Roxy Theater
5500 Lansdowne Avenue,
St. Louis,
MO
63109
5500 Lansdowne Avenue,
St. Louis,
MO
63109
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Shortly after this picture was taken in 1975, the Roxy was demolished and two new homes were built on its site.
This was truly a neighborhood house, not located on a main street but in the middle of a South City neighborhood in St. Louis.
Contributed by
Norman Plant
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Recent comments (view all 6 comments)
It is amazing how many theatres are named ROXY in imitation of the once famous name of the New York City panjandrum of the movie palace: Samual Lionel Rothapfel = “Roxy”. His namesake was the famous ROXY THEATRE in NYC, which outlasted him by only 25 years when it was demolished in 1960. The whole story is in that landmark book “The Best Remaining Seats: The Story of the Golden Age of the Movie Palace” by the late Ben M. Hall in 1961. Various editions of it are sometimes available from www.Amazon.com, but only the first edition contains the color plates.
Theatre was constructed in 1925 but, from newspaper ads, apparently didn’t open until September 1926.
Architect listed on the building permit: J. B. Catanzaro.
Theatre, with capacity of 738, opened as the Southampton and was renamed the Roxy in 1931.
Theatre closed in 1965.
Long after the Roxy had showed its last movie, it was slated to be converted into a church-sponsored coffeehouse for the local youth. Some of the neighbors feared that this business would attract hippies, bikers, and (gasp!) African-Americans to the block, and the plan was trashed. The theater’s owner, who had been looking forward to collecting some rent on the place for the first time in ages, was so frustrated by this irrational grassroots uprising that he fired up the projector and reopened the theater VERY briefly as a porno house, just to show the naysayers how foolish they’d been to protest something as innocuous as a Christian coffeehouse!
This is from Boxoffice magazine, May 1960:
ST. LOUIS-The Roxy Theater, on Lansdowne Ave. in the southwestern part of the city, will resume a regular picture policy June 4 when new lessees Dave Ganz, a former house employee, and John Conner, a newcomer to exhibition, take over. They have leased the house from its owner.
The art policy the Roxy has followed for several years has been meeting growing disapproval by church members in the area.
Correcting my earlier entry, the Roxy had its grand opening (as the Southampton) on February 27, 1926.
My brother, Alan, (now deceased) was the Head Usher at both the Roxy and the Columbia prior to going in the Marine Corps. He married one of the Confection Girls, and so I did pretty well on goodies at the Roxy. nadale