This web page has a story about a group called Friends of the Rook, who are raising funds to restore the Rook Theatre and operate it as a performance space and community event center. It says that the house was built in 1939 by Bert and Elmer Rook to replace their Lyric Theatre at another location in Cheyenne. The official opening of the Rook was April 3, 1940.
The Rook was one of the earliest theaters designed by architect Jack Corgan, of Corgan & Moore. Unfortunately a 1972 fire destroyed the original interior, and even the interior from a remodeling that year is now gone, the auditorium having been stripped to the bare walls.
A history of the Rook Theater says that Bert an Elmer Rook built that house in 1939 to replace their Lyric Theatre. The 250-seat Lyric made its first appearance in the 1931 FDY. In 1929, Cheyenne had been home to the 175-seat Princess Theatre, and the town was not listed in the 1930 edition. I’ve been unable to discover if the Princess was enlarged, renamed and reopened or if the Lyric was a new house opened sometime in 1930.
An advertisement in Pulaski newspaper The Southwest Times of July 29, 1921 said that the new Dalton Theatre would open the following evening, Saturday, July 30, at 700 P. M.. The Dalton Theatre was leased to the American Theater Company, of Welch, West Virginia.
A list of buildings designed by architect Albert F. Janowitz includes the Heights Theatre, a 1919 project. The list also includes the 1924 West Park Theatre, and two 1917 projects listed only under the generic term “Movie Theatre.” These two are both listed in Cleveland and both listed as demolished.
One web page says that the Heights didn’t begin operation until 1922, but I’ve found no corroboration for the claim elsewhere.
The pastor of the church which occupies the theater, Joel Negus, has converted part of the auditorium into a recording studio/performance space, a project begun in 2019. There is a photo of the space on his Facebook page here.
A list of buildings designed by architect Albert F. Janowitz includes the West Park Theatre, listed as a 1924 project, though it apparently opened in 1925. The list also includes the 1919 Heights Theatre, and two 1917 projects listed only under the generic term “Movie Theatre.” These two are both listed in Cleveland and both listed as demolished.
Typos and errors in the Hill and Cahn guides muddled the owners of the first Welch Theatre. They were Benjamin Hurvitz and partners J. M. (Joseph) Lopinsky and his brother E. H. (Eugene) Lopinsky.
I’ve found a Louis Shore connected with the Cinderella Theatre by trade publications a early as 1923 (Moving Picture World, May 12) and as late as 1956 (Boxffice, April 21.) Shore also operated theaters in Keystone and War at various times, and his brother Mannie Shore was the long-time operator of the War Theatre at War.
This house and its predecessor were called the Welch Theatre, owned and originally operated by brothers Huritz and Joe Lopinsky. It was closed when later operators opened the new Pocahontas Theater in 1928. The pending conversion of the Welch Theatre building into a store for the G. C. Murphy Co. was noted in the August 12, 1928 issue of the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. At that time it was expected that the new theater would be completed in January of 1929, but the job was done ahead of schedule and it opened on December 25. The last show at the Welch was therefore probably on December 24, 1928.
Gus Hill’s 1914 directory lists a theater at Welch called the Welch, playing “R V P” (Road shows, Vaudeville, and Pictures.) The stage was 20 feet deep and 28 feet wide, which sounds like a good fit for this building. It was managed by “Huritz Lopinsky & Bro.” The 1912-1913 Cahn guide also lists the house, giving a seating capacity of 217 on the lower floor and 200 in the balcony. In 1917, a Joe Lopinsky (apparently the Bro.) was noted as owner of an unnamed movie theater at Welch. The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory missed Welch altogether, but the Welch Theatre was listed in the FDY through the late 1920s.
Mister R. W. Thayer of the Ross Theatre contributed three capsule movie reviews to the September 8, 1945 issue of Motion Picture Herald. In 1946, the July 19 issue of Film Daily reported that Gus Eisner and J. M. McKernan had purchased the house.
Boxoffice of January 12, 1950, reported that another new owner of the Ross, DeVerne Darnell, had changed the name of the house to Marcellus Theatre.
