Mutoscope Theater
3301-3303 Olive Street,
St. Louis,
MO
63103
3301-3303 Olive Street,
St. Louis,
MO
63103
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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.
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.