San Carlino Theatre

857 Grand Avenue,
New Haven, CT 06511

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Additional Info

Functions: Church, Retail

Previous Names: Star Theatre, Strand Theatre, Apollo Theatre

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The San Carlino Theatre was opened prior to 1914 (possibly prior to 1909). By 1915 it had been renamed Strand Theatre. This building is three stories and is now a Pentecostal Church (Manantial De Vida). The bottom is retail and the top two floors have long windows on each level at each end with a small windown in the center with a raised pilaster on each side of the middle window. For lack of a better architectural term), there are squiggly plaster lines on each side of each pilaster.

The side is sloped with mini-pilasters and there’s an L-wing to the left in yellow brick. The right side is grey brick and there’s a staircase leading up to a locked and rusted door. In the back is lots of ivy and basement steps that I didn’t have time to explore.

Contributed by Dave Bonan

Recent comments (view all 1 comments)

Joe Vogel
Joe Vogel on November 4, 2018 at 2:59 pm

The San Carlino was a fairly old theater. It was listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. Biographies of opera singer Rosa Ponselle note that she gave some of her earliest public performances at the San Carlino, around 1914, when she was still a teenager. In an interview she described the San Carlino as “… a full-sized theater….nearly a thousand seats, counting the balcony and the boxes. It had a pretty large stage, and there was also an orchestra pit.” It was operated by a Mr. Richard T. Halliwell, who also had smaller theaters in Meriden and Ansonia.

The house had been renamed the Strand by 1915, when the July 10 issue of Motion Picture Newsnoted its recent closing. A notice of an open plumbing contract at the “Carlino” Theatre in New Haven ran in the October 2, 1909 issue of The Metal Worker, Plumber and Steam Fitter, so that might have been when the theater was built, though it might also have been only some repair work or remodeling going on. The house must have been in existence by 1909, though.

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