The Valley Theatre was a Fox West Coast operation in 1940, when it suffered an estimated $5,000 damages from an earthquake that also damaged several other Imperial Valley houses, according to an item in the May 25, 1940, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. By 1945, Boxoffice was saying that the Valley Theatre was operated by independent exhibitor Frank Ullman.
From Boxoffice Magazine, March 1, 1952: “The Oregon premier of ‘Quo Vadis’ this week also marked the reopening as a first-run house of John Hamrick’s Liberty. The theatre is now known as the New Liberty.”
Deborah Kerr was among the guests appearing at the opening, which was broadcast on local radio.
The May 23, 1942, issue of Boxoffice magazine said: “Jimmy Edwards opened his new Santa Anita, near Arcadia, May 14. The 743-seater charges 40 cents admission and boasts a crying room and a parking lot accommodating 450 cars. The Edwards circuit, with this addition, numbers 20 houses.”
According to the finding aid for the Buechner & Orth papers at the University of Minnesota, the firm designed over a dozen theaters. So far, Cinema Treasures attributes only three of these, with separate listings for Charles Buechner and Henry Orth.
The Grand makes a few appearances in various issues of Boxoffice Magazine from 1938 to 1944. First, in the June 25, 1938, issue there is this brief item: “Hyman ‘Doc’ Barsky has assumed ownership and will reopen two dark houses —the Placentia, a 300-seater at Placentia, and the Grand, in Anaheim, a 600-seater —with both scheduled for renovation.” The item also mentions that Fox West Coast had been the lessee of the Grand.
Then from Boxoffice of January 21, 1939, comes this breaking news: “Closed for the last 12 years, the Grand Theatre will be reopened February 1 by Doc Barsky and Bob Sproul on a lease relinquished by Fox West Coast. Sproul, who operates the Brentwood Theatre in Santa Monica, will be the active manager at the Grand.”
It sounds as though Fox West Coast had been leasing the house for years only to keep it closed. But maybe the copy writer at Boxoffice mistakenly wrote “12 years” in place of “12 months.” Does anybody know if the Grand vanished from theater listings from 1927 through 1939?
Then, the July 29, 1939, issue of Boxoffice announces a shakeup at the Grand: “H.H. Barsky has purchased the Grand Theatre from Bob Sproul and has closed it temporarily for alterations and redecorating. He will open the house at a 15-cent admission scale.”
As the earlier reports suggest that Barsky and Sproul were in a partnership, this item must have meant that Barsky had bought Sproul’s share of the business. Perhaps they’d had a tiff.
But it looks as though Mr. Barsky soon had buyer’s remorse. The April 6, 1940, issue of Boxoffice reveals the next turn of events in the Grand saga: “J.E. Trott has purchased the Grand, a 950-seater, from H.H. Barsky.”
As the reported seating capacity had increased from 600 in 1938, Barsky and/or Sproul must have done extensive remodeling- or crammed in a lot of really small seats.
The Grand soon found itself with yet another new owner, and then another. The June 17, 1944, issue of Boxoffice reported that Morris Rabwin had purchased the Grand from A. Blanco. Meanwhile, according to the same report, A. Blanco had lately been palling round in Tijuana with none other than “Doc” Barsky. Boxoffice fails to provide further details about their relationship. I guess Bob Sproul was entirely out of the picture by then.
With its sale to Mr. Rabwin, the Grand vanishes from the pages of Boxoffice, as far as I’ve been able to discover. I can find no mentions of it as the Garden, either. Sic transit gloria.
The name change from Downey Theatre to Avenue Theatre took place in 1949. The April 16 issue of Boxoffice Magazine said that the Cummings circuit would spend $200,000 on remodeling its Victory and Meralta Theatres, and that the Victory would be renamed the Avenue.
With regard to ken mc’s posts of January this year, I do recall the United Artists being called the Alameda for a while around 1961-1962. I think it was after it closed again that the Alameda name was moved to the United Artists in East Los Angeles. I guess UA wanted to get their money’s worth from that expensive signage.
My USC links have all changed again, too, so here’s the current link to the wide view of the original Optic Theatre on Broadway (located at lower right of the photo.) There is also this cropped version with the Optic in close-up.
Note that just up the street the Broadway Central Building, later to become the location of the Broadway Theatre, is under construction.
Fox West Coast reopened this house as the New Anaheim Theatre on Thursday, July 8, 1937, according to Boxoffice Magazine of July 10 that year. The item said that the house had “…been closed for several months, undergoing extensive remodeling.”
The PSTOS page about the Liberty Theatre appears to contain errors and certainly omits some early information about the house. The organization itself has another web page with two vintage postcard views of the Liberty when it was the the Orpheum Theatre, clearly identifiable as the same building in the 1946 photo of the Liberty linked by Lost Memory immediately above this comment.
