This house opened early in 1982 as the Cinedome 7. Like the other Cinedome theaters in California, it was a project of Syufy Enterprises (Century Theatres), and was designed by architect Vincent G. Raney.
Boxoffice Magazine ran an article about it in their January, 1983, issue, mentioning that it had opened just a year earlier. In its original configuration, the Cinedome had 2400 seats, with four domed auditoriums of 400 seats each (two of them equipped for 70mm projection and six track sound) and three flat-top houses of 400, 200, and 200 seats.
The theater had been so successful from its opening day that Syufy was, at the time the article was published, building a second, identical cineplex a couple of miles away, which was to be called the Cinedome West, and is now the Cinedome 7 Newark.
I don’t know when the Fremont Cinedome got its eighth screen, or how it was done, or how it changed the total seating capacity. A few of the domed theaters at various Century locations were split in later years, but they might have split the larger of the flat-top theaters in Fremont. Somebody who has actually been there will probably turn up eventually to let us know.
Paul, if you’re still around, check the Cinema Treasures page for the Uptown to see if there are any recent developments. There are lots of links to recent photos there now.
The April 30, 1938, issue of Boxoffice Magazine featured an article by Edward Paul Lewin, architect of the recently-opened Times Theatre. The article included several photos of the house.
This article was a follow-up to an article by Lewin in the January 8, 1938, issue of the same publication, which included renderings of the Times, then still under construction.
Lewin’s plans for the house included structural elements that would support a 400 seat balcony which the owners wanted to add to the original 1000 seat auditorium at a later time, if patronage justified it. The provision for this possible balcony addition gave the Times an unusually high ceiling for a single-floor theater.
Not exactly theater-related, but this web log post contains a 1935 Armstrong Linoleum ad with a picture of the stunning deco-moderne interior of a Philadelphia night club and restaurant designed by the architect of the Dante, Armand Carroll.
The Cove Theatre was listed for sale in the Clearing House section of Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of June 19, 1978. The scan is bad, but I can make out that the house was then operating on weekends, and I’m pretty sure it says 400 seats (or maybe 490.) The asking price for the building, business and equipment appears to have been $67,000.
Here’s something from the December 14, 1946, issue of Boxoffice: “The opening of the Cove at Orange Cove last month by John L. Terrill came 17 months after he had opened his first house, the Orosi at Orosi….” Orosi is a few miles south of Orange Cove and about an equal distance east of Dinuba.
The June 30, 1945, issue of Boxoffice ran an item saying that John J. Terrill had declared the recent opening of his new Orosi Theatre “a tremendous success.” It added that Terrill, an Air Transport Command veteran, had previously operated a theater in San Andreas, and during the war had operated a military post theater in Long Beach.
Does anybody know anything about the Orosi Theatre? It’s not listed at Cinema Treasures.
Boxoffice Magazine reveals the date the Ventnor reopened with Armand Carroll’s handsome deco-moderne interior (seen in the 1936 photos linked in Warren G. Harris’s comment of May 15, 2008, comment above.)
The September 26, 1936, issue of Boxoffice ran an article about theater grosses in the Atlantic City area. One line reads “…and Ventnor in Ventor city also reported grosses topped previous season despite the fact that the Ventnor house was only rebuilt and opened on July 4, missing a month of good business.”
The Boxoffice item corroborates Warren’s 1936 trade journal photos as to the year the Ventnor reopened, but this Cinema Treasures news post says the house was reopened in 1938, after the original 1921 theater was destroyed by a fire. Unless the place was rebuilt twice in two years, the claim of a 1938 reopening must be an error. Unfortunately, the news post doesn’t cite a source for the date or for the information about a fire.
The wording of the Boxoffice article doesn’t make clear if the Ventnor was closed for only a month for rebuilding (an awfully brief time for a major project) or had merely lost a month’s business from the busy summer season, but it does use the word “rebuilt,” suggesting that, at the least, the house had been gutted, so a fire is a possibility. A planned rebuilding probably would not have been scheduled at a time that might keep the house closed during its busiest season.
This message board page includes some discussion of the Ventnor Theatre, and some pictures of the facade.
The cover plate of the Modern Theatre section of Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of November 7, 1942, featured a photo of the standee-foyer area of the Embassy Theatre in Atlantic City. A caption on a later page says that it was designed by architect Armand de Cortieux Carroll. The auditorium was rather austere, but the photo gives a glimpse of a nice little Moderne lounge with bench seating on the other side of the standee area.
