According to the NRHP registration form for downtown Elkader’s historic district, Harold and Belma Hall, owners and operators of the Rivola Theatre at 119 N. Main Street since 1927, opened the Elkader Theatre in September, 1941 in a commercial building that had been built in 1901. The Elkader and Rivola both continued to be listed in the FDY for several years, with the Rivola listed as closed, but the Year Book listed both with 250 seats, though the Elkader apparently had 400 from the beginning.
The NRHP form says that the Rivola, opened in 1921, was the first movie theater in Elkader, but they missed something. The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists two houses in the town: The Crystal, located on Main Street, and the Majestic, no location noted. A history of Clayton County published in 1916 says that John L. Flanagan opened the Majestic in 1910. There is a possibility that the Majestic was an aka for the Elkader Opera House, which opened in 1903 at 207 N. Main Street, but I’ve been unable to confirm this.
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists two theaters at Guttenberg: the Lyric, at 1st and Herder Street, and the Elite, no address provided. Polk’s 1912 Iowa directory lists only one theater at Guttenberg, that being called the Delight.
In 1926, proprietors of the Princess, Hunstad and Becker, were providing capsule movie reviews for Exhibitors Herald.
The 1960 FDY lists the Princess in Guttenberg as one of the 24 houses operated by the Iowa United Theatres chain.
Internet gives this as the address of a chiropractic clinic (Dr. Scott Scherer, DC). I hoped Bing Maps might have a better street view, as they sometimes do, but they don’t have any at all for this location.
The Cozy is the only theater listed at Dyersville in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory and is occasionally mentioned, along with the Plaza Theatre, in early trade journal items from the 1910s and 1920s. The only other theater name I’ve found associated with Dyersville is the Nemo, mentioned in issues of Moving Picture World in November and December, 1916, when it was operated by a Mr. A. E. Bennett.
The April 6, 1918 issue of Moving Picture World mentions “J. E. Lippert, of the Plaza theater, Dyersville….” The name Lippert had appeared in that journal before, in the April 17, 1909 issue, which said “Henry and Anthony Lippert have opened a five and ten-cent theater in the Lippert Building.” I’ve been unable to discover if the house opened in 1909 was in fact the Plaza or a different theater. The only theater listed at Dyersville in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory was the Cozy, but that publication’s listings were frequently incomplete.
The November 7, 1925 issue of Motion Picture News said that H. Lippert was remodeling the Plaza, and had spent $1,500 on new equipment from Exhibitors Supply Company of Des Moines.
The July 9, 1949 Boxoffice said that Bert Coughlin’s new Fine Arts Theatre at Maynard had opened on June 29 with the ballet picture “The Red Shoes.” The article gave the seating capacity of the original single-screen house as 425.
A 2019 Lodi Newsarticle about the Sunset quotes Lodi Historical Society director Lisa Craig as saying that the house on which the Sunset was modeled, the Ritz Theatre in Hayward, was designed by San Francisco architect Albert H. Larsen. I guess that implies that the Sunset and the nearly identical Tower theatre in Willows were also Larsen designs.
A Bijou Theatre is listed at Mason City in the 1926 FDY, with 400 seats. If it was the same Bijou, it must have taken over the entire ground floor of its building. It is last listed, with no seating capacity given, as a silent house, in the 1932 FDY.
An item datelined Mason City in the March 11, 1911 issue of Moving Picture World said “Mesers. Arthur and Heffner are making arrangements to open a new vaudeville and moving picture theater here. It will be known as the Princess.” The Princess Theatre operating at Mason City in 1908 must have been a different house.
In Polk’s 1912 Iowa business directory, the Princess was the only Mason City theater listed among both the picture houses (along with the Orpheum, Bijou and Star) and among regular theaters (along with the Wilson Theatre and Parker’s Opera House.)
The 1922 Cahn-Leighton guide’s moving picture theaters section lists a house called the Maryland Theatre at 1015 E. 7th Street with the notation “OB”, meaning out of business. However, the same year’s L.A, City Directory lists the Merryland Theatre at the same address. The 1921 directory did list it as the Maryland, as did the 1920 directory. As it was listed as Merryland in the 1915 directory, I don’t know if Maryland was just an intermittent typo or was an actual aka, even if temporary, for this house.
There was a gap between the closing of the Academy and the opening of the Normandie. The 1922 Cahn-Leighton guide lists the Academy at this address with the notation “OB”, meaning out of business. No theaters are listed at this address in city directories later than 1921 until the Normandie appears in 1925.
