Electric Theater
413 N. Main Street,
Garden City,
KS
67846
413 N. Main Street,
Garden City,
KS
67846
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Seth G: The Grand is a puzzle, as no Sanborns are available from its period of operation and there don’t appear to be any newspaper archives from that period available either. I’ve wondered if it might have been one of the other early theaters reopened.
The Garden City opened on March 8, 1921, and it has crossed my mind, purely as speculation, that it might have been the house that surfaced in 1931 as the Dickinson. Our photo of the Dickinson/Town certainly doesn’t look like anything that would have been built in 1931, especially in a small Kansas town on the edge of the dust bowl, but it does look like something that could have been built in a prosperous, growing prairie town in the early 1920s.
The 350-seat Garden last appears in the FDY in 1931, and the 600-seat Dickinson first appears in 1932. If the Garden had been built with an eye to future expansion, with the rear portion of the lot left unbuilt, then it would have been an easy and natural fit for Dickinson to snatch it up and do the expansion in 1931 while costs were low. I’ve done searches to see if the trade journals mentioned Dickinson’s 1931 Garden City project, but no luck. Still, it’s a tantalizing possibility.
rivest266: The Lyric Electric of 1907 was on Main Street next door to the Post Office, which was in the 200 block on both the 1905 and 1911 Sanborn maps. The 1911 Sanborn shows a bank building north of the Post Office and it was too shallow to have housed a theater. The Lyric had to have been in the storefront south of the Post Office, and that was at 209 N. Main.
an Lyric Electric theatre opened on July 15th, 1907. Is this it?
I assumed it had closed to be replaced by the State, which opened soon after.
Anyhow, thanks for confirming the ID.
Going through the old report, they say the Edison was located in the the ground floor of the Opera House, and closed late in 1913. The 1914-15 AMPD lists it as open, and gives a definite address on Grant. Perhaps it moved? There is also a Grand mentioned as opening in late 1913. I’m not sure where that was, and it closed in 1917. There’s also the Garden City/Garden, again with no indication as to a location.
The absence of Garden City from the 1926 (and 1927) FDYs was certainly an error by the publishers. The population of Garden City was nearing 4,000 in 1920 and topped 6,000 in 1930, and the idea that so large a town would have no movie theaters in the middle of that decade is preposterous. In fact I’ve found two Garden City houses, the Electric Theatre and the Garden Theatre, mentioned in trade journals during the 1920s, and both are also listed in the 1928 FDY. The Electric is listed with 300 seats and the Garden with 350.
From what I’ve been able to glean from various scattered sources, I’m certain that the house at 413 N. Main was the Electric Theatre. This house is the only movie theater appearing on the May, 1920 Sanborn map, and the Garden City Theatre (opening name of the Garden) did not open until March 18, 1921, according to a history of the Stevens Opera House (good-sized PDF here.)
The Electric Theatre was in operation by January, 1908, and was to be Garden City’s first long-running cinema, still open in 1929. An earlier house called the Lyric Theatre opened next door to the Post Office (probably at 209 N. Main) in July, 1907, but had apparently closed by October that same year.