Rio Theatre
412 MacDonald Avenue,
Richmond,
CA
94801
412 MacDonald Avenue,
Richmond,
CA
94801
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The Rio opened on June 26th, 1943. Grand opening ad posted.
Rio theatre opening 25 Jun 1943, Fri Richmond Daily Independent (Richmond, California) Newspapers.com
The reason this maps out to Canada is because the street name is misspelled. It’s MacDonald, with the extra a. There is only one building left on the even side of the 400 block, but whether that’s the theater is anybody’s guess.
This is from Boxoffice in January 1948:
WOODLAND, CALIF.-Harry Lazzarini, manager of the State and Porter theaters since 1946, has purchased the Rio in Richmond from the Robert L. Lippert circuit.
I found the answer to my question WHY WAS THE RIO NAMED RIO? in “Spoils of War Plans for Peacetime” MARQUEE Vol. 27 No. 4. According to author Steve Levin the “Rio” name was chosen for its brevity. A short name made signs cheaper and advertisements also cheaper.
Many cities in different parts of the USA had small neighborhoods of Mexicans/Latinos during the 1940s. In many of these cities it was common to have a neighbord movie theaters which weekly or occasionally one night or two nights a week featured Mexican films. In Milwaukee the World Theater (later known as Royal) would now and then have a Mexican films. As the Latino population grew, this theater featured only Mexican films.
Why was the Rio named Rio? There were theaters an all areas of the country called Rio.
i was doing a study of the mexican history of richmond and recently found out that back in the 40s and 50s on certain nights this movie theater would have mexican movie nights and that all the latinos in this neighborhood would come here to watch there favorite mexican actors like cantinflas and pedro infante and tin tan and etc there used to be a small mexican neighborhood at the foot of mcdonald ave and gerard st mostly made up of ship yard workers and santa fe railroad workers .
About ten years ago(circa 1993 or 4), armed with a listing of the addresses of the theatres of Richmond, I checked out McDonald Avenue to see what, if anything, had survived. I’d never been to Richmond before. The Rio was still standing at that time, and in use as a church. I’ve seen old pictures of it, and aside from the marquee being gone, the building still looked like a theatre, with poster cases still intact, surrounded by maroon tile. Though I had my camera with me, there were several very unfriendly-looking guys out on the sidewalk, and I was unwilling to ruffle any feathers. I did photograph the shell of the Uptown—now a senior center and only vaguely recognizable as a former theatre—which sat along a quieter and cleaner stretch of the former theatre district. It was the only other theatre building surviving. I remember that the theatre variously known as the T&D, Fox, and UA survived into the mid-1980s, because at that time there was some talk of reopening it as some kind of community arts facility, but this didn’t materialize, and this theatre was demiolished.