The Grandview Cinema, then under construction, was described in an article in Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of July 22, 1968. The 85 foot wide auditorium was to have 838 plush, reclining seats in rows four feet wide, a 55 foot wide screen, gold drapes, sea green carpeting, and a color scheme of blue, russet, and burnt orange for the seat upholstery.
The house would have 35 and 70mm Simplex projection equipment, and there would be 17 Altec speakers in the auditorium. The 140-foot long lobby-foyer area would feature more sea green carpeting, and had vaulted ceilings and a 20 foot chandelier. In lieu of a marquee there would be a fifteen-foot overhang along the glass front of the building, and a ten foot overhang along the sides, adjacent to the two acres of parking. The would be a double-sided attraction board 8 feet by 42 feet placed near the main road, about a block from the theatre.
The Grandview Cinema was designed by architect Bob Peters of the Odessa firm Peters & Fields.
The Century Mall Theatre was opened on June 26, 1968. It had 1204 seats, according to the announcement of its opening published in Boxoffice Magazine on July 22 that year.
It probably shouldn’t be added to Cinema Treasures, as it’s open only two nights a month, but the Broadway Theatre now has a cinematic neighbor of sorts called the Angel City Drive-In. It’s located at 240 W. 4th Street (corner of Broadway), on the upper level parking lot.
The place started out as the Million Dollar Drive-In, on August 25, 2007, and was originally located in the parking lot south of the Alexandria Hotel on Spring Street, with the movie projected onto the wall of the hotel. They soon changed the name to Angel City Drive-In, and the move to 4th Street seems to have been made in 2008.
They use a portable screen which appears to be mounted on the wall of the Judson Rives Building, and the projector will be perched atop a car. Here’s a weblog post from April 13, 2008, which includes a couple of photos of the impromptu drive-in.
There are many references to the Angel City Drive-In on the Internet, and the project has obviously attracted enough patronage to keep it going for two years now. There will never be a movie shown in the Broadway Theatre again, but it’s an interesting twist of fate that there are now movies being shown on the outside wall of its building.
The December 9, 1968, issue of Boxoffice Magazine listed the Fox Woodbridge as one of three new houses, all called the Fox, opened in the U.S. by NGC that month. The Fox Woodbridge opened on Tuesday, December 3. The Boxoffice item gave the seating capacity as 1350.
The Beverly Hills Theatre was opened in 1945 by the B.R. McLendon Circuit. McLendon opened the Casa Linda Theatre the same year. Both of these openings were mentioned in an article about recent theater construction in the Dallas area published in Boxoffice Magazine, December 29, 1945.
Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of August 4, 1945, published a brief item about the Casa Linda Theatre headlined “De Luxe Dallas House To Open Thursday.” As August 4 was a Saturday, the opening date must have been August 9, 1945.
Boxoffice Magazine mentions of this theater’s architect always spell his surname Sornik. So does the online finding aid for the J. Evan Miller collection of Cinerama Theater Plans at UCLA.
The Miller Collection also lists this house as the Big Town Mall Theater, and says it opened in 1963. I can’t find any other site giving that date for the theater, but there are numerous references to the Big Town Mall shopping center itself having opened in 1959. Most of the theaters built for Cinerama do date from the early 1960s, so a 1970 opening seems very unlikely, if this is indeed the same theater and not a later replacement.
There are three items in various issues of Boxoffice Magazine from 1964 and 1965 about a theater called the Cinema to be built in Ashley Plaza Shopping Center, on Route 7 in Charleston.
The April 6, 1964, issue says that the theater was to be built by the center’s developer, Gate City Realty, of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and would be leased to General Drive-In Corporation (which was soon to change its name to General Cinema Corporation.) The 900 seat, single-screen house was designed by architect Maurice D. Sornik, and construction was to begin soon, with the opening set for Labor Day that year.
An article about General Cinema in the June 29, 1964, issue mentions in passing that the Cinema in Charleston was then under construction. The January 18, 1965, issue includes the Cinema in its annual list of theaters opened the previous year.
