Stony Brook Drive-In

Last season: 1986

thanks for the pics penway14, i’ll try and take some pics of what the land looks like now

Also hoping to get some more comments on the Lancaster downtown theaters…
I have not been able to find any photos of the Boyd and other theaters.

Wish I could join you too, but I’m in California. I remember seeing GODZILLA VS THE SMOG MONSTER at the Comet. It had a neat sign at the entrance too.

John S: Now that you mention it I think there was a roller rink at Playland. If you faced the property from the highway the miniature golf course and pool were on the left, and the rink was to the right. I think you drove in between them.

The golf course was right in front of the pool which, as I said, was uniquely elevated and shaped like a kind of oval or horseshoe-shaped bowl. Behind the pool there were grounds, mostly grassy lawn, for sunbathing.

There were large paintings of sea creatures on the bottom of the pool and there was a large slide to the right, a smaller children’s one on the left side.

I thought the whole complex was magical, the underwater windows on the dive area were fascinating.

Aside from Hershey Park, Playland was the closest you could come to Disneyland in Pennsylvania. I always looked forward to our trips down from Harrisburg.

John: That would have been the Comet. Never saw it myself so I’m not sure exactly where it was. A Lancaster native once told me it was where Kelly Cadillac is today, but that seems a little too far up the road. Any Lancastrians out there who know for sure?

In way of answer to a few questions:

John: I’m told a car dealership is on the former site of the Comet D-I, northwest of Lancaster off 283.

The Tanger Outlet Center is on the SkyVue site.

Nobody asked about this but cows graze on the site of the Columbia D-I. It is immediately adjacent to a farm, east of Columbia on 462. The site is no longer recognizable as the drive-in. That was a very well-attended D-I that got kicked off the land by the owner’s desire to build a shopping center, which for reasons unknown was never built. It was operating 5 or 6 months a year as recently as 5 years ago.

Ross: Playland in East York was long gone by the time I got to town but there was a huge old roller skating rink in the area I think you’re talking about. Was that part of Playland? The roller rink burned to the ground – leveled in about 20 minutes – in a spectacular fire one Sunday afternoon in the 1980s.

The Lincoln was pretty rural, all the way out in Thomasville, but the Stony Brook was just down the street from the apartment complex where I lived when I came to York. I could have walked there. East York became a very well-developed suburban area post-WWII, and East Market Street for the first mile or so past Mt. Zion Road. (Rt. 24) was a busy retail strip and is more so today. Drive-ins were traditionally built on cheap, outlying land accessible by good roads. The Lincoln was a prime example. How they got all that land in suburban East York to build a drive-in theater in 1950 I’ll never figure out. Perhaps they were lucky and beat the rush, or the original owners of the drive-in already owned the land. It was probably all farm land or woods at that time.

Thanks for all the info, John S. I know little about the York drive-ins, other than vague memories of attending them from time to time. I remember the Lincoln as being fairly rural at the time.
I also attended the Comet and one other drive-in in Lancaster.
Strange you should mention the “cannibalized” Stony Brook projection booth.
I’ve added three new photos including one of the very “no frills” projection building.
View link

Back in 1989, I was an “Arts & Leisure” writer for a local daily newspaper. I wrote an article about York-area drive-ins and the Lincoln in particular, as AMC had re-opened it for the summer after a two-year hiatus. I had to go look up that article to get some facts straight. AMC acquired the Budco theaters in January 1987 and closed most of Budco’s drive-ins, and there were many. As an AMC spokesman told me, they had no experience with drive-ins and considered them a waste of time. Both the Stony Brook and the Lincoln did not re-open in 1987. AMC did re-open the Columbia Drive-in, however, as that one was fairly close to their New Jersey district office and had always been successful. The guy who ran Columbia convinced them to re-open the Lincoln in 1989. They declined to re-open Stony Brook, I was told, because of the York 4 Cinema on the same property, and they didn’t want to compete with themselves. I attended a showing of “Pink Cadillac” at the Lincoln as part of writing the article and interviewing the people who worked there, as friendly and dedicated a group of people as I have ever met. Unfortunately, AMC did a lousy job of running and promoting the Lincoln. The lot was overgrown with weeds and the projectors each hit a different spot on the screen. AMC declined to re-open the Lincoln after that season, and it was left to rot for years. Stony Brook could never re-open, as AMC had, in their words, “cannibalized” the projection equipment for spare parts. That property sat there for years, turning into a veritable jungle of weeds and overgrowth. They just closed it and forgot about it. At least when the York 4 was running they kept the lot reasonably clean, but after that, forget it. Too bad.

Opened in 1950. Closed in 1986. Co-owned with the Lincoln Drive-in, west of York on Rt. 30 in Thomasville. Like the Lincoln, open year-round during its heyday, running first-run movies. Stony Brook, Lincoln and the hard-top HiWay eventually came into the Budco fold, which also operated the York Cinema next to the Stony Brook property. When I moved to York in 1975, the York Cinema was one large theater, which was then twinned, and two more screens were added by the late 70s. Budco closed Stony Brook at the end of the 1986 season; Lincoln around the same time. AMC acquired Budco and re-opened the Lincoln for one season around 1990, using equipment that had been removed from Stony Brook. AMC closed the York Cinema in the late 90s and the property sat there declining for close to a decade before a developer leveled it all for a shopping center and condos, both of which sit where the drive-in used to be, on a new street called Cinema Drive. Ironic, since there is no longer a cinema located there. The last movie I saw at the Stony Brook: “Purple Rain.”

Great pictures,Penway14.Here are some more facts from 1956 Almanac.It parked 900 cars making it a huge Drive-in.And was owned in the late fifties by V.Smith. Who owned a few Drive-ins in Pennsylvania.