The October 19, 1957 issue of Boxoffice said that the Marcellus Theatre, recently closed by DeVerne Darnell, had been reopened by Richard E. Relsch and renamed the Dix. Dix Theatre is how the house is styled at Water Winter Wonderland, which says the theater was closed by 1959.
This theater was not on Monroe Street, but Main Street. The address might be 126 E. Main. Neither Google nor Bing Maps have either satellite or street views of Marcellus, but Water Winter Wonderland has a photo of the building the theater was in, and a real estate web site has a photo of the same row of buildings, one of which, at 128 E. Main, it says was recently sold. I’m pretty sure (though not absolutely certain) that the theater was in the building next door west of the one recently sold, and it is probably numbered 126 or some other number not too much smaller than 128.
This item datelined Saginaw appeared in the September 11, 1915 issue of Michigan Contractor and Builder:
“After September 11 the remodeling of the Jeffers theater building into a moving picture theater will be started. The lobby, ticket office will be remodeled, the interior newly decorated and new equipment, a new pipe organ and new stage settings will be installed. E. A. Eberson of Chicago, has the contract for the work. The theater when completed will be known as the Strand.”
A careless copy editor or typesetter must have garbled John Adolph Emil Eberson’s name, because that’s who the Eberson who had the contract for the project must have been.
The Jeffers was one of two Saginaw theaters listed in the 1908-1909 Cahn guide, the other being the Academy. Both were then owned and operated by the National Amusement Company, and both were about the same size, but the Academy had a stage a bit larger and charged higher prices, with a top of S1.25 to the Jeffers' .75 cents. That indicates that the Jeffers was probably the vaudeville house and the Academy hosted the big road shows, though I did find indications that the Jeffers also hosted stock companies part of the time.
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists a house at Saginaw called the Jeffries Theatre, which I thought might have been a misspelling of Jeffers, but there are also references to it from 1920, after the Jeffers had been renamed Strand, so I now suspect it was a different house.
The Lyric was listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, along with theaters called the Dreamland and the Opera House. In the 1926 FDY, the only theater listed at Bonne Terre was the Odeon. There was a house in Bonne Terre called the Odeon by 1923, and it appears to have been relocated to a new building in late 1924.
The 1926 FDY lists the Odeon with only 275 seats. The first time it is listed with 500 seats is 1931. No capacity was given in the 1930 edition, so the expansion was probably done either in 1929 or 1930.
The October 4, 1924 issue of Moving Picture World ran this announcement: “Bonne Terre, Mo., is to have a new picture house, plans for a building to seat 600 having been prepared by Harry Clayman, owner of the Lead Belt News, who owns the present Odeon Theatre in Bonne Terre. Harry Rousse is managing the house for the editor. He formerly conducted theatres in St. Louis and DeSoto, Mo.”
Th earlier Odeon Theater was mentioned in the March 31, 1923 issue of Exhibitors Herald.
The first appearance of the Sophia Theatre (and the town of Sophia) in the FDY is in the 1927 edition. The most likely opening year for the house is thus 1926.
I forgot to mention in my comment what brought me here to begin with. It was this item from Manufacturers Record of April 14, 1919, about a theater to be built in Seneca: “S. C., Seneca.-W. T. Edwards and Dr. W. F. Austin; $40,000 moving-picture theater; 3 stores offices on 2d floor; day labor; Casey & Fant, Archts., Anderson, S. C.”
The dance studio at 117 E. North 1st street is adjacent to a building with three matching storefronts, though they have no second floors with offices in them. The second floors might have been removed, of course, but more likely the developers decided that economic conditions at the time they were built didn’t justify the expense of building them. The buildings have a high degree of design integrity, and are characteristic of the period around 1919. I think this building probably is the project noted in the magazine, minus the second floors.
Architects Casey & Fant (Joseph Huntley Casey and Charles William Fant Sr.) have one other theater already attributed to them at Cinema Treasures, the Imperial, in their home town of Anderson.
A history or the Oconee County library system says that “[t]he Seneca Library opened in April 1953 in the Laurel Room of the Richardson Theater on Townville Street.” The page gives no clue as to what the Laurel Room was, or if it was an essential part of the theater. If it was, then the Richardson must have been closed in or before 1952. The library moved to another location in 1956.
