Madstone Centrum

A list of buildings designed by architect Albert F. Janowitz includes the Heights Theatre, a 1919 project. The list also includes the 1924 West Park Theatre, and two 1917 projects listed only under the generic term “Movie Theatre.” These two are both listed in Cleveland and both listed as demolished.

One web page says that the Heights didn’t begin operation until 1922, but I’ve found no corroboration for the claim elsewhere.

The pastor of the church which occupies the theater, Joel Negus, has converted part of the auditorium into a recording studio/performance space, a project begun in 2019. There is a photo of the space on his Facebook page here.

Now serves as City Church on Sundays. Website & Facebook page below.

https://heights.citychurchcle.com/

https://www.facebook.com/citychurchhts/

I was at the Centrum again on March 27th as part of a improv comedy workshop for a few hrs. I performed on the stage and afterwards I took a peak behind the curtain and the screen is definately still there lol.

An article about the comedy club’s opening with a picture of the auditorium: View link

This originally was the Heights theatre and ran as the “Heights Art Theatre” showing foreign films and independent films during the 50s-70s. They co-booked with the Westwood Arts Theatre in Lakewood and, for awhile with the Continental theatre in East Cleveland. They also did midnight movies and showed porn during the day and at midnight. I recall seeing films as diverse as “King of Hearts” and “Behind the Green Door” there. Mitchell’s Candies, which was next door, still operated a a couple blocks down from the Cedar-Lee.

A 1941 picture of the theater as the Heights:
View link

The downstairs of the Centrum is now a Johnny Malloy’s sports bar that uses one of the screens as a big-screen TV.

The Centrum, I read recently, may be turned into a sports bar, in which the two downstairs screens would be kept, and converted to show sporting events (and possibly movies) via projection video equipment. Whether that comes to pass remains to be seen.

I’m proud to say that I was an employee and manager at the Centrum while it was owned by Landmark Theatre Corporation (‘94-'97).
It was indeed a beautiful theater and a great place to see a film but several factors spelt its doom. As mentioned above, we were competing directly with the Cedar Lee which had a far more generous ticket pricing scheme (for the art films) and against the other large chains and their advertising budgets (for the mainstream films). Parking was also an issue in the Coventry area: street parking could be tricky since the regulations changed based on the time of day which lead to more than one customer (and a local film critic) having their cars towed! There was a good-sized parking lot down the street, but it was… well… down the steet!

Also, there was a space above the lobby that the landlord, in his outstanding wisdom, filled with a sports bar! Their customers had to use our upstairs restrooms and had access to one of our theaters. Trying to keep the rowdy drunks out of the theater and keeping the restrooms clean was a losing battle. If a small retailer moved in instead, it would’ve been a different story.

Lots of fond memories though… like the topiary and robotics display we had for the opening of “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control”, the Indian food buffet for “Kama Sutra”, the oh-so-frequent power outages, the adjacent Chinese resteraunt setting off the fire alarms at least once a week (I was on first call, of course!), Quentin Crisp’s visit for “Orlando”, our “Meter Feeding” program to try to keep our customers from getting parking tickets when they parked at 1-hr meters, the quizzical looks from customers when they see the shakers of brewer’s yeast on the counter… good times.

The Centrum originally opened as the Heights Theatre back in the 1920’s?. From the 1950’s to the early 1980’s, the theatre was known as the Heights Art Theatre, first showing art and foreign films, then from the late 1960’s to the early 1980’s, had shown XXX-rated porn films. The theatre was renamed the “Coventry Cinema” and again brought back art films, then mainstream Hollywood fare (the nearby Cedar Lee was this theatre’s main competition when it came to art films.) The Coventry Cinema closed around 1985, then the theatre was completely gutted and restored, with three screens added. The theatre then was renamed the “Centrum”, and was first independently owned, then was part of the Landmark chain. Then after a few years, Landmark closed the Centrum, and the theatre remained closed for over a year (one plan was to put a “Cinema Grill” on the site, but those plans fell through.) Madstone reopened the Centrum a couple of years ago, with art and independent film, but again, as with previous attempts to keep this theatre going, competition with the Cedar Lee for the same type of films and the lack of nearby parking, forced the Centrum to close again. In its final weeks, the Centrum resorted to playing films that had played the Cedar Lee earlier, or mainstream Hollywood fare that also was playing at the nearby Regal Cinemas Severance or Shaker Square.