I have known Boxoffice to include in its annual list of new theaters houses that were planned but never actually built, but this is fairly rare. I know that the Ashley Landing Cinemas is supposed to have opened in the early 1970s, and the Wikipedia article about the Ashley Plaza Center says the shopping center was built in 1970 (and names a different development company,) then enclosed in 1971, but I’ve found Wikipedia to be unreliable even more often than I’ve found Boxoffice Magazine to be so.
Is it possible that the Ashley Landing Cinemas actually opened in 1964 as the Cinema? The Boxoffice article says that the building was 70' wide and 160' deep. This aerial photo of the center, at the Ashley Landing web site, shows a building at lower left that looks to be about that size, and which looks as though it was probably there before the center was enclosed. Is that the building where the theater was located? The impression I get from the description and comments here is that the theater entrance was inside the mall, and the aerial shows that the other buildings which were about the right size to have been the Cinema appear to front on the parking lot.
The first Boxoffice article cites the Charleston Post as a source. If somebody in the area has access to back issues of the paper, maybe they could look up articles from 1964-1965 to see if the Cinema actually got built or if the deal fell through and was delayed. Maybe check the local movie listings from after Labor Day 1964, too.
Correction on the opening date: The Boxoffice item says it was opened on Christmas Night, not Christmas Eve, so that’s an opening date of December 25, 1960.
The photos in Boxoffice show that the auditorium was too small to have held 850 seats. The 600 seats cited in the article is probably the correct number. It was only a two-aisle theater (if you don’t count the dead-end center aisle which served only the loge smoking section), and it had only a few more than 20 rows.
Additional info: The January 16, 1961, issue of Boxoffice has a brief item saying that the Pequa Theatre was opened to the public for the first time on Christmas Eve, so that gives an opening date of December 24, 1960.
This house was open before 1964, and had a smaller seating capacity than is currently listed. The Pequa Theatre had recently opened when it was featured in an article in the May 8, 1961, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The architect was Maurice D. Sornik, and the seating capacity was 600. The Prudential Theatres house featured a glass-walled facade, a two story lobby and lounge, a stainless steel and plastic marquee, and terrazzo flooring in the entry and parts of the lobby.
The auditorium featured aluminum panels on the side walls, a wall-to-wall screen, and exposed ceiling joists to which tubular downlights were attached. The color scheme was red, green, and gold. There was a railed-in loge-smoking area at the rear of the center section of seats, accessed by a truncated center aisle.
One of the photos shows a spiral staircase rising from a planter in the indoor ticket foyer. Though this feature isn’t mentioned in the text, I’d presume that it led to the projection booth.
Here’s a puzzle for Islipers (Islipians? Islipites?) The January 19, 1946, issue of Boxoffice Magazine ran an article about a contretemps in Islip. Prudential Playhouses, a regional theater circuit, had broken ground for a movie theater on Main Street at Smith Avenue (which is the location of the Islip Theater.) A group of citizens protested the location, saying it was too close to churches and a school, and would generate too much traffic.
William Egelman, President of the Chamber of Commerce and spokesman for the theater’s opponents, denied that the opposition was motivated by the fact that James Poro, operator of the East Islip Theatre, was already building an 800 seat theater on Main Street a couple of blocks from the site of the proposed Prudential house, and it was scheduled to open in April.
Prudential said that they’d already gotten to go-ahead from the town authorities, that the town had originally approached them asking them to build in Islip, and that they had heard of no opposition from residents before breaking ground. Their spokesman added that they had been planning to build in Islip for four years, and that there was no ordinance prohibiting the construction of theaters near schools or churches.
So here’s the puzzle: As the Islip Theater is in the location Prudential wanted to build at (so they must have gone ahead with their project), what became of James Poro’s theater on Main Street? Did Islip support two theaters for a while? Did Poro decide to pull out of his theater project before Prudential’s house opened, and convert his building to some other use? Is the building he had under construction in 1946 still there, and can anybody identify its exact location?
The Google Maps satellite view of Islip shows only one building on Main Street about two blocks from this theater that looks large enough to have held an 800 seat theater, on the south side of the street opposite the end of Locust Avenue. Unfortunately, Google has no street view available for this location so I can’t check to see if the facade looks at all theater-like.
Now Marty’s peccadillo will be exposed among Google results when his name is searched. The guy was pretty well known. Here he is hanging out with actor Pat O'Brien, about 1940.
Such “jostlings” were doubtlessly common at the Art and other Main Street grind houses through much of their history, and probably only a small percentage of them ended with an arrest. There’s a whole secret history of these theaters that’s little discussed.