I suspect that the Star Theatre operated under that name only until some time 1927. A Richardson Theatre is listed at Seneca in the 1928 FDY, with 250 seats, and is advertised in the October 17, 1928 issue of The Tiger, student newspaper of Clemson College. In 1926, the FDY lists only the Star Theatre at Seneca, with 250 seats. It’s listed again in 1927, but I’ve checked FDYs for 1928, 1929, 1930, 1936, 1940 and 1950, and the Star Theatre never appears again.
The only 400-seat theater I’ve seen listed at Seneca in the FDY is a house called the YMCA Theatre, listed in 1927 through 1929. I suspect that the Star only ever had 250 seats, was renamed Richardson Theatre in 1927, and was replaced by a new Richardson Theatre in 1935 (first listed, with 500 seats, in the 1936 FDY) and the old theater building was converted to some other use at that time or soon after. I’ve been unable to discover anything about the YMCA Theatre.
Both the ground floor and upper floor spaces in this complex were originally planned to be theaters, as noted in this item from Manufacturers Record of August 14, 1919: “ $1,000,000 building at 18 W. Lexington St.; 178x120 ft.; 2 theaters under 1 roof; 1st floor seat 3900; 2d, 2500; moving stage; pipe organ, $50,000; 6 elevators for roof service; galleries reached by runway; Jno. J. Zink, Archt., McLachlen Bldg…..”
The decision to open the upper floor as a ballroom instead must have been made after the initial plans had been announced. The conversion of the ballroom to a theater five years later must have been greatly facilitated by the fact that the space had been planned to house a theater to begin with.
A centennial history of Clarence published in 1959 said that the town’s 1938 theater was installed in the north half of the American Legion Hall. With an expanding membership during the post-war period, the Legion decided to remodel the building and use the entire space for their own activities.
I haven’t been able to confirm that the current American Legion hall is the same remodeled building, which was rededicated in 1954, but aside from a fake mansard that probably dates from the 1970s it does have a midcentury look to it. If this was the State Theatre, the building’s address is 304 6th Avenue, just off Lombard Street, which is aka Lincoln Highway.
The Temple Theatre was one of two movie houses listed at Creston in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The other was the Comet, listed at 211 N. (probably a typo for W.) Adams.
The name Masonic Theatre appeared in reports of the 1920 fire appearing in safety and insurance industry journals, but I haven’t found it in any theater industry publications yet. Those invariably refer to the house as either the Temple Theatre or the Temple Grand Theatre.
Reports in various entertainment journals in late 1909 indicate that the Temple Grand had a major fire in December that year as well, causing some $40,000 in damage.
The July 9, 1955 issue of Boxoffice said that novice theater operator Maurice Sorenson had taken over the Newell Theatre about two months earlier and had installed a wide screen. I’ve found no later mentions of Mr. Sorenson, but the town’s theater, closed again, is mentioned in the November 13, 1957 issue of Motion Picture Exhibitor. The item said “[t]he community of Newell, Iowa, wants its theatre reopened; a group of women is selling season tickets.” I’ve been unable to discover the outcome of their efforts.
The February 10, 1917 issue of Moving Picture World said that “Van Hooser and Layman have purchased the Amuzu theater in Fonda from Smith Bros.”
A 1958 photo of the Amuzu shows it a few doors down Main Street from the First National Bank building, which is still standing at 119 N. Main Street. The photo doesn’t show the entire block, most of which has been demolished in any case, but the theater was perhaps about halfway along it, so the address would have been approximately 109 N. Main.
The June 3, 1959 issue of Motion Picture Exhibitor published a letter from Wayne Walker, manager of the Glenn Theatre in Georgetown, Kentucky, who said that the house had recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. A more detailed article in the Louisville Courier-Journal of December 20, 1959 said that the Glenn had opened in 1909 as the Opera House. It was still listed under that name in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory and in editions of the FDY through 1935. The 1936 edition listed the Glenn Theatre for the first time.
