Cort Theater
107 E. Main Street,
Luverne,
MN
56156
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This theater first appears on the 1913 map. It was located in the eastern half of a large Romanesque style commercial building constructed sometime before 1894. The building is brick with a facade of Sioux Quartzite. The 1907 map shows a hardware store here.
This theater remains in operation on the 1921 map. Later maps are not available online, but this closed many years ago. The building today is in excellent shape. The portion which held the theater had a really ugly storefront, but that was removed in 2013. The building was home to a restaurant, which seems to have closed in early-2024.
Note that the historical address for the theater was 105.
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Recent comments (view all 4 comments)
The only theater listed at Luverne in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory is called the Opera House, which would seem a rather grandiose name for this modest storefront operation. When the Palace Theatre opened in 1915 it was called the New Opera House, implying that Luverne had an old Opera House, and I suppose it could have been this house, inappropos as it might seem, but over the longer term this house came to be known, still rather pretentiously, as the Grand Theatre. It is the only theater at Luverne other than the Palace to be mentioned in trade journals, and it was also named in this article from the March 1, 1918 issue of the Rock County Herald:
Photos of the building at this address captioned as the Arcade Building can be found on the Internet, so there’s no mistake. The 1926 FDY lists only two theaters at Luverne, and they are the Palace and a 250-seat house called the Cort Theatre. The latter seems most likely to have been a new name for the Grand. The last mention of the Grand I’ve found in trade journals is this item from Moving Picture World of August 2, 1919: “J. P. Coffey has leased the former Grand Theatre building at Luverne, Minnesota, to Glen Duggan, who will open it as a motion picture house in the near future.”The Opera House referred to was a large wooden building on Cedar, where the bowling alley is today. It was sloppy of me not to have checked the maps, since the ‘New Opera’ name struck me as a clue that there was an old opera house. I’ll add a listing.
There is confirmation that the Grand became the Cort Theatre, sometime after Glen Duggan got control of the Grand, noted in the August, 1919 MPW item cited in my previous comment. The evidence is in the Google search results for a page in the Rock County Star Herald which I can’t date as it requires a subscription to access, but the Google results include this: “…Duggan, formerly manager of the Cort theatre….” The Cort was still listed in the 1929 FDY, but I haven’t checked later editions. If the Cort did not close with the onset of the depression, it would surely have closed by the time the Pix opened.
Thanks for finding the names!