The Odeon Twin was the subject of an article in the American trade publication Boxoffice Magazine, October 25, 1965. It says that the plans for the 1964-65 rebuilding were made by the architectural firm of Harry W. Weedon and Partners, and the interior design consultants were Trevor Stone and Mavis Stone. Among the photos accompanying the article is one of the marquee displaying the announcement “Grand Opening July 12th.”
The Tyrone Square 6 and the Crossroads were different theaters, and it turns out that the AMC Crossroads 8 was yet another. I found a 1972 reference to the Crossroads Theatre being at 1900 Tyrone Boulevard, so the AMC Crossroads 8 at 2190 Tyrone doesn’t have a Cinema Treasures page yet either.
Movie Listings in The St. Petersburg Evening Independent, January 28, 1984, show AMC then operating five houses in the area: Tyrone Square 6; Countryside 6; Crossroads 2; Clearwater 4; Seminole 2.
Plans for construction of the 2200 seat AMC Crossroads 8 were announced in the St. Petersburg Times of August 8, 1986. The article said that the Crossroads 2 would be closed when the new house was opened in 1987, and would be converted to retail space.
Also, the August 16, 1965, issue of Boxoffice has a list of theaters recently opened in shopping centers, and one of them is a 1000 seat house called the Tyrone Theatre, located in the Tyrone Shopping Center, St. Petersburg. There’s a photo of the front, and it shows a typical, nondescript shopping center theater of the era. An ad for the Tyrone Theatre in the August 14, 1965, issue of The St. Petersburg Evening Independent includes the line “Wurlitzer Concert on our stage, 8:00PM.” The feature film, “Lord Jim,” was also scheduled at 8:00PM. That must have produced quite a cacophony.
Roger: Issuu has some issues of Boxoffice available online. I find them easier to search via Google than through the site’s own search feature. Use Google’s advanced search and use issuu.com as the domain, and put boxoffice (single word) in the top box of the form, along with words specific to the subject you’re searching for. Fewer words are usually better than more.
This house opened early in 1982 as the Cinedome 7. Like the other Cinedome theaters in California, it was a project of Syufy Enterprises (Century Theatres), and was designed by architect Vincent G. Raney.
Boxoffice Magazine ran an article about it in their January, 1983, issue, mentioning that it had opened just a year earlier. In its original configuration, the Cinedome had 2400 seats, with four domed auditoriums of 400 seats each (two of them equipped for 70mm projection and six track sound) and three flat-top houses of 400, 200, and 200 seats.
The theater had been so successful from its opening day that Syufy was, at the time the article was published, building a second, identical cineplex a couple of miles away, which was to be called the Cinedome West, and is now the Cinedome 7 Newark.
I don’t know when the Fremont Cinedome got its eighth screen, or how it was done, or how it changed the total seating capacity. A few of the domed theaters at various Century locations were split in later years, but they might have split the larger of the flat-top theaters in Fremont. Somebody who has actually been there will probably turn up eventually to let us know.
That was supposed to make a link, but the site has been misbehaving lately. You’ll have to copy and paste the URL.
Paul, if you’re still around, check the Cinema Treasures page for the Uptown to see if there are any recent developments. There are lots of links to recent photos there now.
/theaters/69/
The April 30, 1938, issue of Boxoffice Magazine featured an article by Edward Paul Lewin, architect of the recently-opened Times Theatre. The article included several photos of the house.
This article was a follow-up to an article by Lewin in the January 8, 1938, issue of the same publication, which included renderings of the Times, then still under construction.
Lewin’s plans for the house included structural elements that would support a 400 seat balcony which the owners wanted to add to the original 1000 seat auditorium at a later time, if patronage justified it. The provision for this possible balcony addition gave the Times an unusually high ceiling for a single-floor theater.
Not exactly theater-related, but this web log post contains a 1935 Armstrong Linoleum ad with a picture of the stunning deco-moderne interior of a Philadelphia night club and restaurant designed by the architect of the Dante, Armand Carroll.
The Cove Theatre was listed for sale in the Clearing House section of Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of June 19, 1978. The scan is bad, but I can make out that the house was then operating on weekends, and I’m pretty sure it says 400 seats (or maybe 490.) The asking price for the building, business and equipment appears to have been $67,000.
