Sons must have designed only the building the theater was in, as the article identifies the architect of the theater itself to Eugene De Rosa.
I suspected that the claim about Todd-AO was wrong. There was a lot of hype flying around about the original Todd-AO format in the mid-1950s, and it pretty much all came to nothing.
Pickford Center is located in a building which originally served as offices and studios for the Mutual-Don Lee Broadcasting System’s radio and television network. It was dedicated in 1948, and was designed by Los Angeles architect Claud Beelman.
The complex originally featured four theater-style sound stages which could be used as studios for telecasts with what the television industry rather disturbingly calls live audiences (as opposed, I guess, to audiences of the undead.) Presumably, the Linwood Dunn Theater occupies one of those four studios.
Hollywood Heritage provides this history of the building (but misspells architect’s Beelman’s first name as Claude, a common mistake. He used the spelling Claud.)
As the Manos Theatre is a three-story building, not very wide, and appears to have an iron cornice, perhaps it was the proposed house mentioned in the May 21, 1910, issue of The American Contractor:
“Tarentum, Pa.—Theater: 3 sty. 136x 33. Architect Ira F. Cutshall. Owner J. H. Oppenheimer. Plans completed; taking figures. Brick, stone, composition roof, large skylight, galv. iron cornice, struct. & orn. iron, yellow pine finish, tile & hardwood floors, marble tiling, gas & electric fixtures, lavatories, water closets, bath tubs.”
What the theater needed bathtubs for I don’t know. Perhaps they were a feature of the dressing rooms.
A history of Tarentum published as part of the Tarentum Borough Comprehensive Plan (Google Documents quick view here; see page 23) says that the Harris Theatre opened in January, 1906, as the Tareco Opera House, and was renamed the Nixon Theatre the following year. It became the Harris Theatre in 1926.
The Nixon was mentioned in the September 16, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World, which reported that the vaudeville house had been taken over by F.J. Nally and Jacob York, who intended to operate it as a movie house.
The three most recent comments on this page are actually about AMC’s Rosemead 4 Cinemas, not the much earlier Rosemead Theatre, which closed almost twenty years before the AMC was opened.
Google Maps is putting this theatre on First Street in San Pedro. The downtown address has not existed since the late 1920s, of course, so I guess Google is confused. Maybe adding the zip code (90012) would help.
To get Google Maps to display the correct location of this theater, its address will have to be changed to the modern 3021 Whittier Boulevard. Stephenson Avenue was not obliterated, just renamed.
The Los Angeles County Assessor’s office says that the building on this site was built in 1921. In Google’s satellite view, the auditorium roof appears to be partly intact. Comparing it with a 1948 view at Historic Aerials, it looks as though only about the rear third of the building has actually been demolished.
Here is Metropolitan Theatres' official Isis Theatre page. They are listing movies on only four screens, though.
This web page appears to be a sale listing for the building, though the information on it does not appear to be up-to-date. It has a few photos, as well as details about the building and its history. This page says that, as of 2001, there were five screens, and that the total seating capacity was 753. Perhaps one of the auditoriums has since been closed.
The original auditorium of the Isis was entirely demolished in 1998. Only the facade of the original building (which was erected in 1892 as a warehouse) is still standing.
A biography of William Sterling Hebbard says that he took over the San Diego practice of the Reid brothers in May, 1891. The Fisher Opera House opened on January 11, 1892, so Hebbard was solely in charge of the project for about eight months. The Reid brothers were associated with the project as early as January, 1889, when they entered into a contract with Fisher and the San Diego Opera House Company.
The Reids had over a year to design the project, while Hebbard became involved only a short time before construction began. Given this timetable, it seems likely that the Reid brothers were primarily responsible for the design of the Fisher Opera House, and Hebbard primarily responsible for overseeing its construction.
Here is a photo of Jimmy Edwards standing in front of the Alhambra Theatre in the 1930s. The circa 1939 date given on that page is wrong. As I recall from earlier research, Edwards bought the lease on the Alhambra not long after he acquired the Mission (later Monterey) Theatre in Monterey Park, and that was in 1930. By 1939, Edwards was operating a circuit of more than a dozen neighborhood theaters, and the Alhambra was his flagship house. If this photo depicts the theater just after Edwards acquired it, it probably dates from the very early 1930s.
The July 23, 1938, Boxoffice Magazine item about Edwards' plans to add a second auditorium to the Alhambra Theater, mentioned in my earlier comment, has been moved to this link.
The article by Helen Kent about the opening of the Alhambra’s second auditorium, in the October 12, 1940, issue of Boxoffice, now begins at this link, and continues on the subsequent two pages of the magazine (click “next page” links at top or bottom of the page scans.) This article has several photos of the theater as it appeared in 1940.
OldJody: You were seeing Warnor’s Theatre in the Street View photo because the 1100 block of Fulton Street is a pedestrian mall and not accessible to Google’s camera truck. The Strand was an entirely different house on Fulton Street south of Fresno Street.
Google would have done better to show the view at the corner of Fulton Mall and Fresno Street. I’ve adjusted Street View to that location and updated it, to prevent further confusion. The Strand would have been on the left side of the mall as you look south from Fresno Street. The pin icon on the Google map is still in the wrong location, at Tuolumne Street.
