Tower Twin Theatres
3649 New Bern Avenue,
Tower Shopping Center,
Raleigh,
NC
27610
3649 New Bern Avenue,
Tower Shopping Center,
Raleigh,
NC
27610
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December 21st, 1977 grand opening ad posted. It opened the same day as the Fitzeralds twin cinemas and two days before the opening of the Imperial 4 in Cary.
Same thing also happened when I tried to get tickets for NEW JACK CITY on its opening weekend in October of 1991. It was sold out within the first 15 minutes and there were no advance ticket sales for this feature.
Steven Spielburg’s RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK played here on its opening weekend as one of two theaters that booked the film in Raleigh..the other was the Village Twin over at Cameron Village. Tried to get advance tickets for its opening weekend,but it was completely sold out for both evening shows and matinees where the lines for the movie snaked from one end of the Tower Shopping Center to the other.
The Tower Twin was not demolished. It remained vacant and virtually unchanged for many years after it closed. Several years ago it was used as a haunted house at Halloween for a few years. More recently it has been converted to retail space. Just so you know, Carmike owned BOTH the Tower Twin and the Merchants Six and ran them concurrently. Also, the two auditoriums at Tower were mirror images of each other. They had exactly the same seating capacity. I cannot remember what the capacity was, but it was around 400 each.
In the early 1980s, in the middle of the night someone stole a bulldozer from the construction site next door (Tower Merchants) and took it for a joy ride. With the blade up, the bulldozer crashed through the left side exit door, went through the lobby and demolished the concession stand. Police and firemen arrived to find the bulldozer stopped against the interior lobby wall. No arrest was made, but rumor had it that it was a local high school kid that lived nearby. (Keith Carpenter was the theatre manager at that time.)
The Tower Twin did not have 1200 seats. The larger auditorium had about 450 and the smaller had about 350.
This was one of the theatres that showed the “X” rated “YOU SO CRAZY”(Martin Lawrence’s stand-up comedy film) as a exclusive area engagement.
This was one of the old ABC Plitt Theatres that Cineplex took over with the purchase of Plitt Theatres!!!
That was one of the theatres CARMIKE abandoned and left for dead when it close in 2001. When it closed,the theatre was completely guttered. So Sad.