Here’s something from the December 14, 1946, issue of Boxoffice: “The opening of the Cove at Orange Cove last month by John L. Terrill came 17 months after he had opened his first house, the Orosi at Orosi….” Orosi is a few miles south of Orange Cove and about an equal distance east of Dinuba.
The June 30, 1945, issue of Boxoffice ran an item saying that John J. Terrill had declared the recent opening of his new Orosi Theatre “a tremendous success.” It added that Terrill, an Air Transport Command veteran, had previously operated a theater in San Andreas, and during the war had operated a military post theater in Long Beach.
Does anybody know anything about the Orosi Theatre? It’s not listed at Cinema Treasures.
Boxoffice Magazine reveals the date the Ventnor reopened with Armand Carroll’s handsome deco-moderne interior (seen in the 1936 photos linked in Warren G. Harris’s comment of May 15, 2008, comment above.)
The September 26, 1936, issue of Boxoffice ran an article about theater grosses in the Atlantic City area. One line reads “…and Ventnor in Ventor city also reported grosses topped previous season despite the fact that the Ventnor house was only rebuilt and opened on July 4, missing a month of good business.”
The Boxoffice item corroborates Warren’s 1936 trade journal photos as to the year the Ventnor reopened, but this Cinema Treasures news post says the house was reopened in 1938, after the original 1921 theater was destroyed by a fire. Unless the place was rebuilt twice in two years, the claim of a 1938 reopening must be an error. Unfortunately, the news post doesn’t cite a source for the date or for the information about a fire.
The wording of the Boxoffice article doesn’t make clear if the Ventnor was closed for only a month for rebuilding (an awfully brief time for a major project) or had merely lost a month’s business from the busy summer season, but it does use the word “rebuilt,” suggesting that, at the least, the house had been gutted, so a fire is a possibility. A planned rebuilding probably would not have been scheduled at a time that might keep the house closed during its busiest season.
This message board page includes some discussion of the Ventnor Theatre, and some pictures of the facade.
The cover plate of the Modern Theatre section of Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of November 7, 1942, featured a photo of the standee-foyer area of the Embassy Theatre in Atlantic City. A caption on a later page says that it was designed by architect Armand de Cortieux Carroll. The auditorium was rather austere, but the photo gives a glimpse of a nice little Moderne lounge with bench seating on the other side of the standee area.
The Lompoc Theatre’s official web site appears to be dead. I’m getting a 404 error.
The Grandview Cinema, then under construction, was described in an article in Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of July 22, 1968. The 85 foot wide auditorium was to have 838 plush, reclining seats in rows four feet wide, a 55 foot wide screen, gold drapes, sea green carpeting, and a color scheme of blue, russet, and burnt orange for the seat upholstery.
The house would have 35 and 70mm Simplex projection equipment, and there would be 17 Altec speakers in the auditorium. The 140-foot long lobby-foyer area would feature more sea green carpeting, and had vaulted ceilings and a 20 foot chandelier. In lieu of a marquee there would be a fifteen-foot overhang along the glass front of the building, and a ten foot overhang along the sides, adjacent to the two acres of parking. The would be a double-sided attraction board 8 feet by 42 feet placed near the main road, about a block from the theatre.
The Grandview Cinema was designed by architect Bob Peters of the Odessa firm Peters & Fields.
The Century Mall Theatre was opened on June 26, 1968. It had 1204 seats, according to the announcement of its opening published in Boxoffice Magazine on July 22 that year.
It probably shouldn’t be added to Cinema Treasures, as it’s open only two nights a month, but the Broadway Theatre now has a cinematic neighbor of sorts called the Angel City Drive-In. It’s located at 240 W. 4th Street (corner of Broadway), on the upper level parking lot.
The place started out as the Million Dollar Drive-In, on August 25, 2007, and was originally located in the parking lot south of the Alexandria Hotel on Spring Street, with the movie projected onto the wall of the hotel. They soon changed the name to Angel City Drive-In, and the move to 4th Street seems to have been made in 2008.
They use a portable screen which appears to be mounted on the wall of the Judson Rives Building, and the projector will be perched atop a car. Here’s a weblog post from April 13, 2008, which includes a couple of photos of the impromptu drive-in.
There are many references to the Angel City Drive-In on the Internet, and the project has obviously attracted enough patronage to keep it going for two years now. There will never be a movie shown in the Broadway Theatre again, but it’s an interesting twist of fate that there are now movies being shown on the outside wall of its building.
