Rialto Theater
106 W. Thornton Street,
Three Rivers,
TX
78071
106 W. Thornton Street,
Three Rivers,
TX
78071
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Closed per Google search.
The new Rialto Theatre launched May 14, 1948 to a capacity crowd with Henry W, Hall of Hall Industry Theatres Circuit on hand.
Two different Rialto Theatres are conflated on this page, and I think it’s partly because Google Maps has the addresses for Thornton Street totally screwed up. 106 W. Thornton was probably the address of the original Rialto, built in the 1920s and closed in 1948 when the new Rialto opened. It also probably had the 260 seats. The 1948 Rialto is at 613 E. Thornton, but good luck getting Google to realize that.
Boxoffice of May 29, 1948, reported that Hall Industries had opened their new Rialto at Three Rivers on May 14. The 800-seat house featured a section of stadium seating and charged an admission price of 44 cents.
This web page from the Live Oak County Historical Commission has a history of this Rialto, and also a few lines about Three Rivers' original Rialto. Hall Industries had also operated the first Rialto.
Hall Industries closed the second Rialto in 1981, and it remained dark until 2001, after it was acquired and restored by the Economic Development Corporation of Three Rivers. The most recent operator, Virginia Herring, closed the house in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, and decided not to renew her lease when it was up in July that year. I don’t know if the EDC has found another lessee yet, but none of the cinema web sites currently list any showtimes for the Rialto. This could be a good opportunity for someone who wants to run a vintage movie theater in a small town. It would be a shame if the place doesn’t get reopened.
Here’s a newspaper article about the Three Rivers Rialto.
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June 1 2009 Pic…. Still looking good….
Click on pic for larger version
According to the May 8, 1948, issue of Boxoffice magazine, the Rialto at Three Rivers was expected to open within 30 days. The house had been designed for the Hall circuit by architect Jack Corgan.
My November 2005 picture HERE.
Looks in good shape here, and 2 screens too. Will get some updated photos next time I pass through. Was open a couple of weeks ago.
The page needs updating. The Rialto has two screens.
There is some information about renovation on this page:
http://tinyurl.com/2qzvwn
Thanks for noticing the pix on flickr longisland. I will go to work on the theater locations.
Don…………
DON i love your pics on flicker can you put were these theaters are next to the name ?
My photograph of the RIALTO.
www.flickr.com/photos/lastpictureshow/297368159
Their address was just a P.O. box. Theater is on the first block West of US 281, and faces the city hall and park from the South. I don’t think Three Rivers has gotten any bigger.
I became interested in the name TIVOLI when I worked at a Milwaukee area hotel which had a restaurant with this name; they had no idea where the name came from, so I did some research, especially since it had also become the name of a number of theatres. It was popularized in the 19th century by the famous Tivoli amusement park and gardens in Copenhagen, Denmark founded in 1843 in imitation of the famous gardens and palaces of the Italian ruling princes of the 16th century, the Estes, who built the famed Villa d’Este palace in the region of Tivoli, a popular tourist attraction to this day. Thus, the pleasure-assuring name was thought auspicious by the developers of theatres, theatres being the pleasure palaces of the masses of their day.
This is akin to the common theatre name: RIALTO, for the famous enclosed Rialto bridge of 1591 in Venice, Italy over the Grand Canal, which to this day contains many amusing boutiques and is at the heart of an entertainment district. The distinctive architecture of the Rialto bridge also inspired many latter day architects, and perhaps found its forms reproduced in some movie palaces (as in the STANLEY in Jersey City, NJ). A monograph on the origin of theatre names was presented at the 1981 Conclave of the Theatre Historical Society of America then meeting at the PABST theater in Milwaukee, but the origins of the above names and others were not known by the author of that paper. Perhaps this will add a little bit to that quest.