I don’t know where PSTOS got the information that the theater had been built in 1916 for T&D, but that circuit, based in San Francisco, was indeed operating vaudeville houses in California during that period. Perhaps they had some sort of arrangement with the Orpheum circuit to present Orpheum vaudeville and use the Orpheum name.
In any case, the Liberty was taken over by Jensen and Von Herberg by 1917, and was operated in later years by the Evergreen-Hamrick combine, and then by John Hamrick Theatres. Hamrick had the house extensively remodeled in 1952.
The Broadway Theatre, at Broadway and Stark, that was the subject of the 1917 L.A. Times article ken mc quoted from on Nov 16, 2008, must have been the original Portland Orpheum, pictured in photos on this PSTOS page. It is recently listed at Cinema Treasures (but without its Orpheum and Broadway aka’s) under its later name, the Liberty Theatre.
PSTOS has a Liberty Theatre page, too, but nobody there seems to have realized that the Orpheum and the Liberty were the same theater.
The December 15, 1945, issue of Boxoffice Magazine names among the recent visitors to Film Row in San Francisco one Lesley Pancake of the Shasta Theatre at Central Valley. Mr. Pancake is mentioned in various issues of Boxoffice as late as 1954, and then he and his theater vanish from cinema history— or at least from the pages of Boxoffice Magazine.
The former boomtown is still very much in existence, an incorporated city and thriving suburb of Redding. I’m sure the Google Maps link for the address above does not show the actual location of the theater, though. I haven’t been able to track down a modern address for the location, but I suspect it was near the center of the town of Central Valley (the largest of several small towns that were incorporated into the modern municipality of Shasta Lake.) Central Valley Street may have been the former name of Shasta Dam Boulevard, but I’ve been unable to confirm this. I believe there has been street renumbering since the days when this theater was operating, too. For now, the actual location of the Shasta Theatre remains a mystery.
John Hamrick had a long association with the first Music Box Theatre in Portland, and Hamrick Theatres built the new Music Box on Broadway as well. The old Music Box was operated as the Alder Theatre by Fox West Coast’s Evergreen Theatres subsidiary from at least the late 1920s, until 1935. In that year the house came under Hamrick’s management as the result of a merger which created the Evergreen-Hamrick circuit.
It was probably then that it was renamed the Music Box Theatre, after Hamrick’s earlier Music Box in Seattle. When the various Fox circuits were forced to divest themselves of many theaters in the late 1940s, the combination was dissolved and the Music Box came entirely under the control of John Hamrick Theatres.
There’s a problem with the aka’s currently listed for this house. Aside from Cinema Treasures, I can’t find any references to it ever being called the Alder Street Music Box Theatre. The PSTOS page for the Music Box gives the aka Alder Street Theatre, but their page displays a 1929 postcard view of the house, and the theater’s sign hanging above the street simply says Alder Theatre.
The only pre-Music Box reference to the house I can find in Boxoffice Magazine is from a 1943 article about a fellow named George McMurphy, which lists the Alder (not Alder Street) among the Portland theaters he had managed for Fox West Coast in the early 1930s.
Also, visitors to the PSTOS Portland Music Box page should note that another ca.1920s postcard there, captioned “Broadway, looking South from Stark,” shows a theater with a vertical sign reading “John Hamrick’s Music Box Theatre.” I don’t think it’s a photo of Portland at all, but of Seattle.
The Rosewood Theatre was pictured in the July 22, 1950, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The house, then under construction, was expected to open on October 15, but was ahead of schedule. Boxoffice announced in its issue of September 16, 1950, that the Rosewood had opened. The architect was W.C. Lester.
In the October 19, 1929, issue of Movie Age, among the theaters listed as having been purchased by Publix are three at Fairbury, Nebraska: The Bonham, the Majestic, and the Rex.
An item in the September 18, 1937, issue of Boxoffice Magazine announced that construction had begun on William Chesbrough’s new Drexel Theatre. The new house was expected to open around January 1.
A paragraph published under the heading “Columbus” in the February 5, 1938, issue of Boxoffice Magazine indicates the sort of promotions theaters did in those days. It says “Wm. Chesbrough’s new Drexel Theatre presented "Brownie,” the educated dog, in a free show for children. Every boy and girl was asked to leave their name, date of birth and address for a Birthday Club which is to be started soon."
I’ve been unable to discover the architect of the Drexel, but as the house was in suburban Columbus, I’m wondering if perhaps it was designed and built by the F&Y Building Services, headquartered in that city and responsible for the creation of dozens of deco-moderne theaters in the region from the late 1930s on? It certainly resembles some of F&Y’s work.
