There was a gap between the closing of the Academy and the opening of the Normandie. The 1922 Cahn-Leighton guide lists the Academy at this address with the notation “OB”, meaning out of business. No theaters are listed at this address in city directories later than 1921 until the Normandie appears in 1925.
The America Theatre was not in the building at 167 N. College, now occupied by the comedy club, but in the building immediately south of it, at 153-157 N. College. I also think that the facades of both buildings are misleading, as is often the case in old urban neighborhoods. Buildings can be gutted and entirely new facades put on them without demolishing the basic structure, though in this case I suspect that the building which actually housed the America Theatre has had its roof lowered, which means nothing remains of the theater but the side walls and perhaps the lower part of the back wall. The fly tower is of course gone, along with any other traces of the building’s theatrical history
Here is a major problem with the comedy club building: satellite view shows that it simply isn’t deep enough to have held a theater. About 2/5 of that lot is parking, and was already parking in a 1956 aerial view (the earliest aerial available online.) LoopNet’s page for 167 N. College says it was built/renovated in 1885/1914 and calls it the Briggs Building (though there is another building of that name in Fort Collins, at Oak and Mason street, built in 1951/1952.)
The building to the south of this Briggs Building, at 153-157 N. College, also has a LoopNet page, which calls it the America Building (!), and says it was built/renovated in 1904/2016. This building is definitely deep enough to have housed a theater. It is currently occupied by an assortment of small businesses, some of them arrayed along a passageway cut through the building to the alley in back. Despite LoopNet noting only a 2016 renovation, the conversion of the structure to a commercial arcade was done around 1955, the year noted on plans and drawings of the project prepared by local architect William B. Robb, listed in the finding aid for his collected papers. The closing date of 1953 provided by rivest266 is probably correct, despite the continued listing of the house in the 1956 FDY.
The theater entrance having been in the north bay of the building, as revealed by the vintage photo, the address would have been about 157 N., currently the address of a business called Elite E-Sport. The historic address I’ve seen for the Orpheum Theatre was 163 N, but that number is apparently no longer in use.
While there apparently was an earlier Empress Theatre in Fairbanks, local sources I’ve seen have all been in agreement that this house opened on August 25, 1927, and I’ve found none that give it any name other than Empress. CinemaTour cites a June 15, 1962 item in the Daily News Miner saying that the house had shown its last movie the previous night. It was the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy “Lover Come Back.”
The Vocal Group Hall of Fame web site is still working, which I doubt would be the case if the auditorium was gone. There is nothing on the web site or anywhere else on the Internet about any demolition. Until somebody provides a reliable source saying that it has been razed, the theater’s status should be listed as closed, restoring, and the VGHF web site’s Columbia Theatre page linked to it.
I found a modern photo of the Royal’s building at Flickr. The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists only the Princess Theatre at West Union, but I have come across a February 12, 1916 Moving Picture World item datelined saying that an R. D. Fellows had purchased an interest in the Cozy Theatre. The Cozy could have been the Royal reopened. By 1926 the FDY is listing only the Princess.
If this was the only theater on the 1913 Sanborn of West Union it must have been the Royal, a house whose proprietor, G. W. Batemen, had just installed a new screen, projector, and seats, according to the December 13 issue of Moving Picture World.
Apparently Mr. Kramer did manage to get the Winfield Theatre reopened in 1954, with the announcement appearing in the March 15 issue of Boxoffice. The house would be open three nights a week. Local businesses subscribed to each buy two adult tickets a week for one year, and additionally had given away 60 tickets for the first show under the new management. The house was still in in operation in 1955 when the April 16 Boxoffice reported that Kramer planned to continue a program of free movies on Wednesday nights sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. I haven’t found any later items about the Winfield.
There could have been an afterlife for this theater. The February 27, 1954 issue of Boxoffice had a brief article saying that E. J. Kramer of Burlington, Iowa, ad bought the theater equipment from the Allens and leased the Winfield Theatre building from the Pratt Brothers for three years and planned to reopen the house in March.
I haven’t found anything to confirm that Mr. Kramer, who had the backing of the local Chamber of Commerce, was able to fulfill his plans, though it seems to me his timing could hardly have been worse. wide screen equipment was about to become essential for theaters, and that would have been an enormous expense, yet had it not been made I don’t see how the house could have survived three year with a dwindling, then nonexistent, supply of new movies.
