Park Theatre

Rstewart on July 17, 2021 at 6:37 pm

Was just in Lehighton, this is now a bowling alley, Fritz’s I think was the name.

Joe Vogel on January 18, 2018 at 9:24 pm

I’ve come across conflicting reports about a theater in Lehighton built in the early 1920s. Sources from 1922 indicate that the Bayer family, operators since around 1908 of the Grand Opera House in Lehighton, were planning to build a new theater. Notices in The American Contractor gave the location as South First Street. Construction was set to begin in April.

However, the Park Theatre didn’t open until 1923, when a notice of the event appeared in the July 31 issue of The Film Daily. But the theater, though operated by the Bayers, was not on First Street. It was located at 100 S. Second Street, where the building is still standing, the auditorium now housing a bowling alley, and the stage house occupied by a dance school.

The 1922 construction journal notices named the Allentown architectural, engineering, and construction firm the Tilghman Moyer Co. as designers of the Bayers' theater project, but I don’t know if that company’s design was kept when the project was built a year later on Second Street.