The America Theatre was not in the building at 167 N. College, now occupied by the comedy club, but in the building immediately south of it, at 153-157 N. College. I also think that the facades of both buildings are misleading, as is often the case in old urban neighborhoods. Buildings can be gutted and entirely new facades put on them without demolishing the basic structure, though in this case I suspect that the building which actually housed the America Theatre has had its roof lowered, which means nothing remains of the theater but the side walls and perhaps the lower part of the back wall. The fly tower is of course gone, along with any other traces of the building’s theatrical history
Here is a major problem with the comedy club building: satellite view shows that it simply isn’t deep enough to have held a theater. About 2/5 of that lot is parking, and was already parking in a 1956 aerial view (the earliest aerial available online.) LoopNet’s page for 167 N. College says it was built/renovated in 1885/1914 and calls it the Briggs Building (though there is another building of that name in Fort Collins, at Oak and Mason street, built in 1951/1952.)
The building to the south of this Briggs Building, at 153-157 N. College, also has a LoopNet page, which calls it the America Building (!), and says it was built/renovated in 1904/2016. This building is definitely deep enough to have housed a theater. It is currently occupied by an assortment of small businesses, some of them arrayed along a passageway cut through the building to the alley in back. Despite LoopNet noting only a 2016 renovation, the conversion of the structure to a commercial arcade was done around 1955, the year noted on plans and drawings of the project prepared by local architect William B. Robb, listed in the finding aid for his collected papers. The closing date of 1953 provided by rivest266 is probably correct, despite the continued listing of the house in the 1956 FDY.
The theater entrance having been in the north bay of the building, as revealed by the vintage photo, the address would have been about 157 N., currently the address of a business called Elite E-Sport. The historic address I’ve seen for the Orpheum Theatre was 163 N, but that number is apparently no longer in use.
While there apparently was an earlier Empress Theatre in Fairbanks, local sources I’ve seen have all been in agreement that this house opened on August 25, 1927, and I’ve found none that give it any name other than Empress. CinemaTour cites a June 15, 1962 item in the Daily News Miner saying that the house had shown its last movie the previous night. It was the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy “Lover Come Back.”
The Vocal Group Hall of Fame web site is still working, which I doubt would be the case if the auditorium was gone. There is nothing on the web site or anywhere else on the Internet about any demolition. Until somebody provides a reliable source saying that it has been razed, the theater’s status should be listed as closed, restoring, and the VGHF web site’s Columbia Theatre page linked to it.
I found a modern photo of the Royal’s building at Flickr. The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists only the Princess Theatre at West Union, but I have come across a February 12, 1916 Moving Picture World item datelined saying that an R. D. Fellows had purchased an interest in the Cozy Theatre. The Cozy could have been the Royal reopened. By 1926 the FDY is listing only the Princess.
If this was the only theater on the 1913 Sanborn of West Union it must have been the Royal, a house whose proprietor, G. W. Batemen, had just installed a new screen, projector, and seats, according to the December 13 issue of Moving Picture World.
Apparently Mr. Kramer did manage to get the Winfield Theatre reopened in 1954, with the announcement appearing in the March 15 issue of Boxoffice. The house would be open three nights a week. Local businesses subscribed to each buy two adult tickets a week for one year, and additionally had given away 60 tickets for the first show under the new management. The house was still in in operation in 1955 when the April 16 Boxoffice reported that Kramer planned to continue a program of free movies on Wednesday nights sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. I haven’t found any later items about the Winfield.
There could have been an afterlife for this theater. The February 27, 1954 issue of Boxoffice had a brief article saying that E. J. Kramer of Burlington, Iowa, ad bought the theater equipment from the Allens and leased the Winfield Theatre building from the Pratt Brothers for three years and planned to reopen the house in March.
I haven’t found anything to confirm that Mr. Kramer, who had the backing of the local Chamber of Commerce, was able to fulfill his plans, though it seems to me his timing could hardly have been worse. wide screen equipment was about to become essential for theaters, and that would have been an enormous expense, yet had it not been made I don’t see how the house could have survived three year with a dwindling, then nonexistent, supply of new movies.
The October 2, 1933 issue of Film Daily reveals another aka for this house: “Elroy, Wis. — The Majestic has been renamed the Juneau and is now being operated by Edmund Mohns and Donald Wilcox.”
Yet another name was presented in the issue of April 9, 1934: “Elroy, Wis. — The Juneau theater has been renamed the Star and is now being operated by J. Eskin.”
This name might have been used only briefly, though, as the May 28 issue had this item: “ELROY—Star (formerly Juneau), transferred to Elroy Theater, Inc. by A. A. Suczycki.”