The October 2, 1933 issue of Film Daily reveals another aka for this house: “Elroy, Wis. — The Majestic has been renamed the Juneau and is now being operated by Edmund Mohns and Donald Wilcox.”
Yet another name was presented in the issue of April 9, 1934: “Elroy, Wis. — The Juneau theater has been renamed the Star and is now being operated by J. Eskin.”
This name might have been used only briefly, though, as the May 28 issue had this item: “ELROY—Star (formerly Juneau), transferred to Elroy Theater, Inc. by A. A. Suczycki.”
An October, 1914 Sanborn map of Elroy shows a “Motion Picture Theatre” on the second floor of a building at the southeast corner of Main and Franklin streets (modern address 140 Main Street.) As it is upstairs, I suspect that it was an existing hall converted to show movies, and was probably the Opera House that was listed in a 1911 Polk directory of Wisconsin businesses. The Opera House was also the only theater listed at Elroy in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.
While the Sanborn map proves a theater was at this location in 1914, the 1926 FDY lists the Majestic with 329 seats, and I doubt that this small structure could have held half that many. It might be that the Majestic began in the Opera house in 1914 but later found larger quarters. Or the FDY might have just gotten the capacity wrong.
The 1913 Cahn guide lists the Phillips Opera House as a ground floor theater (the earlier opera house was also owned by and named for Mr. Phillips– Cahn guides, 1897-98, 1898-99.) One thing that troubles me is that the Sanborn map of the building at 8 N. Frederick doesn’t show a balcony, as Sanborn maps invariably (as far as I know) did when such existed. The Cahn guide lists a balcony, gallery and boxes for the opera house. If this fairly large opera house existed in 1913, why isn’t it on the 1914 Sanborn? It could have burned down, of course, but I’ve found no evidence that such a thing happened.
I do think it far more likely that the Cahn guide would list a theater that wasn’t actually there, or wasn’t as described, than that the Sanborn map would miss a building that actually was there, or would fail to note features as significant as a balcony, gallery and boxes. In fact the latter seems near impossible while the former wouldn’t surprise me at all. All I can think of is that either the opera house was destroyed sometime in 1913, or that the original project planned in 1907 was scaled back to the more modest theater that appears on the 1914 Sanborn. At least so far, the latter seems more likely.
Also, a 1912 Iowa business directory lists three theaters at Oelwein: the Lyric, the Orpheum, and the Phillips Opera House. The Orpheum and Opera House might have been the same theater, and I’ve been thinking that the Lyric, which I found mentioned in both 1911 and in December, 1910, might have been an earlier name for the Colonial.
A photo showing part of the Gem Theatre’s front in 1926 can be seen on this page (my mouse has been acting up and I’m unable to do any photo editing with it.) The photo is from the May 8 issue of Universal Weekly.
The November, 1911 issue of Motography had this item about the Gem:
“The Gem theater of Oelwein, operated by Messrs. Preston and O'Brien, has been purchased by Harlan Short and Arthur Dailey, who have had wide experience in the theatrical line and will doubtless meet with success in their new undertaking, as they propose to give their patrons the best.”
That is the earliest mention of the Gem I’ve found so far, and as the house was still listed (with 250 seats) in the 1929 FDY, it had a long run. The Gem was on the FDY’s national list of important first run houses in 1920. In the 1921 FDY, both the Gem and the Orpheum made the list.
As the Gem was listed in FDYs from 1926 through 1929 with 250 seats, I’m not sure what to make of the report in the September 1, 1923 issue of Moving Picture World that manager Ted Bryant was remodeling the Gem and planned to add about 400 seats. So ambitious a project probably would have involved taking over all the ground floor space in the building, and extensive reconstruction. As the Grand Theatre with over 800 seats had opened the previous year, it’s likely Mr. Bryant was unable to get financing for his risky project. It’s clear that it was never carried out. I suspect Mr. Bryant of having been on the pipe.
Whether it was at this address or not in 1905, the Dreamland was listed at 10 E. Charles Street in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory (I overlooked the listing before because I was looking at the OCS page, which has some garbled type, not the proper scan where it is quite clear.) In 1911, the May issue of Motography said that the Dreamland had recently been sold to Messrs. W. A. and D. E. Schneider.
To add a bit more confusion, the 1911 edition of the Chicago Daily News Almanac and Year Book contained an ad for the Western Vaudeville Managers Association, and the ad lists a theater at Oelwein, but it’s called the Lyric.