The December 9, 1968, issue of Boxoffice Magazine listed the Fox Woodbridge as one of three new houses, all called the Fox, opened in the U.S. by NGC that month. The Fox Woodbridge opened on Tuesday, December 3. The Boxoffice item gave the seating capacity as 1350.
The Beverly Hills Theatre was opened in 1945 by the B.R. McLendon Circuit. McLendon opened the Casa Linda Theatre the same year. Both of these openings were mentioned in an article about recent theater construction in the Dallas area published in Boxoffice Magazine, December 29, 1945.
Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of August 4, 1945, published a brief item about the Casa Linda Theatre headlined “De Luxe Dallas House To Open Thursday.” As August 4 was a Saturday, the opening date must have been August 9, 1945.
Boxoffice Magazine mentions of this theater’s architect always spell his surname Sornik. So does the online finding aid for the J. Evan Miller collection of Cinerama Theater Plans at UCLA.
The Miller Collection also lists this house as the Big Town Mall Theater, and says it opened in 1963. I can’t find any other site giving that date for the theater, but there are numerous references to the Big Town Mall shopping center itself having opened in 1959. Most of the theaters built for Cinerama do date from the early 1960s, so a 1970 opening seems very unlikely, if this is indeed the same theater and not a later replacement.
There are three items in various issues of Boxoffice Magazine from 1964 and 1965 about a theater called the Cinema to be built in Ashley Plaza Shopping Center, on Route 7 in Charleston.
The April 6, 1964, issue says that the theater was to be built by the center’s developer, Gate City Realty, of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and would be leased to General Drive-In Corporation (which was soon to change its name to General Cinema Corporation.) The 900 seat, single-screen house was designed by architect Maurice D. Sornik, and construction was to begin soon, with the opening set for Labor Day that year.
An article about General Cinema in the June 29, 1964, issue mentions in passing that the Cinema in Charleston was then under construction. The January 18, 1965, issue includes the Cinema in its annual list of theaters opened the previous year.
I have known Boxoffice to include in its annual list of new theaters houses that were planned but never actually built, but this is fairly rare. I know that the Ashley Landing Cinemas is supposed to have opened in the early 1970s, and the Wikipedia article about the Ashley Plaza Center says the shopping center was built in 1970 (and names a different development company,) then enclosed in 1971, but I’ve found Wikipedia to be unreliable even more often than I’ve found Boxoffice Magazine to be so.
Is it possible that the Ashley Landing Cinemas actually opened in 1964 as the Cinema? The Boxoffice article says that the building was 70' wide and 160' deep. This aerial photo of the center, at the Ashley Landing web site, shows a building at lower left that looks to be about that size, and which looks as though it was probably there before the center was enclosed. Is that the building where the theater was located? The impression I get from the description and comments here is that the theater entrance was inside the mall, and the aerial shows that the other buildings which were about the right size to have been the Cinema appear to front on the parking lot.
The first Boxoffice article cites the Charleston Post as a source. If somebody in the area has access to back issues of the paper, maybe they could look up articles from 1964-1965 to see if the Cinema actually got built or if the deal fell through and was delayed. Maybe check the local movie listings from after Labor Day 1964, too.
Correction on the opening date: The Boxoffice item says it was opened on Christmas Night, not Christmas Eve, so that’s an opening date of December 25, 1960.
The photos in Boxoffice show that the auditorium was too small to have held 850 seats. The 600 seats cited in the article is probably the correct number. It was only a two-aisle theater (if you don’t count the dead-end center aisle which served only the loge smoking section), and it had only a few more than 20 rows.
Additional info: The January 16, 1961, issue of Boxoffice has a brief item saying that the Pequa Theatre was opened to the public for the first time on Christmas Eve, so that gives an opening date of December 24, 1960.
This house was open before 1964, and had a smaller seating capacity than is currently listed. The Pequa Theatre had recently opened when it was featured in an article in the May 8, 1961, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The architect was Maurice D. Sornik, and the seating capacity was 600. The Prudential Theatres house featured a glass-walled facade, a two story lobby and lounge, a stainless steel and plastic marquee, and terrazzo flooring in the entry and parts of the lobby.