There were apparently two Rialtos in Beatrice, operating at different times and, surprisingly, also at the same time. The July 19, 1941, issue of Boxoffice said “A corporation, backers unannounced, are reported to have started equipping the old Rialto at Beatrice, Neb., just around the corner from the new Rialto, operated by Frank Hollingsworth.”
On January 18, 1941, Boxoffice had run a brief item datelined Beatrice, Neb., saying “Harold G. Bowers, who just formed a new corporation, the Rialto Building Co. here, bought the Rialto Theatre from Dean Randall of Eugene, Ore.”
The December 13, 1941, issue of Boxoffice ran a brief item headlined “Cal Bard Brings Another Rialto to Beatrice, Neb.”, saying that Bard had opened his Rialto the previous week. So far I haven’t been able to find out how long this second Rialto operated.
As Frank Hollingsworth had, in 1940, filed a lawsuit against Fox Beatrice, the local operating company of Fox Midwest Theatres, accusing them of attempting to drive him out of business by denying him access to first run films, I can’t help but wonder if Bowers, Bard, and the “unannounced backers” of Bowers' corporation were not all fronting for the Fox interests, in order to discourage Hollingsworth from pursuing his suit.
When Frank Hollingsworth retired in 1964, the November 9 issue of Boxoffice ran an article about him which said that he had opened his Rialto on April 12, 1933. So far I haven’t found a closing date for Hollingsworth’s Rialto, but he apparently either closed the house or let it go before his retirement. The Boxoffice article said he had sold the Holly upon retiring, but it only spoke of the Rialto in the past tense.
I’m wondering about the source of the address listed above. As there were two Rialtos, and at least for a while both were operating at the same time, can we be certain which of the two that address belongs to? If the source is from before 1933, it must be the address of the first Rialto, and it it’s from sometime later, other than right around the early 1940s, it must be for Hollingsworth’s Rialto.
On January 25, 1941, Boxoffice Magazine said that Frank Hollingsworth, operator of the Pix and Rialto Theatres in Beatrice, was planning to remodel a building almost directly across the street from the Pix into a 400-seat theater. It was expected to be open by March.
The Victory is mentioned in various issues of Boxoffice through the 1940s, and then the September 10, 1949, issue ran an item under the headline “Remodeled Theatres Open” says that, over the weekend, Frank Hollingsworth had opened the Holly Theatre, formerly the Victory, at Beatrice.
The November 16, 1929, issue of Movie Age says “Fox Film Corporation has taken over the Ritz Theatre at Beatrice, Nebr.” That increases the likelihood that the Ritz became the Fox. If it did, there’s also a chance that it was the same theater which is now the Cinema Centre. Read on for details.
The June 5, 1948, issue of Boxoffice has an item headlined “To Rebuild in Beatrice” saying “Fox Midwest will rebuild an old local theatre building, long closed, into the modern 900-seat Fox Theatre. The project, to be completed by the end of the year, will replace the 900-seat Rivoli, now operated by FMW.” Fox might have dropped the Rivoli, but I’ve seen mentions of it in later issues of Boxoffice, so if they did then somebody else must have reopened it.
A November 9, 1964, article published by Boxoffice on the occasion of Frank Hollingswoth’s retirement, had this to say: “…he started his theatre business on April 12, 1933, with the Rialto…. Eight years later he built the Holly. At one time he also owned the Pix Theatre, now the Fox.” (Oh, and I mistakenly put has name as Earl Hollingsworth in my comment yesterday. It was Frank.)
Now it gets a bit twisty. Under the headline “F. Hollingsworth Opens Second Beatrice House,” the November 8, 1939, issue of Boxoffice says: “Frank Hollingsworth, who has been a one-house operator in Beatrice for some time, has opened his new Pix Theatre. It is a first-run spot, renamed from the old Fox. Hollingsworth took it over when Fox Midwest let it go recently in a rental squabble. He will continue to operate the Rialto as a subsequent runner.”
Hollingsworth must have had friends at Boxoffice (or Fox had enemies), as their December 9, 1939, issue published a multi-page article about his new house, with several photos and with the title “The Little Pix Theatre Puts Its Predecessor to Shame.” Take that, Fox! Hollingsworth had re-seated the house, redecorated, put in acoustical treatment to improve sound, modernized the facade, and installed air conditioning. But the 1948 rebuilding when the Pix became the Fox again must have been quite extreme, as the Fox had 900 seats and the Pix only 525.
So it looks as though the Cinema Center also has Pix as an aka, and was the Fox until 1939, and then was the Fox again from 1948 on. It might also have been the Ritz, but I haven’t found any solid confirmation of that yet.