An October, 1914 Sanborn map of Elroy shows a “Motion Picture Theatre” on the second floor of a building at the southeast corner of Main and Franklin streets (modern address 140 Main Street.) As it is upstairs, I suspect that it was an existing hall converted to show movies, and was probably the Opera House that was listed in a 1911 Polk directory of Wisconsin businesses. The Opera House was also the only theater listed at Elroy in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.
While the Sanborn map proves a theater was at this location in 1914, the 1926 FDY lists the Majestic with 329 seats, and I doubt that this small structure could have held half that many. It might be that the Majestic began in the Opera house in 1914 but later found larger quarters. Or the FDY might have just gotten the capacity wrong.
The 1913 Cahn guide lists the Phillips Opera House as a ground floor theater (the earlier opera house was also owned by and named for Mr. Phillips– Cahn guides, 1897-98, 1898-99.) One thing that troubles me is that the Sanborn map of the building at 8 N. Frederick doesn’t show a balcony, as Sanborn maps invariably (as far as I know) did when such existed. The Cahn guide lists a balcony, gallery and boxes for the opera house. If this fairly large opera house existed in 1913, why isn’t it on the 1914 Sanborn? It could have burned down, of course, but I’ve found no evidence that such a thing happened.
I do think it far more likely that the Cahn guide would list a theater that wasn’t actually there, or wasn’t as described, than that the Sanborn map would miss a building that actually was there, or would fail to note features as significant as a balcony, gallery and boxes. In fact the latter seems near impossible while the former wouldn’t surprise me at all. All I can think of is that either the opera house was destroyed sometime in 1913, or that the original project planned in 1907 was scaled back to the more modest theater that appears on the 1914 Sanborn. At least so far, the latter seems more likely.
Also, a 1912 Iowa business directory lists three theaters at Oelwein: the Lyric, the Orpheum, and the Phillips Opera House. The Orpheum and Opera House might have been the same theater, and I’ve been thinking that the Lyric, which I found mentioned in both 1911 and in December, 1910, might have been an earlier name for the Colonial.
A photo showing part of the Gem Theatre’s front in 1926 can be seen on this page (my mouse has been acting up and I’m unable to do any photo editing with it.) The photo is from the May 8 issue of Universal Weekly.
The Model Theatre survived long enough to be listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.
According to the NRHP registration form for downtown Elkader’s historic district, Harold and Belma Hall, owners and operators of the Rivola Theatre at 119 N. Main Street since 1927, opened the Elkader Theatre in September, 1941 in a commercial building that had been built in 1901. The Elkader and Rivola both continued to be listed in the FDY for several years, with the Rivola listed as closed, but the Year Book listed both with 250 seats, though the Elkader apparently had 400 from the beginning.
The NRHP form says that the Rivola, opened in 1921, was the first movie theater in Elkader, but they missed something. The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists two houses in the town: The Crystal, located on Main Street, and the Majestic, no location noted. A history of Clayton County published in 1916 says that John L. Flanagan opened the Majestic in 1910. There is a possibility that the Majestic was an aka for the Elkader Opera House, which opened in 1903 at 207 N. Main Street, but I’ve been unable to confirm this.
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists two theaters at Guttenberg: the Lyric, at 1st and Herder Street, and the Elite, no address provided. Polk’s 1912 Iowa directory lists only one theater at Guttenberg, that being called the Delight.
In 1926, proprietors of the Princess, Hunstad and Becker, were providing capsule movie reviews for Exhibitors Herald.
The 1960 FDY lists the Princess in Guttenberg as one of the 24 houses operated by the Iowa United Theatres chain.
Internet gives this as the address of a chiropractic clinic (Dr. Scott Scherer, DC). I hoped Bing Maps might have a better street view, as they sometimes do, but they don’t have any at all for this location.
The Cozy is the only theater listed at Dyersville in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory and is occasionally mentioned, along with the Plaza Theatre, in early trade journal items from the 1910s and 1920s. The only other theater name I’ve found associated with Dyersville is the Nemo, mentioned in issues of Moving Picture World in November and December, 1916, when it was operated by a Mr. A. E. Bennett.
The April 6, 1918 issue of Moving Picture World mentions “J. E. Lippert, of the Plaza theater, Dyersville….” The name Lippert had appeared in that journal before, in the April 17, 1909 issue, which said “Henry and Anthony Lippert have opened a five and ten-cent theater in the Lippert Building.” I’ve been unable to discover if the house opened in 1909 was in fact the Plaza or a different theater. The only theater listed at Dyersville in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory was the Cozy, but that publication’s listings were frequently incomplete.
The November 7, 1925 issue of Motion Picture News said that H. Lippert was remodeling the Plaza, and had spent $1,500 on new equipment from Exhibitors Supply Company of Des Moines.
