Strand Theatre

Joe Vogel on December 31, 2023 at 4:11 am

The June 20, 1918 issue of The Princeton Union carried an advertisement giving the upcoming schedule for the “Strand Theater (Formerly Crystal)….” The earliest appearance of the name Crystal Theater I’ve seen in the paper is in 1915. Prior to that the only theater name to appear was Happyland.

The theater marquee was still on the Strand building in the mid-1980s, when the Union published a photo of it with a caption noting that it still looked much the same as it had the previous year when a St. Paul architect had announced that he would remodel the interior for a mixed use project. Comments on the local Facebook page also say that for a time the building housed a nightclub called Porky’s, but it isn’t pinned down to a specific era.