Grand Theatre
123 N. Main Street,
New Castle,
IN
47362
123 N. Main Street,
New Castle,
IN
47362
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The picture makes it pretty obvious that the Coca-Cola plant has absolutely no link with the theater.
Additional history credit Henry County Historical Society, Inc:
“Feb. 25, 1916, a fire started in the furnace room of the Grand Theatre before a crowd had started to assemble for the evening show. George A. Conduitt, a New Castle firefighter, was struck by falling timbers while battling the blaze. He died from his injuries the next day. The tragedy happened just six years after the theatre opened. Photos here show both the outside and inside of the theatre, which was located on North Main Street in downtown New Castle.”
I’m not entirely convinced that the old bottling plant is a remodel of the theater. The shape is different, although the height and width appear to be the same. The back section of the plant looks like it would have involved demolishing at least some of the rear of the theater, and definitely involved the removal of some other buildings on that lot. It would probably have been easier to demolish the older building.
The original Coliseum appears on the 1908 map, having replaced several small buildings serving as the Newcastle Buggy Works. It was a large brick building with a sloping wooden truss roof, shown as 1-2 stories. The SE corner of the building was cut off diagonally. I think the capacity is wrong, since the Grand Theater on the 1914 map has a huge balcony, roughly ‘C’ shaped, running all the way down the walls to the stage. By 1924, the building as an auto dealership appears to have a flat roof (at any rate it is now 2' shorter), but the footprint is identical. The roof is noted as a wooden truss on both the 1924 and 1949 maps, but the bottling plant definitely has a flat roof, so it can’t have been a holdover from the original Coliseum.
This item from The American Contractor of March 18, 1916, might be about the Grand Theatre on Main Street, but there was another Grand Theatre in New Castle, and the Grand Theater Company might also have operated other houses:
Here is a history of the first Grand Theatre building from the NRHP registration form for the New Castle Commercial Historic District:The Grand Theatre was listed in the 1922 city directory with the address 1207 Race Street, so the location at 123 N. Main had closed by then. The second Grand Theatre was in the Masonic Temple, which had an 850-seat theater upstairs originally called the Alcazar. It was renamed the Grand when converted to a movie house, and operated until 1926 when it was gutted by a fire. Rebuilding in 1927 the Masons converted the former theater space for their own use.