In the 1926 FDY three houses are listed at Oelwein: the 250-seat Gem, the 867-seat Grand, and the 420-seat Orpheum. All three survived into 1929, but only the Grand was listed in 1930. Odds that the Orpheum became the Ritz seem pretty good to me. There is no overlap in their operation, and they were about the same size.
An Opera House at Oelwein is mentioned in Moving Picture World February 20, 1909, when a Mr. J. G. Capron of Waterloo purchased it with the intention of operating it as a vaudeville and movie house. It is mentioned again in the November 13, 1915 issue, when another new owner, A. L. Smith, converted it into a movie theater.
The origin of this opera house might have been in 1907. An item dateline Oelwein in the December 29, 1906 issue of The Improvement Bulletin said that “J. T. and J. W. Ridler will probably erect an opera house in the spring.” The March 21, 1907 issue of the same journal said “Messers. Ridler and Field have a site and are having plans prepared for the proposed opera house.”
A March 30, 1907 item reveals more, and the plans were fairly elaborate. Architect James Cox of Estherville had prepared plans for a three story brick building, 70 x 140 feet. If this particular project got built it should be quite obvious on the Sanborn map. I haven’t found any later notices to indicate if the project was completed, scaled back, or abandoned.
If completed as originally planned it would certainly have accommodated more seats than the 400 in the Ritz. It also failed to getting into the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, but the 1912-1913 Cahn guide lists a Phillips Opera House, rather small at about 510 seats including a gallery with 100, and a stage only 18 feet from footlights to the back wall and a proscenium only 10 x 22.
A notice that one George Philips had bought the old Methodist Church at Oelwein and would remodel it for use as a hall appeared in the April 6, 1907 issue of The Improvement Bulletin.
I suppose that might have been it, though a short-lived storefront nickelodeon is probably as likely at that early date. But in researching the opera house I found a projected one in 1906-07 that I think might have become the Ritz.
One early Oelwein movie house was called the Dreamland Theatre, though no house of that name (or on Charles Street) is listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The July 12, 1913 Moving Picture World features a photo of a Mr. A. W. McIntosh, who, the caption says, “…commenced his picture exhibiting career eight years ago in the Dreamland Theater, Oelwein, Iowa.” That would have been 1905, so that theater should have shown up on the 1906 map, if it still existed then, and assuming Mr. McIntosh and the caption writer both got their numbers right.
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists 31 S. Frederick as the location of the Gem Theatre. There is a lot of overlap in mentions of the Orpheum and Gem in trade journals, so they clearly operated at the same time. Of course that doesn’t preclude them from both having operated in this building at different times, if one or both had operated in more than one location.
The October 16, 1915 Moving Picture World mentions a house in Oelwein called the Colonial, recently purchased by a Paul R. Whitney, formerly of Albert Lea, Minnesota. It might be that the purchase didn’t go through at that time, as the June 10, 1916 issue of Motography also said that the Colonial had recently been purchased by Mr. Whitney, who planned extensive improvements.
A church of that era would be fairly likely to have been designed in a Colonial Revival style, which I think increases the chances that it would have been named the Colonial when it was converted into a theater.
This house should be marked as closed but renovating. This article from the Waverly Newspapers Group, published on September 7, 2022, is the most recent I’ve found, and notes that the project had been awarded some three quarters of a million dollars in tax credits.
A locally formed group called Movie Guys LLC which has owned the building since 2018 is in charge of the project, with plans to develop apartments on the upper floor of the building and a restaurant and a movie theater on the ground floor. The project was delayed by the pandemic, but work got underway again in 2021. I haven’t seen details about the size and configuration of the theater, and there is no information about a completion date for it, but the target for completion of the residential portion of the project is by June, 2024.
The Iowa Historical Society’s documentation for this building says its construction began in 1925 and was completed in 1926. The July 3, 1926 issue of Motion Picture News said that “[p]icture fans of Waverly, Iowa, attended the opening of the new Palace Theatre last week.” The May 8 issue of the same journal had said that the theater’s owner, M. H. Haggerman, a local attorney, would not be actively involved in the theater’s management, but had arranged the outfitting of the house through the Exhibitor’s Supply Company of Omaha.
As noted in an earlier comment, the Palace was renamed the Waverly Theatre in 1937, the year it was remodeled with plans by Mortimer Cleveland. Another remodeling took place in 1972, according to the Historical Society’s site inventory form.