Hollingsworth apparently closed the Pix some time in 1940, when he couldn’t get first-run pictures for the house. He filed a lawsuit against the Fox Beatrice division of Fox Midwest Theatres, and in 1942 a jury awarded him damages for his 1940 losses, and he and Fox then settled out of court for his 1941 damage claims. I haven’t been able to find a final closing date for the Pix, but as he opened the Victory (later renamed the Holly) in 1941, perhaps the Pix remained closed until Fox re-acquired it in 1948.
Lots of items about Beatrice show up in Boxoffice Magazine and its predecessors, but there are some contradictions and complications among them, so it’s hard to figure out which theaters had which names when. For example, there might have been two theaters called the Fox, the second of which was a 1948 rebuild of an older house- or maybe just a rebuild of the first Fox. The article is imprecise. Does anybody know if the Fox changed addresses about 1948?
One interesting item is an ad for Boller Brothers in the July 10, 1926, issue of The Reel Journal, which lists a Beatrice Theatre in Beatrice, Nebraska, as one of their projects under construction, though it says that Boller Brothers were only consulting architects on that project. I’ve found a few references to a Fox Beatrice Theatre. I wonder if they were the same house?
The Reel Journal of September 19, 1925, lists the Gillbert Theatre in Beatrice as being among the houses which has installed a Reproducto Player Pipe Organ (which sold for $2,150, installed.)
An item in Movie Age, February 9, 1929, said that the Ritz Theatre in Beatrice had installed Dramaphone sound equipment. Boxoffice of June 5, 1948, included a mention of the Ritz opening recently in its “From the Boxoffice Files, Twenty Years Ago” feature.
Another interesting item is in the October 19, 1929, issue of Movie Age, which said that Publix had bought four theaters in Beatrice- the Rivoli, Strand, Palm, and Ken. There are mentions of the Rivoli into the 1940s, but I’ve found no more about the other three so far.
There was also a Pix or New Pix Theatre, under operation in 1940 by Earl Hollingsworth, who was also operating the Rialto at that time.
There’s some other stuff about Hollingsworth’s theaters, but different issues give contradictory information which will have to be sorted out.
According to the January 26, 1952, issue of Boxoffice, there was also a Majestic Theatre in Fairbury, which had been closed for some unspecified time but was renovated in late 1951 and reopened as the Woods Theatre. The Woods had 468 seats. The Majestic had seated 600. The article said that the house was across the street from the Pla-Mor, but failed to say what the Pla-Mor was. Perhaps it was another closed theater?
The Chief Theatre was designed by the noted Omaha architectural firm of John Latenser & Sons, according to an item in the June 15, 1946, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. Owner Ralph Blank said that work on the new house was progressing steadily, but the completion date would depend on the availability of materials and labor. The house was open by late 1947, as five photos of it appeared in the November 15 issue of Boxoffice that year.
There’s a large discrepancy between the seating capacity of 328 currently listed above, and the Boxoffice projection of 1,254 seats for the Chief. The photos published in Boxoffice show that it was a very large house, with three pairs of double doors flanking each side of the box office at the entrance, and a wide auditorium that appears to have had four aisles. The frontage of the building must have been at least 80 feet, and was probably more. Judging from the photo of the auditorium, the Chief must have had nearly 1000 seats at the least, if not as many as Boxoffice claimed.
Boxoffice calls it the States Theatre, too. The January 28, 1950, issue says that the States Theatre had been destroyed by fire on January 13. It also said that the theater had been operating since 1923, and had been one of the leading theaters in the Grand Forks area. An August 31, 1946, article saying that Ira Haaven had bought “…the theatre in East Grand Forks” indicates that the States was the only theater in the town at that time.
A later article says that the States Theatre had originally been located across the street from its final location. It doesn’t give the year the house moved to the new building. The original States Theatre building, according to the October 15, 1955, issue of Boxoffice, was in 1955 remodeled and reopened as a 230-seat house called the WW Theatre, named for the owner, William C. Wong, operator of a local restaurant. An earlier article about Mr. Wong’s project said that the town had been without a theatre since the States had burned in 1950.
The WW Theatre “…had been closed for some time” when it was reopened by a Mr. R.D. Ferguson, according to an item in the December 25, 1961, issue of Boxoffice. That’s the last mention of the house I can find, at least under that name. The February 9, 1976, issue of Boxoffice makes a reference to a Century Cinema in East Grand Forks, but there’s no indication whether or not it was the WW Theatre renamed.
