Esquire Theatre

Mike Gallagher on May 9, 2010 at 3:04 pm

I wish someone had some good interior pictures of the Esquire and the Tower Theater. As for the “grind” house – I am not sure that was true of the Esquire (formerly 12th Street. I think someone is getting confused with the theater across the street facing McGee. It had a performing arts stage, back stage and dressing rooms. I think the Esquire theater was built strictly as a movie house with a theater organ installed. The stage was only big enough for the organ equipment, screen, curtain rigging and later the speakers.

I may be wrong, but I had been told this by my father.regular singer

JAlex on May 9, 2010 at 10:58 am

Digging further into my research, an item in the St. Louis Post-
Dispatch of June 23, 1920 stated the new 12th Street Theatre was purchased by the Skouras interests from Richards and Flynn for $250,000 (including the FN franchise).

Joe Vogel on December 7, 2009 at 1:07 am

Another clue to the earlier history of the Esquire appears in Boxoffice of May 3, 1947. The item was about the Tower replacing the Esquire as Fox Midwest’s “A” house in Kansas City, playing first run movies day and date with their Uptown Theatre. The item says that, as the Twelfth Street Theatre, the Esquire had been a burlesque house.

However, an item in The Reel Journal of August 28, 1926, said of a fellow named Cullen Espy: “Starting his career with Skouras Bros. some years ago as manager of the Twelfth Street Theatre in Kansas City….” It seems unlikely that the Skouras brothers would have operated a burlesque house, so if the place had that policy during the late 1920s-early 1930s, they must have sold the theater to another operator, and then Fox Midwest bought it in 1938. As a Skouras operation in the earlier 1920s The Twelfth Street had been a regular movie theater.

In addition, comments exchanged by Warren Harris and Claydoh77 on March 28, 2008, at the Tower Theatre page reveal that this house was called the Wonderland Theatre beginning in 1932. The Wonderland was a grind house. So far there’s no information about when the Wonderland became the Downtown.

So the time-line of names now appears to be: Twelfth Street Theatre from around 1922, when it was operated by the Skouras brothers (probably the original owners,) and then at some unknown date it was converted to a burlesque house operating under the same name until 1932, then it became the Wonderland Theatre for a time, and then the Downtown Theatre, and then the Esquire from 1938 until closing.

I believe the Twelfth Street/Esquire is in the last photo on this web page, right next to the Pantages/Tower. A similar picture is on the Tower’s Cinema Treasures page, but this larger photo makes it clear that there are two theaters side by side. The Twelfth Street is the nearer theater, with the arch on the front.

Joe Vogel on September 16, 2009 at 12:23 am

Here’s information from the August 13, 1938, issue of Boxoffice that doesn’t quite match the current intro above:

“The remodeled Downtown, which opens August 18 as the Esquire Theatre, was established 16 years ago by Spyros Skouras, president of National Theatres, he revealed here this week. His first venture beyond his St. Louis scene of operations, the house was then known as the Twelfth Street Theatre.”

I can’t tell from the wording of this item whether Skouras opened the house as the Twelfth Street Theatre 16 years before, then later changed the name to Downtown Theatre, or if he acquired an existing house called the Twelfth Street Theatre 16 years before and changed the name to Downtown Theatre at that time. Can anyone know anything about a theater being at this address prior to 1922?