There was a gap between the closing of the Academy and the opening of the Normandie. The 1922 Cahn-Leighton guide lists the Academy at this address with the notation “OB”, meaning out of business. No theaters are listed at this address in city directories later than 1921 until the Normandie appears in 1925.
The America Theatre was not in the building at 167 N. College, now occupied by the comedy club, but in the building immediately south of it, at 153-157 N. College. I also think that the facades of both buildings are misleading, as is often the case in old urban neighborhoods. Buildings can be gutted and entirely new facades put on them without demolishing the basic structure, though in this case I suspect that the building which actually housed the America Theatre has had its roof lowered, which means nothing remains of the theater but the side walls and perhaps the lower part of the back wall. The fly tower is of course gone, along with any other traces of the building’s theatrical history
Here is a major problem with the comedy club building: satellite view shows that it simply isn’t deep enough to have held a theater. About 2/5 of that lot is parking, and was already parking in a 1956 aerial view (the earliest aerial available online.) LoopNet’s page for 167 N. College says it was built/renovated in 1885/1914 and calls it the Briggs Building (though there is another building of that name in Fort Collins, at Oak and Mason street, built in 1951/1952.)
The building to the south of this Briggs Building, at 153-157 N. College, also has a LoopNet page, which calls it the America Building (!), and says it was built/renovated in 1904/2016. This building is definitely deep enough to have housed a theater. It is currently occupied by an assortment of small businesses, some of them arrayed along a passageway cut through the building to the alley in back. Despite LoopNet noting only a 2016 renovation, the conversion of the structure to a commercial arcade was done around 1955, the year noted on plans and drawings of the project prepared by local architect William B. Robb, listed in the finding aid for his collected papers. The closing date of 1953 provided by rivest266 is probably correct, despite the continued listing of the house in the 1956 FDY.
The theater entrance having been in the north bay of the building, as revealed by the vintage photo, the address would have been about 157 N., currently the address of a business called Elite E-Sport. The historic address I’ve seen for the Orpheum Theatre was 163 N, but that number is apparently no longer in use.
While there apparently was an earlier Empress Theatre in Fairbanks, local sources I’ve seen have all been in agreement that this house opened on August 25, 1927, and I’ve found none that give it any name other than Empress. CinemaTour cites a June 15, 1962 item in the Daily News Miner saying that the house had shown its last movie the previous night. It was the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy “Lover Come Back.”
The Vocal Group Hall of Fame web site is still working, which I doubt would be the case if the auditorium was gone. There is nothing on the web site or anywhere else on the Internet about any demolition. Until somebody provides a reliable source saying that it has been razed, the theater’s status should be listed as closed, restoring, and the VGHF web site’s Columbia Theatre page linked to it.
I found a modern photo of the Royal’s building at Flickr. The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists only the Princess Theatre at West Union, but I have come across a February 12, 1916 Moving Picture World item datelined saying that an R. D. Fellows had purchased an interest in the Cozy Theatre. The Cozy could have been the Royal reopened. By 1926 the FDY is listing only the Princess.
If this was the only theater on the 1913 Sanborn of West Union it must have been the Royal, a house whose proprietor, G. W. Batemen, had just installed a new screen, projector, and seats, according to the December 13 issue of Moving Picture World.
Apparently Mr. Kramer did manage to get the Winfield Theatre reopened in 1954, with the announcement appearing in the March 15 issue of Boxoffice. The house would be open three nights a week. Local businesses subscribed to each buy two adult tickets a week for one year, and additionally had given away 60 tickets for the first show under the new management. The house was still in in operation in 1955 when the April 16 Boxoffice reported that Kramer planned to continue a program of free movies on Wednesday nights sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. I haven’t found any later items about the Winfield.
There could have been an afterlife for this theater. The February 27, 1954 issue of Boxoffice had a brief article saying that E. J. Kramer of Burlington, Iowa, ad bought the theater equipment from the Allens and leased the Winfield Theatre building from the Pratt Brothers for three years and planned to reopen the house in March.
I haven’t found anything to confirm that Mr. Kramer, who had the backing of the local Chamber of Commerce, was able to fulfill his plans, though it seems to me his timing could hardly have been worse. wide screen equipment was about to become essential for theaters, and that would have been an enormous expense, yet had it not been made I don’t see how the house could have survived three year with a dwindling, then nonexistent, supply of new movies.