The Valley Theatre was a Fox West Coast operation in 1940, when it suffered an estimated $5,000 damages from an earthquake that also damaged several other Imperial Valley houses, according to an item in the May 25, 1940, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. By 1945, Boxoffice was saying that the Valley Theatre was operated by independent exhibitor Frank Ullman.
From Boxoffice Magazine, March 1, 1952: “The Oregon premier of ‘Quo Vadis’ this week also marked the reopening as a first-run house of John Hamrick’s Liberty. The theatre is now known as the New Liberty.”
Deborah Kerr was among the guests appearing at the opening, which was broadcast on local radio.
The May 23, 1942, issue of Boxoffice magazine said: “Jimmy Edwards opened his new Santa Anita, near Arcadia, May 14. The 743-seater charges 40 cents admission and boasts a crying room and a parking lot accommodating 450 cars. The Edwards circuit, with this addition, numbers 20 houses.”
According to the finding aid for the Buechner & Orth papers at the University of Minnesota, the firm designed over a dozen theaters. So far, Cinema Treasures attributes only three of these, with separate listings for Charles Buechner and Henry Orth.
There probably was supposed to be a comma between the names, but the addition of “Street” appears to have been an error as well.
The Grand makes a few appearances in various issues of Boxoffice Magazine from 1938 to 1944. First, in the June 25, 1938, issue there is this brief item: “Hyman ‘Doc’ Barsky has assumed ownership and will reopen two dark houses —the Placentia, a 300-seater at Placentia, and the Grand, in Anaheim, a 600-seater —with both scheduled for renovation.” The item also mentions that Fox West Coast had been the lessee of the Grand.
Then from Boxoffice of January 21, 1939, comes this breaking news: “Closed for the last 12 years, the Grand Theatre will be reopened February 1 by Doc Barsky and Bob Sproul on a lease relinquished by Fox West Coast. Sproul, who operates the Brentwood Theatre in Santa Monica, will be the active manager at the Grand.”
It sounds as though Fox West Coast had been leasing the house for years only to keep it closed. But maybe the copy writer at Boxoffice mistakenly wrote “12 years” in place of “12 months.” Does anybody know if the Grand vanished from theater listings from 1927 through 1939?
Then, the July 29, 1939, issue of Boxoffice announces a shakeup at the Grand: “H.H. Barsky has purchased the Grand Theatre from Bob Sproul and has closed it temporarily for alterations and redecorating. He will open the house at a 15-cent admission scale.”
As the earlier reports suggest that Barsky and Sproul were in a partnership, this item must have meant that Barsky had bought Sproul’s share of the business. Perhaps they’d had a tiff.
But it looks as though Mr. Barsky soon had buyer’s remorse. The April 6, 1940, issue of Boxoffice reveals the next turn of events in the Grand saga: “J.E. Trott has purchased the Grand, a 950-seater, from H.H. Barsky.”
As the reported seating capacity had increased from 600 in 1938, Barsky and/or Sproul must have done extensive remodeling- or crammed in a lot of really small seats.
The Grand soon found itself with yet another new owner, and then another. The June 17, 1944, issue of Boxoffice reported that Morris Rabwin had purchased the Grand from A. Blanco. Meanwhile, according to the same report, A. Blanco had lately been palling round in Tijuana with none other than “Doc” Barsky. Boxoffice fails to provide further details about their relationship. I guess Bob Sproul was entirely out of the picture by then.
With its sale to Mr. Rabwin, the Grand vanishes from the pages of Boxoffice, as far as I’ve been able to discover. I can find no mentions of it as the Garden, either. Sic transit gloria.
The name change from Downey Theatre to Avenue Theatre took place in 1949. The April 16 issue of Boxoffice Magazine said that the Cummings circuit would spend $200,000 on remodeling its Victory and Meralta Theatres, and that the Victory would be renamed the Avenue.
With regard to ken mc’s posts of January this year, I do recall the United Artists being called the Alameda for a while around 1961-1962. I think it was after it closed again that the Alameda name was moved to the United Artists in East Los Angeles. I guess UA wanted to get their money’s worth from that expensive signage.
My USC links have all changed again, too, so here’s the current link to the wide view of the original Optic Theatre on Broadway (located at lower right of the photo.) There is also this cropped version with the Optic in close-up.
Note that just up the street the Broadway Central Building, later to become the location of the Broadway Theatre, is under construction.
Fox West Coast reopened this house as the New Anaheim Theatre on Thursday, July 8, 1937, according to Boxoffice Magazine of July 10 that year. The item said that the house had “…been closed for several months, undergoing extensive remodeling.”
The PSTOS page about the Liberty Theatre appears to contain errors and certainly omits some early information about the house. The organization itself has another web page with two vintage postcard views of the Liberty when it was the the Orpheum Theatre, clearly identifiable as the same building in the 1946 photo of the Liberty linked by Lost Memory immediately above this comment.
