Midtown Theatre
270 Dauphin Street,
Mobile,
AL
36603
270 Dauphin Street,
Mobile,
AL
36603
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The January 13, 1940 issue of Boxoffice listed the Crown Theatre as one of three downtown Mobile houses then being operated by the Saenger Theatres Corporation. The other two were the Empire and the Saenger.
Needs to be listed as closed.
One of Charles King’s family told me once that it was called The Crown because every king needed a crown. in the late ‘60s throughout the '70s this was The Midtown Cinema, and they showed adult films. It had been changed quite a bit by then, but one of the renovations in recent years tried to restore it to an appearance closer to the photo above.
This is too bad for such a nice old theater.
While this building was used as a club called The Crown at the turn of the 21st century, before renaming itself as Atlantis, there was an adult theater accessible from the parking lot in the back. I don’t know the size of the screen and room, as I only heard about it, but it could not have been too large because the dance club occupied a significant amount of space.
Now the Xcite Pool Hall and Lounge.
The Midtown theater is closed. It was replaced by The Crown(nightclub) then Atlantis (nightclub) and a few other nightclub which are all closed also. The building is currently empty but I was there today and it appears they are painting it so something show be being planned but it will not be a theater.
When Google’s camera car went by in 2007, the Midtown Theatre building was sporting the signage of Atlantis, a night club that was closed in 2011. I’ve been unable to discover if the building has since been reoccupied, but it might be an establishment called the Sports Bar & Grill, unless the multiple search results are a bunch of old pages from before it became the Atlantis (somebody should come up with a way of cleaning the Internet.)
The ornate facade of the building is largely unchanged from the way it looked in this 1920 photo of the Crown Theatre from the Erik Overbey collection at the University of South Alabama.
From the Mobile Press-Register of February 23, 1911: “The opening of the New Crown Theatre last night was a conspicuous event in the history of Mobile amusements. When the doors of the beautiful new edifice located on Dauphin between Jackson and Joachim streets, were thrown open to the public, the people of Mobile were permitted for the first time to enjoy a moving picture performance in a building especially constructed for that purpose — beautiful, sanitary and refined in appearance.”
It is obvious that by 1988, it was hardly beautiful any more and no doubt something less than sanitary and refined.