The October 2, 1933 issue of Film Daily reveals another aka for this house: “Elroy, Wis. — The Majestic has been renamed the Juneau and is now being operated by Edmund Mohns and Donald Wilcox.”
Yet another name was presented in the issue of April 9, 1934: “Elroy, Wis. — The Juneau theater has been renamed the Star and is now being operated by J. Eskin.”
This name might have been used only briefly, though, as the May 28 issue had this item: “ELROY—Star (formerly Juneau), transferred to Elroy Theater, Inc. by A. A. Suczycki.”
An October, 1914 Sanborn map of Elroy shows a “Motion Picture Theatre” on the second floor of a building at the southeast corner of Main and Franklin streets (modern address 140 Main Street.) As it is upstairs, I suspect that it was an existing hall converted to show movies, and was probably the Opera House that was listed in a 1911 Polk directory of Wisconsin businesses. The Opera House was also the only theater listed at Elroy in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.
While the Sanborn map proves a theater was at this location in 1914, the 1926 FDY lists the Majestic with 329 seats, and I doubt that this small structure could have held half that many. It might be that the Majestic began in the Opera house in 1914 but later found larger quarters. Or the FDY might have just gotten the capacity wrong.
I came across a news report from 1968 saying there had been a major tornado in Oelwein. That might account for its sorry condition today.
The 1913 Cahn guide lists the Phillips Opera House as a ground floor theater (the earlier opera house was also owned by and named for Mr. Phillips– Cahn guides, 1897-98, 1898-99.) One thing that troubles me is that the Sanborn map of the building at 8 N. Frederick doesn’t show a balcony, as Sanborn maps invariably (as far as I know) did when such existed. The Cahn guide lists a balcony, gallery and boxes for the opera house. If this fairly large opera house existed in 1913, why isn’t it on the 1914 Sanborn? It could have burned down, of course, but I’ve found no evidence that such a thing happened.
I do think it far more likely that the Cahn guide would list a theater that wasn’t actually there, or wasn’t as described, than that the Sanborn map would miss a building that actually was there, or would fail to note features as significant as a balcony, gallery and boxes. In fact the latter seems near impossible while the former wouldn’t surprise me at all. All I can think of is that either the opera house was destroyed sometime in 1913, or that the original project planned in 1907 was scaled back to the more modest theater that appears on the 1914 Sanborn. At least so far, the latter seems more likely.
Also, a 1912 Iowa business directory lists three theaters at Oelwein: the Lyric, the Orpheum, and the Phillips Opera House. The Orpheum and Opera House might have been the same theater, and I’ve been thinking that the Lyric, which I found mentioned in both 1911 and in December, 1910, might have been an earlier name for the Colonial.
Okay, I have no idea why my link is not working. Try this one, though you’ll have to embiggen it yourself.
A photo showing part of the Gem Theatre’s front in 1926 can be seen on this page (my mouse has been acting up and I’m unable to do any photo editing with it.) The photo is from the May 8 issue of Universal Weekly.
The November, 1911 issue of Motography had this item about the Gem:
That is the earliest mention of the Gem I’ve found so far, and as the house was still listed (with 250 seats) in the 1929 FDY, it had a long run. The Gem was on the FDY’s national list of important first run houses in 1920. In the 1921 FDY, both the Gem and the Orpheum made the list.As the Gem was listed in FDYs from 1926 through 1929 with 250 seats, I’m not sure what to make of the report in the September 1, 1923 issue of Moving Picture World that manager Ted Bryant was remodeling the Gem and planned to add about 400 seats. So ambitious a project probably would have involved taking over all the ground floor space in the building, and extensive reconstruction. As the Grand Theatre with over 800 seats had opened the previous year, it’s likely Mr. Bryant was unable to get financing for his risky project. It’s clear that it was never carried out. I suspect Mr. Bryant of having been on the pipe.
Whether it was at this address or not in 1905, the Dreamland was listed at 10 E. Charles Street in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory (I overlooked the listing before because I was looking at the OCS page, which has some garbled type, not the proper scan where it is quite clear.) In 1911, the May issue of Motography said that the Dreamland had recently been sold to Messrs. W. A. and D. E. Schneider.
To add a bit more confusion, the 1911 edition of the Chicago Daily News Almanac and Year Book contained an ad for the Western Vaudeville Managers Association, and the ad lists a theater at Oelwein, but it’s called the Lyric.