I don’t know where PSTOS got the information that the theater had been built in 1916 for T&D, but that circuit, based in San Francisco, was indeed operating vaudeville houses in California during that period. Perhaps they had some sort of arrangement with the Orpheum circuit to present Orpheum vaudeville and use the Orpheum name.
In any case, the Liberty was taken over by Jensen and Von Herberg by 1917, and was operated in later years by the Evergreen-Hamrick combine, and then by John Hamrick Theatres. Hamrick had the house extensively remodeled in 1952.
The Broadway Theatre, at Broadway and Stark, that was the subject of the 1917 L.A. Times article ken mc quoted from on Nov 16, 2008, must have been the original Portland Orpheum, pictured in photos on this PSTOS page. It is recently listed at Cinema Treasures (but without its Orpheum and Broadway aka’s) under its later name, the Liberty Theatre.
PSTOS has a Liberty Theatre page, too, but nobody there seems to have realized that the Orpheum and the Liberty were the same theater.
The December 15, 1945, issue of Boxoffice Magazine names among the recent visitors to Film Row in San Francisco one Lesley Pancake of the Shasta Theatre at Central Valley. Mr. Pancake is mentioned in various issues of Boxoffice as late as 1954, and then he and his theater vanish from cinema history— or at least from the pages of Boxoffice Magazine.
The former boomtown is still very much in existence, an incorporated city and thriving suburb of Redding. I’m sure the Google Maps link for the address above does not show the actual location of the theater, though. I haven’t been able to track down a modern address for the location, but I suspect it was near the center of the town of Central Valley (the largest of several small towns that were incorporated into the modern municipality of Shasta Lake.) Central Valley Street may have been the former name of Shasta Dam Boulevard, but I’ve been unable to confirm this. I believe there has been street renumbering since the days when this theater was operating, too. For now, the actual location of the Shasta Theatre remains a mystery.
The March 30, 1946, issue of Boxoffice Magazine said that the architect of Robert Lippert’s new Pix Theatre on Market Street was Vincent G. Raney.
John Hamrick had a long association with the first Music Box Theatre in Portland, and Hamrick Theatres built the new Music Box on Broadway as well. The old Music Box was operated as the Alder Theatre by Fox West Coast’s Evergreen Theatres subsidiary from at least the late 1920s, until 1935. In that year the house came under Hamrick’s management as the result of a merger which created the Evergreen-Hamrick circuit.
It was probably then that it was renamed the Music Box Theatre, after Hamrick’s earlier Music Box in Seattle. When the various Fox circuits were forced to divest themselves of many theaters in the late 1940s, the combination was dissolved and the Music Box came entirely under the control of John Hamrick Theatres.
There’s a problem with the aka’s currently listed for this house. Aside from Cinema Treasures, I can’t find any references to it ever being called the Alder Street Music Box Theatre. The PSTOS page for the Music Box gives the aka Alder Street Theatre, but their page displays a 1929 postcard view of the house, and the theater’s sign hanging above the street simply says Alder Theatre.
The only pre-Music Box reference to the house I can find in Boxoffice Magazine is from a 1943 article about a fellow named George McMurphy, which lists the Alder (not Alder Street) among the Portland theaters he had managed for Fox West Coast in the early 1930s.
Also, visitors to the PSTOS Portland Music Box page should note that another ca.1920s postcard there, captioned “Broadway, looking South from Stark,” shows a theater with a vertical sign reading “John Hamrick’s Music Box Theatre.” I don’t think it’s a photo of Portland at all, but of Seattle.
The Rosewood Theatre was pictured in the July 22, 1950, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The house, then under construction, was expected to open on October 15, but was ahead of schedule. Boxoffice announced in its issue of September 16, 1950, that the Rosewood had opened. The architect was W.C. Lester.
In the October 19, 1929, issue of Movie Age, among the theaters listed as having been purchased by Publix are three at Fairbury, Nebraska: The Bonham, the Majestic, and the Rex.
An item in the September 18, 1937, issue of Boxoffice Magazine announced that construction had begun on William Chesbrough’s new Drexel Theatre. The new house was expected to open around January 1.
A paragraph published under the heading “Columbus” in the February 5, 1938, issue of Boxoffice Magazine indicates the sort of promotions theaters did in those days. It says “Wm. Chesbrough’s new Drexel Theatre presented "Brownie,” the educated dog, in a free show for children. Every boy and girl was asked to leave their name, date of birth and address for a Birthday Club which is to be started soon."