I’m not sure how long ago the Strand was closed. The only photo I can find showing a Strand Theatre in Fresno is this one, taken way back when Fulton Street was still called J Street. I’m not even sure it’s the same Strand Theatre, as everything on Fulton Street has changed since then.
A list of U.S. radio stations broadcasting as of May, 1923, includes station WOAG, located in the Apollo Theatre, Belvidere, Illinois. A chronology of early radio says that WOAG began broadcasting in October, 1922. The Federal government began licensing radio stations for commercial broadcasts in late 1920, so WOAG was one of the fairly early ones.
I’ve come across references to a late 19th-early 20th century theater in Belvidere called the Derthick Opera House. Some sources say that it was next to the river. I think it might have been on the same site as the Apollo. The November, 1917, issue of Safety Engineering reported that the “Dorthic” Opera House at Belvidere, Illinois, had been destroyed by fire on October 1, 1917. This publication also said that the theater was next to the river.
The December 6, 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World said that the Zimperhoff Brothers, of Chicago, had been negotiating a two-year leas on the “Derthofk” Opera House in Belvidere, with the intention of operating it as a movie house. I’ve been unable to discover if they got the lease, but given the state of the theater business in the 1910s, odds are good that the Derthick did show movies in its last years.
It’s possible that the Hetrick dated from the very early 20th century. The earliest reference to it I can find in Julius Chan’s guides is in the edition of 1904-1905.
The Hetrick Theatre dated to the late 19th century, and was also known as the Hetrick Opera House. The 1904 Cahn Guide lists it as a 1,050-seat second-floor theater. This photo shows that it was a three-story building in the Romanesque Revival style.
The Emporia Gazette of July 20, 1925, reported that half a block of business buildings at Chanute, Illinois, had been destroyed on July 10 by fire that had started in the Hetrick Theatre. The total loss was estimated at $500,000.
If the Capri was on the same site as the theater it replaced, the La Nora, then it must have been at the same address of 114 N. Cuyler Street. The building at that address is currently occupied by the Heard & Jones Health Mart, a drug store and pharmacy. It’s a midcentury modern building and looks to be about 1961 vintage, and it could have been a theater.
There’s another building in Pampa, at the northeast corner of Cuyler and Francis Avenue, which looks like it was once a theater. It has a vertical sign with spots for five letters, but all are missing except the bottom one, and that’s an E. If the E is original, it might have been the State Theatre, but the letter might have been left by some other occupant, so the building could also have been the Capri. The Overview here doesn’t make it clear if the Capri was on the same site as the La Noya or not, and the State is not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.
Cinema Treasures currently says that the Southern Theatre has been demolished, but I wonder if the building is still standing? A May, 2011, obituary for Mr. Raymond L. Spayne says that he was the owner and operator of the Southern Theater and Southern Tap Room in Akron.
The Southern Tap Room is located at 1169 Grant Street. Here’s a photo. The door to the upstairs of the building has the address 1165. There is an adjacent storefront, with no address on display, that might have been the theater entrance at one time. The building looks a bit too small for the listed seating capacity of 550, though.
If the theater was not in the same building as the bar, then it must have been on what is now a parking lot next door. The driveway apron there looks very old and worn, so if the theater was on that lot it must have been demolished ages ago.
212 E. Main Street is now occupied by offices of the City of Cuero.
The little building next door to the theater looks to small to have been the Palace/Rex Theatre that was operating in the 1920s and 1930s, so that house must have been where the parking lot is now.
The aka Normana Theatre still needs to be added to the additional info.
A book called “Rantoul and Chanute Air Force Base” by Mark D. Hanson says that this house was operating in the 1920s as the Blackstone Theatre. Another house also called the Home Theatre was closed down when the Blackstone was renamed the New Home Theatre. The book doesn’t say when the renaming took place, nor when the “New” was dropped, but a 1942 photo in the book shows the same marquee that is currently on the building.
If you move Street View down 17th Avenue to the alley, you can see some glass block windows at the corner of the building. These would not have been installed as late as 1956, so they must be part of the original design. That indicates that the theater was probably built in the 1930s, when the streamline modern style first came into vogue. The upstairs corner windows with steel sash were also characteristic of the 1930s style.
If there’s a record of this theater existing in 1934, that’s probably the year it opened. A book called “A Guide to Historic Hollywood: A Tour Through Place and Time” by Joan Mickelson says that a Hollywood Theatre built in 1923 at 1921 Hollywood Boulevard was remodeled and reopened as the Ritz Theatre in 1935. Presumably the name change was prompted by the opening of this new house.
The Grand Theatre page at PSTOS says that the house was located on Cedar Street. A 1915 magazine item gave the location as Cedar and 5th. One of the photos at PSTOS shows that the theater building was the first structure in the 500 block, so the entrance was probably 503 Cedar. The site is now a parking lot.
The Grand Theatre was built in 1915, and opened November 10 that year. An article about the opening of the house appeared in the January 1, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. The Grand Theatre was designed by Spokane architect Lewis R. Stritesky.