In the 1926 FDY three houses are listed at Oelwein: the 250-seat Gem, the 867-seat Grand, and the 420-seat Orpheum. All three survived into 1929, but only the Grand was listed in 1930. Odds that the Orpheum became the Ritz seem pretty good to me. There is no overlap in their operation, and they were about the same size.
An Opera House at Oelwein is mentioned in Moving Picture World February 20, 1909, when a Mr. J. G. Capron of Waterloo purchased it with the intention of operating it as a vaudeville and movie house. It is mentioned again in the November 13, 1915 issue, when another new owner, A. L. Smith, converted it into a movie theater.
The origin of this opera house might have been in 1907. An item dateline Oelwein in the December 29, 1906 issue of The Improvement Bulletin said that “J. T. and J. W. Ridler will probably erect an opera house in the spring.” The March 21, 1907 issue of the same journal said “Messers. Ridler and Field have a site and are having plans prepared for the proposed opera house.”
A March 30, 1907 item reveals more, and the plans were fairly elaborate. Architect James Cox of Estherville had prepared plans for a three story brick building, 70 x 140 feet. If this particular project got built it should be quite obvious on the Sanborn map. I haven’t found any later notices to indicate if the project was completed, scaled back, or abandoned.
If completed as originally planned it would certainly have accommodated more seats than the 400 in the Ritz. It also failed to getting into the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, but the 1912-1913 Cahn guide lists a Phillips Opera House, rather small at about 510 seats including a gallery with 100, and a stage only 18 feet from footlights to the back wall and a proscenium only 10 x 22.
A notice that one George Philips had bought the old Methodist Church at Oelwein and would remodel it for use as a hall appeared in the April 6, 1907 issue of The Improvement Bulletin.
I suppose that might have been it, though a short-lived storefront nickelodeon is probably as likely at that early date. But in researching the opera house I found a projected one in 1906-07 that I think might have become the Ritz.
One early Oelwein movie house was called the Dreamland Theatre, though no house of that name (or on Charles Street) is listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The July 12, 1913 Moving Picture World features a photo of a Mr. A. W. McIntosh, who, the caption says, “…commenced his picture exhibiting career eight years ago in the Dreamland Theater, Oelwein, Iowa.” That would have been 1905, so that theater should have shown up on the 1906 map, if it still existed then, and assuming Mr. McIntosh and the caption writer both got their numbers right.
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists 31 S. Frederick as the location of the Gem Theatre. There is a lot of overlap in mentions of the Orpheum and Gem in trade journals, so they clearly operated at the same time. Of course that doesn’t preclude them from both having operated in this building at different times, if one or both had operated in more than one location.
The October 16, 1915 Moving Picture World mentions a house in Oelwein called the Colonial, recently purchased by a Paul R. Whitney, formerly of Albert Lea, Minnesota. It might be that the purchase didn’t go through at that time, as the June 10, 1916 issue of Motography also said that the Colonial had recently been purchased by Mr. Whitney, who planned extensive improvements.
A church of that era would be fairly likely to have been designed in a Colonial Revival style, which I think increases the chances that it would have been named the Colonial when it was converted into a theater.
Damn. I’ve lived in Butte County since 1986 and this is the first I’ve heard of this theater.
This house should be marked as closed but renovating. This article from the Waverly Newspapers Group, published on September 7, 2022, is the most recent I’ve found, and notes that the project had been awarded some three quarters of a million dollars in tax credits.
A locally formed group called Movie Guys LLC which has owned the building since 2018 is in charge of the project, with plans to develop apartments on the upper floor of the building and a restaurant and a movie theater on the ground floor. The project was delayed by the pandemic, but work got underway again in 2021. I haven’t seen details about the size and configuration of the theater, and there is no information about a completion date for it, but the target for completion of the residential portion of the project is by June, 2024.
The Iowa Historical Society’s documentation for this building says its construction began in 1925 and was completed in 1926. The July 3, 1926 issue of Motion Picture News said that “[p]icture fans of Waverly, Iowa, attended the opening of the new Palace Theatre last week.” The May 8 issue of the same journal had said that the theater’s owner, M. H. Haggerman, a local attorney, would not be actively involved in the theater’s management, but had arranged the outfitting of the house through the Exhibitor’s Supply Company of Omaha.
As noted in an earlier comment, the Palace was renamed the Waverly Theatre in 1937, the year it was remodeled with plans by Mortimer Cleveland. Another remodeling took place in 1972, according to the Historical Society’s site inventory form.