I’ve been unable to discover the architect of the Drexel, but as the house was in suburban Columbus, I’m wondering if perhaps it was designed and built by the F&Y Building Services, headquartered in that city and responsible for the creation of dozens of deco-moderne theaters in the region from the late 1930s on? It certainly resembles some of F&Y’s work.
There were apparently two Rialtos in Beatrice, operating at different times and, surprisingly, also at the same time. The July 19, 1941, issue of Boxoffice said “A corporation, backers unannounced, are reported to have started equipping the old Rialto at Beatrice, Neb., just around the corner from the new Rialto, operated by Frank Hollingsworth.”
On January 18, 1941, Boxoffice had run a brief item datelined Beatrice, Neb., saying “Harold G. Bowers, who just formed a new corporation, the Rialto Building Co. here, bought the Rialto Theatre from Dean Randall of Eugene, Ore.”
The December 13, 1941, issue of Boxoffice ran a brief item headlined “Cal Bard Brings Another Rialto to Beatrice, Neb.”, saying that Bard had opened his Rialto the previous week. So far I haven’t been able to find out how long this second Rialto operated.
As Frank Hollingsworth had, in 1940, filed a lawsuit against Fox Beatrice, the local operating company of Fox Midwest Theatres, accusing them of attempting to drive him out of business by denying him access to first run films, I can’t help but wonder if Bowers, Bard, and the “unannounced backers” of Bowers' corporation were not all fronting for the Fox interests, in order to discourage Hollingsworth from pursuing his suit.
When Frank Hollingsworth retired in 1964, the November 9 issue of Boxoffice ran an article about him which said that he had opened his Rialto on April 12, 1933. So far I haven’t found a closing date for Hollingsworth’s Rialto, but he apparently either closed the house or let it go before his retirement. The Boxoffice article said he had sold the Holly upon retiring, but it only spoke of the Rialto in the past tense.
I’m wondering about the source of the address listed above. As there were two Rialtos, and at least for a while both were operating at the same time, can we be certain which of the two that address belongs to? If the source is from before 1933, it must be the address of the first Rialto, and it it’s from sometime later, other than right around the early 1940s, it must be for Hollingsworth’s Rialto.
On January 25, 1941, Boxoffice Magazine said that Frank Hollingsworth, operator of the Pix and Rialto Theatres in Beatrice, was planning to remodel a building almost directly across the street from the Pix into a 400-seat theater. It was expected to be open by March.
The Victory is mentioned in various issues of Boxoffice through the 1940s, and then the September 10, 1949, issue ran an item under the headline “Remodeled Theatres Open” says that, over the weekend, Frank Hollingsworth had opened the Holly Theatre, formerly the Victory, at Beatrice.
The November 16, 1929, issue of Movie Age says “Fox Film Corporation has taken over the Ritz Theatre at Beatrice, Nebr.” That increases the likelihood that the Ritz became the Fox. If it did, there’s also a chance that it was the same theater which is now the Cinema Centre. Read on for details.
The June 5, 1948, issue of Boxoffice has an item headlined “To Rebuild in Beatrice” saying “Fox Midwest will rebuild an old local theatre building, long closed, into the modern 900-seat Fox Theatre. The project, to be completed by the end of the year, will replace the 900-seat Rivoli, now operated by FMW.” Fox might have dropped the Rivoli, but I’ve seen mentions of it in later issues of Boxoffice, so if they did then somebody else must have reopened it.
A November 9, 1964, article published by Boxoffice on the occasion of Frank Hollingswoth’s retirement, had this to say: “…he started his theatre business on April 12, 1933, with the Rialto…. Eight years later he built the Holly. At one time he also owned the Pix Theatre, now the Fox.” (Oh, and I mistakenly put has name as Earl Hollingsworth in my comment yesterday. It was Frank.)
Now it gets a bit twisty. Under the headline “F. Hollingsworth Opens Second Beatrice House,” the November 8, 1939, issue of Boxoffice says: “Frank Hollingsworth, who has been a one-house operator in Beatrice for some time, has opened his new Pix Theatre. It is a first-run spot, renamed from the old Fox. Hollingsworth took it over when Fox Midwest let it go recently in a rental squabble. He will continue to operate the Rialto as a subsequent runner.”
Hollingsworth must have had friends at Boxoffice (or Fox had enemies), as their December 9, 1939, issue published a multi-page article about his new house, with several photos and with the title “The Little Pix Theatre Puts Its Predecessor to Shame.” Take that, Fox! Hollingsworth had re-seated the house, redecorated, put in acoustical treatment to improve sound, modernized the facade, and installed air conditioning. But the 1948 rebuilding when the Pix became the Fox again must have been quite extreme, as the Fox had 900 seats and the Pix only 525.
