Mutoscope Theater
3301-3303 Olive Street,
St. Louis,
MO
63103
3301-3303 Olive Street,
St. Louis,
MO
63103
No one has favorited this theater yet
Additional Info
Nearby Theaters
This theater appears on the 1909 Sanborn. It was located in the front portion of an old three story warehouse building.
The theater is not listed in the 1914-15 AMPD, and this building was demolished around 1915 to build the Plaza Hotel (now apartments).
Contributed by
Seth Gaines
Want to be emailed when a new comment is posted about this theater?
Just login to your account and subscribe to this theater.
Recent comments (view all 2 comments)
I suspect that this storefront operation might not have been an actual movie theater, despite the appellation on the Sanborn map. The Mutoscope was a coin operated, hand-cranked machine allowing a single viewer to watch what was essentially a giant flip book. In other words, a rival to Edison’s Kinetoscope machines.
It might have been that there was a room at the back screening movies with a projector, but it would have been incredibly small, perhaps like the 7-person SRO room at Thomas Talley’s Vitascope Parlor on Spring Street in Los Angeles in 1896. But it seems unlikely such a back-room operation would have survived as late as 1909, by which time plenty of full-sized nickelodeons were operating.
The sign closest to the corner does say that the program is changed frequently, but I guess that might apply to these penny arcade viewers as well. I’ll leave the listing up for now, but we can consider deleting it.