The 1912-1913 Cahn guide lists the Georgetown Opera House as a ground floor theater with about 1,000 seats, but the FDY lists it with only 500, while the Glenn in its first listing has 638. The Cahn says that the Opera House had 519 seats on the main floor, 209 in the balcony and 246 in the gallery. It seems likely that in its operation as a movie house the balcony and gallery were simply not used, but when the house was renovated and renamed in 1935 the balcony was reopened. A more extensive remodeling took place in 1937, as records of the alterations planned in May through August that year exist in the papers of the Lexington architectural firm Frankel & Curtis.
According to a 2011 article in the La Crosse Tribune, Viroqua’s Vernon Square Shopping Center opened in 1991, and the three-screen cinema opened in 1996, in space vacated by an unsuccessful retail store.
The NRHP registration form for the Masonic Temple Building (PDF here) says that the Temple Theatre opened on July 1, 1922 under the management of local showman Ben C. Brown, who had first shown movies in Viroqua at the old Brown Opera House at 120-122 N. Main Street in 1908, and had later operated an Airdome, a storefront house called the Electric Theatre, and then in 1915 the Star Theatre, which was in a new building at 211 S. Main Street.
In 1931, the Masonic Lodge entered lease agreement with the Paramount-Publix theater chain, which remodeled the theater interior from its original Classical Revival style to the popular, modern Art Deco style, and installed a modern marquee, though the building’s exterior was otherwise unchanged, retaining the Classical Revival look it still has today. Having lost control of the Temple, Ben Brown responded by converting a garage on Court Street into the Vernon Theatre.
Neither the local Masonic lodge nor Paramount-Publix prospered in Viroqua in the early years of the depression, and by 1935 the Masons had lost their building and Paramount its lease on the theater. The building’s new owner, William Dyson, sold the upstairs lodge facilities back to the Masons, but retained ownership of the ground floor, leasing the theater to a local operator, though it was not Brown. The new operator, Jacob Eskin, refreshed the house and installed new seating with four more inches between rows.
By 1951, when Ben Brown celebrated his sixtieth anniversary in show business (he had started as a promoter of shows in the town’s Brown Opera House in 1891) he was once again a partner in the Temple Theatre.
This web page has a story about a group called Friends of the Rook, who are raising funds to restore the Rook Theatre and operate it as a performance space and community event center. It says that the house was built in 1939 by Bert and Elmer Rook to replace their Lyric Theatre at another location in Cheyenne. The official opening of the Rook was April 3, 1940.
The Rook was one of the earliest theaters designed by architect Jack Corgan, of Corgan & Moore. Unfortunately a 1972 fire destroyed the original interior, and even the interior from a remodeling that year is now gone, the auditorium having been stripped to the bare walls.
A history of the Rook Theater says that Bert an Elmer Rook built that house in 1939 to replace their Lyric Theatre. The 250-seat Lyric made its first appearance in the 1931 FDY. In 1929, Cheyenne had been home to the 175-seat Princess Theatre, and the town was not listed in the 1930 edition. I’ve been unable to discover if the Princess was enlarged, renamed and reopened or if the Lyric was a new house opened sometime in 1930.
An advertisement in Pulaski newspaper The Southwest Times of July 29, 1921 said that the new Dalton Theatre would open the following evening, Saturday, July 30, at 700 P. M.. The Dalton Theatre was leased to the American Theater Company, of Welch, West Virginia.
A list of buildings designed by architect Albert F. Janowitz includes the Heights Theatre, a 1919 project. The list also includes the 1924 West Park Theatre, and two 1917 projects listed only under the generic term “Movie Theatre.” These two are both listed in Cleveland and both listed as demolished.
One web page says that the Heights didn’t begin operation until 1922, but I’ve found no corroboration for the claim elsewhere.
The pastor of the church which occupies the theater, Joel Negus, has converted part of the auditorium into a recording studio/performance space, a project begun in 2019. There is a photo of the space on his Facebook page here.