So it looks as though the Cinema Center also has Pix as an aka, and was the Fox until 1939, and then was the Fox again from 1948 on. It might also have been the Ritz, but I haven’t found any solid confirmation of that yet.
Hollingsworth apparently closed the Pix some time in 1940, when he couldn’t get first-run pictures for the house. He filed a lawsuit against the Fox Beatrice division of Fox Midwest Theatres, and in 1942 a jury awarded him damages for his 1940 losses, and he and Fox then settled out of court for his 1941 damage claims. I haven’t been able to find a final closing date for the Pix, but as he opened the Victory (later renamed the Holly) in 1941, perhaps the Pix remained closed until Fox re-acquired it in 1948.
Lots of items about Beatrice show up in Boxoffice Magazine and its predecessors, but there are some contradictions and complications among them, so it’s hard to figure out which theaters had which names when. For example, there might have been two theaters called the Fox, the second of which was a 1948 rebuild of an older house- or maybe just a rebuild of the first Fox. The article is imprecise. Does anybody know if the Fox changed addresses about 1948?
One interesting item is an ad for Boller Brothers in the July 10, 1926, issue of The Reel Journal, which lists a Beatrice Theatre in Beatrice, Nebraska, as one of their projects under construction, though it says that Boller Brothers were only consulting architects on that project. I’ve found a few references to a Fox Beatrice Theatre. I wonder if they were the same house?
The Reel Journal of September 19, 1925, lists the Gillbert Theatre in Beatrice as being among the houses which has installed a Reproducto Player Pipe Organ (which sold for $2,150, installed.)
An item in Movie Age, February 9, 1929, said that the Ritz Theatre in Beatrice had installed Dramaphone sound equipment. Boxoffice of June 5, 1948, included a mention of the Ritz opening recently in its “From the Boxoffice Files, Twenty Years Ago” feature.
Another interesting item is in the October 19, 1929, issue of Movie Age, which said that Publix had bought four theaters in Beatrice- the Rivoli, Strand, Palm, and Ken. There are mentions of the Rivoli into the 1940s, but I’ve found no more about the other three so far.
There was also a Pix or New Pix Theatre, under operation in 1940 by Earl Hollingsworth, who was also operating the Rialto at that time.
There’s some other stuff about Hollingsworth’s theaters, but different issues give contradictory information which will have to be sorted out.
According to the January 26, 1952, issue of Boxoffice, there was also a Majestic Theatre in Fairbury, which had been closed for some unspecified time but was renovated in late 1951 and reopened as the Woods Theatre. The Woods had 468 seats. The Majestic had seated 600. The article said that the house was across the street from the Pla-Mor, but failed to say what the Pla-Mor was. Perhaps it was another closed theater?
The Chief Theatre was designed by the noted Omaha architectural firm of John Latenser & Sons, according to an item in the June 15, 1946, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. Owner Ralph Blank said that work on the new house was progressing steadily, but the completion date would depend on the availability of materials and labor. The house was open by late 1947, as five photos of it appeared in the November 15 issue of Boxoffice that year.
There’s a large discrepancy between the seating capacity of 328 currently listed above, and the Boxoffice projection of 1,254 seats for the Chief. The photos published in Boxoffice show that it was a very large house, with three pairs of double doors flanking each side of the box office at the entrance, and a wide auditorium that appears to have had four aisles. The frontage of the building must have been at least 80 feet, and was probably more. Judging from the photo of the auditorium, the Chief must have had nearly 1000 seats at the least, if not as many as Boxoffice claimed.
Boxoffice calls it the States Theatre, too. The January 28, 1950, issue says that the States Theatre had been destroyed by fire on January 13. It also said that the theater had been operating since 1923, and had been one of the leading theaters in the Grand Forks area. An August 31, 1946, article saying that Ira Haaven had bought “…the theatre in East Grand Forks” indicates that the States was the only theater in the town at that time.
A later article says that the States Theatre had originally been located across the street from its final location. It doesn’t give the year the house moved to the new building. The original States Theatre building, according to the October 15, 1955, issue of Boxoffice, was in 1955 remodeled and reopened as a 230-seat house called the WW Theatre, named for the owner, William C. Wong, operator of a local restaurant. An earlier article about Mr. Wong’s project said that the town had been without a theatre since the States had burned in 1950.
The WW Theatre “…had been closed for some time” when it was reopened by a Mr. R.D. Ferguson, according to an item in the December 25, 1961, issue of Boxoffice. That’s the last mention of the house I can find, at least under that name. The February 9, 1976, issue of Boxoffice makes a reference to a Century Cinema in East Grand Forks, but there’s no indication whether or not it was the WW Theatre renamed.