The auditorium featured aluminum panels on the side walls, a wall-to-wall screen, and exposed ceiling joists to which tubular downlights were attached. The color scheme was red, green, and gold. There was a railed-in loge-smoking area at the rear of the center section of seats, accessed by a truncated center aisle.
One of the photos shows a spiral staircase rising from a planter in the indoor ticket foyer. Though this feature isn’t mentioned in the text, I’d presume that it led to the projection booth.
Here’s a puzzle for Islipers (Islipians? Islipites?) The January 19, 1946, issue of Boxoffice Magazine ran an article about a contretemps in Islip. Prudential Playhouses, a regional theater circuit, had broken ground for a movie theater on Main Street at Smith Avenue (which is the location of the Islip Theater.) A group of citizens protested the location, saying it was too close to churches and a school, and would generate too much traffic.
William Egelman, President of the Chamber of Commerce and spokesman for the theater’s opponents, denied that the opposition was motivated by the fact that James Poro, operator of the East Islip Theatre, was already building an 800 seat theater on Main Street a couple of blocks from the site of the proposed Prudential house, and it was scheduled to open in April.
Prudential said that they’d already gotten to go-ahead from the town authorities, that the town had originally approached them asking them to build in Islip, and that they had heard of no opposition from residents before breaking ground. Their spokesman added that they had been planning to build in Islip for four years, and that there was no ordinance prohibiting the construction of theaters near schools or churches.
So here’s the puzzle: As the Islip Theater is in the location Prudential wanted to build at (so they must have gone ahead with their project), what became of James Poro’s theater on Main Street? Did Islip support two theaters for a while? Did Poro decide to pull out of his theater project before Prudential’s house opened, and convert his building to some other use? Is the building he had under construction in 1946 still there, and can anybody identify its exact location?
The Google Maps satellite view of Islip shows only one building on Main Street about two blocks from this theater that looks large enough to have held an 800 seat theater, on the south side of the street opposite the end of Locust Avenue. Unfortunately, Google has no street view available for this location so I can’t check to see if the facade looks at all theater-like.
Now Marty’s peccadillo will be exposed among Google results when his name is searched. The guy was pretty well known. Here he is hanging out with actor Pat O'Brien, about 1940.
Such “jostlings” were doubtlessly common at the Art and other Main Street grind houses through much of their history, and probably only a small percentage of them ended with an arrest. There’s a whole secret history of these theaters that’s little discussed.
The Odeon Twin was the subject of an article in the American trade publication Boxoffice Magazine, October 25, 1965. It says that the plans for the 1964-65 rebuilding were made by the architectural firm of Harry W. Weedon and Partners, and the interior design consultants were Trevor Stone and Mavis Stone. Among the photos accompanying the article is one of the marquee displaying the announcement “Grand Opening July 12th.”
The Tyrone Square 6 and the Crossroads were different theaters, and it turns out that the AMC Crossroads 8 was yet another. I found a 1972 reference to the Crossroads Theatre being at 1900 Tyrone Boulevard, so the AMC Crossroads 8 at 2190 Tyrone doesn’t have a Cinema Treasures page yet either.
Movie Listings in The St. Petersburg Evening Independent, January 28, 1984, show AMC then operating five houses in the area: Tyrone Square 6; Countryside 6; Crossroads 2; Clearwater 4; Seminole 2.
Plans for construction of the 2200 seat AMC Crossroads 8 were announced in the St. Petersburg Times of August 8, 1986. The article said that the Crossroads 2 would be closed when the new house was opened in 1987, and would be converted to retail space.
Also, the August 16, 1965, issue of Boxoffice has a list of theaters recently opened in shopping centers, and one of them is a 1000 seat house called the Tyrone Theatre, located in the Tyrone Shopping Center, St. Petersburg. There’s a photo of the front, and it shows a typical, nondescript shopping center theater of the era. An ad for the Tyrone Theatre in the August 14, 1965, issue of The St. Petersburg Evening Independent includes the line “Wurlitzer Concert on our stage, 8:00PM.” The feature film, “Lord Jim,” was also scheduled at 8:00PM. That must have produced quite a cacophony.
Roger: Issuu has some issues of Boxoffice available online. I find them easier to search via Google than through the site’s own search feature. Use Google’s advanced search and use issuu.com as the domain, and put boxoffice (single word) in the top box of the form, along with words specific to the subject you’re searching for. Fewer words are usually better than more.