Court Street Theatre

Joe Vogel on June 3, 2022 at 5:17 am

Pages 27 through 30 of this digital document have considerably more information about this theater. In addition to the names Park Theatre, Shea’s Theatre and Shea’s Court Street Theatre, it operated under the names Music Box Theatre (from 1929) and Teatro Italia (from 21 January 1934 until around 1941.) The document also says that “[t]he Catholic Actors’s Guild rented this theatre for their performances c.1935–c.1939, and printed ‘Shea’s Court Street Theatre’ on their programmes.”

The theater was designed by Leon H. Lempert & Son. This web page has an early photo of the house as Shea’s Theatre. In its early days it used the address 40 Court Street. The site had earlier been occupied by Wahle’s Opera House, which itself was called the Court Street Theatre for a time. Plans to remodel the original theater were abandoned in 1903 in favor of demolition and the construction of an entirely new building.