Princess Theatre

Joe Vogel on January 2, 2014 at 11:29 am

This PDF from the Waseca County Historical Society has an article about the theaters in the area, and it features two photos of the Princess, one of the front and one of the auditorium.

The text says that the building housing the Princess was remodeled to accommodate the theater in 1933, but the style of the theater indicates that it was operating much earlier than that. In fact, the same exterior photo appears in a book called As We Were: American Photographic Postcards, 1905-1930, by Rosamond B. Vaule (Google Books preview), and Vaule dates the photo to 1913. As the caption has the message that was written on the postcard, I would imagine that the date comes from the postmark. The message refers to the “new” Princess Theatre, so 1913 is probably when it opened.

It’s possible that the Princess Theatre was the same house that was listed in the 1909-1910 Cahn guide as the Opera House, managed by C.F. Strunk. The first digit of the seating capacity given in the guide is unreadable, but the number was only three digits, and it was a ground-floor house. 1913, issue of The Moving Picture World reported that the Opera House at Janesville had been leased by H. G. Karzbein and Louy Bartelmhs (the second guy’s names were probably both misspelled.) The fact that MPW mentioned the event suggests that the Opera House was probably already running movies by that time.