Construction must have been rapid, as an announcement that Stritesky was preparing plans for the theater appeared in The Moving Picture World of August 14, 1915. Originally intended as a movie house, stage facilities were added to the plans when the town’s Masonic Temple Opera House was destroyed by fire.
The July, 1921, issue of Architecture and Building has a brief article about the Central Theatre and a portfolio of several photographs. I now think that E. C. Horne and Sons must have designed only the building the theater was in, as the article identifies the architect of the theater itself to Eugene De Rosa.
I suspected that the claim about Todd-AO was wrong. There was a lot of hype flying around about the original Todd-AO format in the mid-1950s, and it pretty much all came to nothing.
Here is a fresh link to the 1955 Boxoffice article about the Fox Theatre in Trona.
Pickford Center is located in a building which originally served as offices and studios for the Mutual-Don Lee Broadcasting System’s radio and television network. It was dedicated in 1948, and was designed by Los Angeles architect Claud Beelman.
The complex originally featured four theater-style sound stages which could be used as studios for telecasts with what the television industry rather disturbingly calls live audiences (as opposed, I guess, to audiences of the undead.) Presumably, the Linwood Dunn Theater occupies one of those four studios.
Hollywood Heritage provides this history of the building (but misspells architect’s Beelman’s first name as Claude, a common mistake. He used the spelling Claud.)
Here is a link to photographer Edmund J. Kowalski’s photos of the Washington Theatre taken June 25, 2005, before the house was restored.
As the Manos Theatre is a three-story building, not very wide, and appears to have an iron cornice, perhaps it was the proposed house mentioned in the May 21, 1910, issue of The American Contractor:
What the theater needed bathtubs for I don’t know. Perhaps they were a feature of the dressing rooms.A history of Tarentum published as part of the Tarentum Borough Comprehensive Plan (Google Documents quick view here; see page 23) says that the Harris Theatre opened in January, 1906, as the Tareco Opera House, and was renamed the Nixon Theatre the following year. It became the Harris Theatre in 1926.
The Nixon was mentioned in the September 16, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World, which reported that the vaudeville house had been taken over by F.J. Nally and Jacob York, who intended to operate it as a movie house.
Whittle Randy’s book “Johnstown: A History” says that the Embassy Theatre opened in 1913 as the Nemo Theatre.
The three most recent comments on this page are actually about AMC’s Rosemead 4 Cinemas, not the much earlier Rosemead Theatre, which closed almost twenty years before the AMC was opened.
Google Maps is putting this theatre on First Street in San Pedro. The downtown address has not existed since the late 1920s, of course, so I guess Google is confused. Maybe adding the zip code (90012) would help.
To get Google Maps to display the correct location of this theater, its address will have to be changed to the modern 3021 Whittier Boulevard. Stephenson Avenue was not obliterated, just renamed.
The Los Angeles County Assessor’s office says that the building on this site was built in 1921. In Google’s satellite view, the auditorium roof appears to be partly intact. Comparing it with a 1948 view at Historic Aerials, it looks as though only about the rear third of the building has actually been demolished.
Here is Metropolitan Theatres' official Isis Theatre page. They are listing movies on only four screens, though.
This web page appears to be a sale listing for the building, though the information on it does not appear to be up-to-date. It has a few photos, as well as details about the building and its history. This page says that, as of 2001, there were five screens, and that the total seating capacity was 753. Perhaps one of the auditoriums has since been closed.
The original auditorium of the Isis was entirely demolished in 1998. Only the facade of the original building (which was erected in 1892 as a warehouse) is still standing.
A biography of William Sterling Hebbard says that he took over the San Diego practice of the Reid brothers in May, 1891. The Fisher Opera House opened on January 11, 1892, so Hebbard was solely in charge of the project for about eight months. The Reid brothers were associated with the project as early as January, 1889, when they entered into a contract with Fisher and the San Diego Opera House Company.
The Reids had over a year to design the project, while Hebbard became involved only a short time before construction began. Given this timetable, it seems likely that the Reid brothers were primarily responsible for the design of the Fisher Opera House, and Hebbard primarily responsible for overseeing its construction.
Here is a photo of Jimmy Edwards standing in front of the Alhambra Theatre in the 1930s. The circa 1939 date given on that page is wrong. As I recall from earlier research, Edwards bought the lease on the Alhambra not long after he acquired the Mission (later Monterey) Theatre in Monterey Park, and that was in 1930. By 1939, Edwards was operating a circuit of more than a dozen neighborhood theaters, and the Alhambra was his flagship house. If this photo depicts the theater just after Edwards acquired it, it probably dates from the very early 1930s.
The July 23, 1938, Boxoffice Magazine item about Edwards' plans to add a second auditorium to the Alhambra Theater, mentioned in my earlier comment, has been moved to this link.
The article by Helen Kent about the opening of the Alhambra’s second auditorium, in the October 12, 1940, issue of Boxoffice, now begins at this link, and continues on the subsequent two pages of the magazine (click “next page” links at top or bottom of the page scans.) This article has several photos of the theater as it appeared in 1940.