A list of buildings designed by architect Albert F. Janowitz includes the West Park Theatre, listed as a 1924 project, though it apparently opened in 1925. The list also includes the 1919 Heights Theatre, and two 1917 projects listed only under the generic term “Movie Theatre.” These two are both listed in Cleveland and both listed as demolished.
Typos and errors in the Hill and Cahn guides muddled the owners of the first Welch Theatre. They were Benjamin Hurvitz and partners J. M. (Joseph) Lopinsky and his brother E. H. (Eugene) Lopinsky.
I’ve found a Louis Shore connected with the Cinderella Theatre by trade publications a early as 1923 (Moving Picture World, May 12) and as late as 1956 (Boxffice, April 21.) Shore also operated theaters in Keystone and War at various times, and his brother Mannie Shore was the long-time operator of the War Theatre at War.
This house and its predecessor were called the Welch Theatre, owned and originally operated by brothers Huritz and Joe Lopinsky. It was closed when later operators opened the new Pocahontas Theater in 1928. The pending conversion of the Welch Theatre building into a store for the G. C. Murphy Co. was noted in the August 12, 1928 issue of the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. At that time it was expected that the new theater would be completed in January of 1929, but the job was done ahead of schedule and it opened on December 25. The last show at the Welch was therefore probably on December 24, 1928.
Gus Hill’s 1914 directory lists a theater at Welch called the Welch, playing “R V P” (Road shows, Vaudeville, and Pictures.) The stage was 20 feet deep and 28 feet wide, which sounds like a good fit for this building. It was managed by “Huritz Lopinsky & Bro.” The 1912-1913 Cahn guide also lists the house, giving a seating capacity of 217 on the lower floor and 200 in the balcony. In 1917, a Joe Lopinsky (apparently the Bro.) was noted as owner of an unnamed movie theater at Welch. The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory missed Welch altogether, but the Welch Theatre was listed in the FDY through the late 1920s.
Mister R. W. Thayer of the Ross Theatre contributed three capsule movie reviews to the September 8, 1945 issue of Motion Picture Herald. In 1946, the July 19 issue of Film Daily reported that Gus Eisner and J. M. McKernan had purchased the house. Boxoffice of January 12, 1950, reported that another new owner of the Ross, DeVerne Darnell, had changed the name of the house to Marcellus Theatre.
The October 19, 1957 issue of Boxoffice said that the Marcellus Theatre, recently closed by DeVerne Darnell, had been reopened by Richard E. Relsch and renamed the Dix. Dix Theatre is how the house is styled at Water Winter Wonderland, which says the theater was closed by 1959.
This theater was not on Monroe Street, but Main Street. The address might be 126 E. Main. Neither Google nor Bing Maps have either satellite or street views of Marcellus, but Water Winter Wonderland has a photo of the building the theater was in, and a real estate web site has a photo of the same row of buildings, one of which, at 128 E. Main, it says was recently sold. I’m pretty sure (though not absolutely certain) that the theater was in the building next door west of the one recently sold, and it is probably numbered 126 or some other number not too much smaller than 128.
This item datelined Saginaw appeared in the September 11, 1915 issue of Michigan Contractor and Builder:
A careless copy editor or typesetter must have garbled John Adolph Emil Eberson’s name, because that’s who the Eberson who had the contract for the project must have been.The Jeffers was one of two Saginaw theaters listed in the 1908-1909 Cahn guide, the other being the Academy. Both were then owned and operated by the National Amusement Company, and both were about the same size, but the Academy had a stage a bit larger and charged higher prices, with a top of S1.25 to the Jeffers' .75 cents. That indicates that the Jeffers was probably the vaudeville house and the Academy hosted the big road shows, though I did find indications that the Jeffers also hosted stock companies part of the time.
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists a house at Saginaw called the Jeffries Theatre, which I thought might have been a misspelling of Jeffers, but there are also references to it from 1920, after the Jeffers had been renamed Strand, so I now suspect it was a different house.
The Lyric was listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, along with theaters called the Dreamland and the Opera House. In the 1926 FDY, the only theater listed at Bonne Terre was the Odeon. There was a house in Bonne Terre called the Odeon by 1923, and it appears to have been relocated to a new building in late 1924.