The July 9, 1949 Boxoffice said that Bert Coughlin’s new Fine Arts Theatre at Maynard had opened on June 29 with the ballet picture “The Red Shoes.” The article gave the seating capacity of the original single-screen house as 425.
A 2019 Lodi News article about the Sunset quotes Lodi Historical Society director Lisa Craig as saying that the house on which the Sunset was modeled, the Ritz Theatre in Hayward, was designed by San Francisco architect Albert H. Larsen. I guess that implies that the Sunset and the nearly identical Tower theatre in Willows were also Larsen designs.
The State Theatre’s first appearance in the FDY was in 1936, making a 1935 opening very likely, though it was listed with only 300 seats.
A Bijou Theatre is listed at Mason City in the 1926 FDY, with 400 seats. If it was the same Bijou, it must have taken over the entire ground floor of its building. It is last listed, with no seating capacity given, as a silent house, in the 1932 FDY.
An item datelined Mason City in the March 11, 1911 issue of Moving Picture World said “Mesers. Arthur and Heffner are making arrangements to open a new vaudeville and moving picture theater here. It will be known as the Princess.” The Princess Theatre operating at Mason City in 1908 must have been a different house.
In Polk’s 1912 Iowa business directory, the Princess was the only Mason City theater listed among both the picture houses (along with the Orpheum, Bijou and Star) and among regular theaters (along with the Wilson Theatre and Parker’s Opera House.)
The 1922 Cahn-Leighton guide’s moving picture theaters section lists a house called the Maryland Theatre at 1015 E. 7th Street with the notation “OB”, meaning out of business. However, the same year’s L.A, City Directory lists the Merryland Theatre at the same address. The 1921 directory did list it as the Maryland, as did the 1920 directory. As it was listed as Merryland in the 1915 directory, I don’t know if Maryland was just an intermittent typo or was an actual aka, even if temporary, for this house.
There was a gap between the closing of the Academy and the opening of the Normandie. The 1922 Cahn-Leighton guide lists the Academy at this address with the notation “OB”, meaning out of business. No theaters are listed at this address in city directories later than 1921 until the Normandie appears in 1925.
The America Theatre was not in the building at 167 N. College, now occupied by the comedy club, but in the building immediately south of it, at 153-157 N. College. I also think that the facades of both buildings are misleading, as is often the case in old urban neighborhoods. Buildings can be gutted and entirely new facades put on them without demolishing the basic structure, though in this case I suspect that the building which actually housed the America Theatre has had its roof lowered, which means nothing remains of the theater but the side walls and perhaps the lower part of the back wall. The fly tower is of course gone, along with any other traces of the building’s theatrical history
Here is a major problem with the comedy club building: satellite view shows that it simply isn’t deep enough to have held a theater. About 2/5 of that lot is parking, and was already parking in a 1956 aerial view (the earliest aerial available online.) LoopNet’s page for 167 N. College says it was built/renovated in 1885/1914 and calls it the Briggs Building (though there is another building of that name in Fort Collins, at Oak and Mason street, built in 1951/1952.)
The building to the south of this Briggs Building, at 153-157 N. College, also has a LoopNet page, which calls it the America Building (!), and says it was built/renovated in 1904/2016. This building is definitely deep enough to have housed a theater. It is currently occupied by an assortment of small businesses, some of them arrayed along a passageway cut through the building to the alley in back. Despite LoopNet noting only a 2016 renovation, the conversion of the structure to a commercial arcade was done around 1955, the year noted on plans and drawings of the project prepared by local architect William B. Robb, listed in the finding aid for his collected papers. The closing date of 1953 provided by rivest266 is probably correct, despite the continued listing of the house in the 1956 FDY.
The theater entrance having been in the north bay of the building, as revealed by the vintage photo, the address would have been about 157 N., currently the address of a business called Elite E-Sport. The historic address I’ve seen for the Orpheum Theatre was 163 N, but that number is apparently no longer in use.
While there apparently was an earlier Empress Theatre in Fairbanks, local sources I’ve seen have all been in agreement that this house opened on August 25, 1927, and I’ve found none that give it any name other than Empress. CinemaTour cites a June 15, 1962 item in the Daily News Miner saying that the house had shown its last movie the previous night. It was the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy “Lover Come Back.”
The Vocal Group Hall of Fame web site is still working, which I doubt would be the case if the auditorium was gone. There is nothing on the web site or anywhere else on the Internet about any demolition. Until somebody provides a reliable source saying that it has been razed, the theater’s status should be listed as closed, restoring, and the VGHF web site’s Columbia Theatre page linked to it.
