Indianapolis Hippodrome

CSWalczak on November 1, 2009 at 11:00 pm

This page from a book on Indianapolis history, mentions that outdoor venues for vaudeville called airdomes in Indianapolis were also known as hippodromes and that at one time there were more than twenty in the city: View link

Joe Vogel on November 1, 2009 at 10:24 pm

This one is a real puzzle, and I’ve pretty much come to a dead end. I haven’t found a single reference to it in Boxoffice or any of that magazine’s predecessors. The only other reference to the Hippodrome I’ve found on the Internet is in a 1911 book (hosted at Google Books) listing an “Indianapolis Hippodrome Company” which had filed articles of incorporation at Cincinnati on April 2, 1910.

Information about this theater will probably be hard to track down. It might have been an old house that didn’t survive far into the 20th century (the 1910 incorporation doesn’t mean the theater was new in 1910. It might have been a new operating company formed to operate an existing theater.)

Or the place might have burned, as many theaters did in those days, or the land might have become valuable for other purposes, and the theater demolished, or the theater might have been renamed and the original name largely forgotten- in which case the house might already be listed at Cinema Treasures under a later name and that page simply be missing the aka Hippodrome.

I think that somebody who has access to old publications and public records in Indianapolis itself will have to research the Hippodrome before we’ll find out much more about it. It must have been listed in city directories and advertised in local newspapers, and there might be news articles about it.