The 1926 FDY lists the Odeon with only 275 seats. The first time it is listed with 500 seats is 1931. No capacity was given in the 1930 edition, so the expansion was probably done either in 1929 or 1930.
The October 4, 1924 issue of Moving Picture World ran this announcement: “Bonne Terre, Mo., is to have a new picture house, plans for a building to seat 600 having been prepared by Harry Clayman, owner of the Lead Belt News, who owns the present Odeon Theatre in Bonne Terre. Harry Rousse is managing the house for the editor. He formerly conducted theatres in St. Louis and DeSoto, Mo.”
Th earlier Odeon Theater was mentioned in the March 31, 1923 issue of Exhibitors Herald.
The first appearance of the Sophia Theatre (and the town of Sophia) in the FDY is in the 1927 edition. The most likely opening year for the house is thus 1926.
I forgot to mention in my comment what brought me here to begin with. It was this item from Manufacturers Record of April 14, 1919, about a theater to be built in Seneca: “S. C., Seneca.-W. T. Edwards and Dr. W. F. Austin; $40,000 moving-picture theater; 3 stores offices on 2d floor; day labor; Casey & Fant, Archts., Anderson, S. C.”
The dance studio at 117 E. North 1st street is adjacent to a building with three matching storefronts, though they have no second floors with offices in them. The second floors might have been removed, of course, but more likely the developers decided that economic conditions at the time they were built didn’t justify the expense of building them. The buildings have a high degree of design integrity, and are characteristic of the period around 1919. I think this building probably is the project noted in the magazine, minus the second floors.
Architects Casey & Fant (Joseph Huntley Casey and Charles William Fant Sr.) have one other theater already attributed to them at Cinema Treasures, the Imperial, in their home town of Anderson.
A history or the Oconee County library system says that “[t]he Seneca Library opened in April 1953 in the Laurel Room of the Richardson Theater on Townville Street.” The page gives no clue as to what the Laurel Room was, or if it was an essential part of the theater. If it was, then the Richardson must have been closed in or before 1952. The library moved to another location in 1956.
I suspect that the Star Theatre operated under that name only until some time 1927. A Richardson Theatre is listed at Seneca in the 1928 FDY, with 250 seats, and is advertised in the October 17, 1928 issue of The Tiger, student newspaper of Clemson College. In 1926, the FDY lists only the Star Theatre at Seneca, with 250 seats. It’s listed again in 1927, but I’ve checked FDYs for 1928, 1929, 1930, 1936, 1940 and 1950, and the Star Theatre never appears again.
The only 400-seat theater I’ve seen listed at Seneca in the FDY is a house called the YMCA Theatre, listed in 1927 through 1929. I suspect that the Star only ever had 250 seats, was renamed Richardson Theatre in 1927, and was replaced by a new Richardson Theatre in 1935 (first listed, with 500 seats, in the 1936 FDY) and the old theater building was converted to some other use at that time or soon after. I’ve been unable to discover anything about the YMCA Theatre.
Both the ground floor and upper floor spaces in this complex were originally planned to be theaters, as noted in this item from Manufacturers Record of August 14, 1919: “ $1,000,000 building at 18 W. Lexington St.; 178x120 ft.; 2 theaters under 1 roof; 1st floor seat 3900; 2d, 2500; moving stage; pipe organ, $50,000; 6 elevators for roof service; galleries reached by runway; Jno. J. Zink, Archt., McLachlen Bldg…..”
The decision to open the upper floor as a ballroom instead must have been made after the initial plans had been announced. The conversion of the ballroom to a theater five years later must have been greatly facilitated by the fact that the space had been planned to house a theater to begin with.
A centennial history of Clarence published in 1959 said that the town’s 1938 theater was installed in the north half of the American Legion Hall. With an expanding membership during the post-war period, the Legion decided to remodel the building and use the entire space for their own activities.
I haven’t been able to confirm that the current American Legion hall is the same remodeled building, which was rededicated in 1954, but aside from a fake mansard that probably dates from the 1970s it does have a midcentury look to it. If this was the State Theatre, the building’s address is 304 6th Avenue, just off Lombard Street, which is aka Lincoln Highway.