I found a modern photo of the Royal’s building at Flickr. The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists only the Princess Theatre at West Union, but I have come across a February 12, 1916 Moving Picture World item datelined saying that an R. D. Fellows had purchased an interest in the Cozy Theatre. The Cozy could have been the Royal reopened. By 1926 the FDY is listing only the Princess.
If this was the only theater on the 1913 Sanborn of West Union it must have been the Royal, a house whose proprietor, G. W. Batemen, had just installed a new screen, projector, and seats, according to the December 13 issue of Moving Picture World.
Apparently Mr. Kramer did manage to get the Winfield Theatre reopened in 1954, with the announcement appearing in the March 15 issue of Boxoffice. The house would be open three nights a week. Local businesses subscribed to each buy two adult tickets a week for one year, and additionally had given away 60 tickets for the first show under the new management. The house was still in in operation in 1955 when the April 16 Boxoffice reported that Kramer planned to continue a program of free movies on Wednesday nights sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. I haven’t found any later items about the Winfield.
There could have been an afterlife for this theater. The February 27, 1954 issue of Boxoffice had a brief article saying that E. J. Kramer of Burlington, Iowa, ad bought the theater equipment from the Allens and leased the Winfield Theatre building from the Pratt Brothers for three years and planned to reopen the house in March.
I haven’t found anything to confirm that Mr. Kramer, who had the backing of the local Chamber of Commerce, was able to fulfill his plans, though it seems to me his timing could hardly have been worse. wide screen equipment was about to become essential for theaters, and that would have been an enormous expense, yet had it not been made I don’t see how the house could have survived three year with a dwindling, then nonexistent, supply of new movies.
The October 2, 1933 issue of Film Daily reveals another aka for this house: “Elroy, Wis. — The Majestic has been renamed the Juneau and is now being operated by Edmund Mohns and Donald Wilcox.”
Yet another name was presented in the issue of April 9, 1934: “Elroy, Wis. — The Juneau theater has been renamed the Star and is now being operated by J. Eskin.”
This name might have been used only briefly, though, as the May 28 issue had this item: “ELROY—Star (formerly Juneau), transferred to Elroy Theater, Inc. by A. A. Suczycki.”
An October, 1914 Sanborn map of Elroy shows a “Motion Picture Theatre” on the second floor of a building at the southeast corner of Main and Franklin streets (modern address 140 Main Street.) As it is upstairs, I suspect that it was an existing hall converted to show movies, and was probably the Opera House that was listed in a 1911 Polk directory of Wisconsin businesses. The Opera House was also the only theater listed at Elroy in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory.
While the Sanborn map proves a theater was at this location in 1914, the 1926 FDY lists the Majestic with 329 seats, and I doubt that this small structure could have held half that many. It might be that the Majestic began in the Opera house in 1914 but later found larger quarters. Or the FDY might have just gotten the capacity wrong.
I came across a news report from 1968 saying there had been a major tornado in Oelwein. That might account for its sorry condition today.
The 1913 Cahn guide lists the Phillips Opera House as a ground floor theater (the earlier opera house was also owned by and named for Mr. Phillips– Cahn guides, 1897-98, 1898-99.) One thing that troubles me is that the Sanborn map of the building at 8 N. Frederick doesn’t show a balcony, as Sanborn maps invariably (as far as I know) did when such existed. The Cahn guide lists a balcony, gallery and boxes for the opera house. If this fairly large opera house existed in 1913, why isn’t it on the 1914 Sanborn? It could have burned down, of course, but I’ve found no evidence that such a thing happened.
I do think it far more likely that the Cahn guide would list a theater that wasn’t actually there, or wasn’t as described, than that the Sanborn map would miss a building that actually was there, or would fail to note features as significant as a balcony, gallery and boxes. In fact the latter seems near impossible while the former wouldn’t surprise me at all. All I can think of is that either the opera house was destroyed sometime in 1913, or that the original project planned in 1907 was scaled back to the more modest theater that appears on the 1914 Sanborn. At least so far, the latter seems more likely.
Also, a 1912 Iowa business directory lists three theaters at Oelwein: the Lyric, the Orpheum, and the Phillips Opera House. The Orpheum and Opera House might have been the same theater, and I’ve been thinking that the Lyric, which I found mentioned in both 1911 and in December, 1910, might have been an earlier name for the Colonial.
Okay, I have no idea why my link is not working. Try this one, though you’ll have to embiggen it yourself.
A photo showing part of the Gem Theatre’s front in 1926 can be seen on this page (my mouse has been acting up and I’m unable to do any photo editing with it.) The photo is from the May 8 issue of Universal Weekly.