Strand Theatre

Joe Vogel on December 29, 2023 at 1:44 am

Princeton might have had more than one house called the Strand. The “New Theatres” column of Film Daily for May 6, 1927 said (with dateline Princeton, Minn.) “M. C. Kruschke has opened the Strand, seating 500.” But M. C. Krushke’s Strand at Princeton had also been mentioned in the December 8, 1923 Universal Weekly. FDYs list the Strand with 350 seats from 1926 through 1929.

Information is very sketchy, but some local sources say that the Strand building was converted into apartments, not demolished. A Strand Building is listed on a real estate web site at 121 S. Rum River Drive (formerly called 5th Avenue), and is a good match for a ca.1984 photo of a closed Strand Theatre which was posted to Pinterest, with no additional information, from a link that is no longer active. The real estate web site says the Strand Building dates from 1914, so it could be that the Strand started out as the Happyland Theater, the only movie house listed at Princeton in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.

CinemaTour gives the Strand an address of 128 5th Avenue N., which I think must have been the address of a later Strand. That address is in a modern strip mall, and in a comment on a Princeton nostalgia Facebook page one member says “I go to church in the old strand theatre in the mall next to pizza barn every Friday night, I look around & try to remember what it looked like, I last remember taking my oldest there in 1998 when she was 6 months.” The Pizza Barn is listed on the Internet at 128 N. Rum River Dr., so I’m thinking the 1980s era replacement for the Strand probably occupied both the church space and the Pizza Barn space. The Facebook commenter is likely too young to remember the original Strand.

That’s all a bit confusing, but I’m sure that 121 Rum River Dr. S. is the correct modern address of the original Strand Theatre, which might have opened in 1914, possibly as the Happyland Theatre, and might have been expanded in 1927. The building still has the old stage structure, which might have been original from 1914 or might have been added in a remodeling. Unfortunately the newest Sanborn map of Princeton available online dates from 1912.