The Temple Theatre was one of two movie houses listed at Creston in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. The other was the Comet, listed at 211 N. (probably a typo for W.) Adams.
The name Masonic Theatre appeared in reports of the 1920 fire appearing in safety and insurance industry journals, but I haven’t found it in any theater industry publications yet. Those invariably refer to the house as either the Temple Theatre or the Temple Grand Theatre.
Reports in various entertainment journals in late 1909 indicate that the Temple Grand had a major fire in December that year as well, causing some $40,000 in damage.
The July 9, 1955 issue of Boxoffice said that novice theater operator Maurice Sorenson had taken over the Newell Theatre about two months earlier and had installed a wide screen. I’ve found no later mentions of Mr. Sorenson, but the town’s theater, closed again, is mentioned in the November 13, 1957 issue of Motion Picture Exhibitor. The item said “[t]he community of Newell, Iowa, wants its theatre reopened; a group of women is selling season tickets.” I’ve been unable to discover the outcome of their efforts.
The February 10, 1917 issue of Moving Picture World said that “Van Hooser and Layman have purchased the Amuzu theater in Fonda from Smith Bros.”
A 1958 photo of the Amuzu shows it a few doors down Main Street from the First National Bank building, which is still standing at 119 N. Main Street. The photo doesn’t show the entire block, most of which has been demolished in any case, but the theater was perhaps about halfway along it, so the address would have been approximately 109 N. Main.
The June 3, 1959 issue of Motion Picture Exhibitor published a letter from Wayne Walker, manager of the Glenn Theatre in Georgetown, Kentucky, who said that the house had recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. A more detailed article in the Louisville Courier-Journal of December 20, 1959 said that the Glenn had opened in 1909 as the Opera House. It was still listed under that name in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory and in editions of the FDY through 1935. The 1936 edition listed the Glenn Theatre for the first time.
The 1912-1913 Cahn guide lists the Georgetown Opera House as a ground floor theater with about 1,000 seats, but the FDY lists it with only 500, while the Glenn in its first listing has 638. The Cahn says that the Opera House had 519 seats on the main floor, 209 in the balcony and 246 in the gallery. It seems likely that in its operation as a movie house the balcony and gallery were simply not used, but when the house was renovated and renamed in 1935 the balcony was reopened. A more extensive remodeling took place in 1937, as records of the alterations planned in May through August that year exist in the papers of the Lexington architectural firm Frankel & Curtis.
According to a 2011 article in the La Crosse Tribune, Viroqua’s Vernon Square Shopping Center opened in 1991, and the three-screen cinema opened in 1996, in space vacated by an unsuccessful retail store.
The NRHP registration form for the Masonic Temple Building (PDF here) says that the Temple Theatre opened on July 1, 1922 under the management of local showman Ben C. Brown, who had first shown movies in Viroqua at the old Brown Opera House at 120-122 N. Main Street in 1908, and had later operated an Airdome, a storefront house called the Electric Theatre, and then in 1915 the Star Theatre, which was in a new building at 211 S. Main Street.
In 1931, the Masonic Lodge entered lease agreement with the Paramount-Publix theater chain, which remodeled the theater interior from its original Classical Revival style to the popular, modern Art Deco style, and installed a modern marquee, though the building’s exterior was otherwise unchanged, retaining the Classical Revival look it still has today. Having lost control of the Temple, Ben Brown responded by converting a garage on Court Street into the Vernon Theatre.
Neither the local Masonic lodge nor Paramount-Publix prospered in Viroqua in the early years of the depression, and by 1935 the Masons had lost their building and Paramount its lease on the theater. The building’s new owner, William Dyson, sold the upstairs lodge facilities back to the Masons, but retained ownership of the ground floor, leasing the theater to a local operator, though it was not Brown. The new operator, Jacob Eskin, refreshed the house and installed new seating with four more inches between rows.
By 1951, when Ben Brown celebrated his sixtieth anniversary in show business (he had started as a promoter of shows in the town’s Brown Opera House in 1891) he was once again a partner in the Temple Theatre.