Something old, something new, something borrowed...forget something blue. But old theaters like young brides need a little of each of the previous. By their very nature, movie palaces are chock full of ancient curtains, paintings, statuary, wrought-iron, fountains, original stained glass exit signs, covering amply the “old” requirement. Over time, stuff has probably been broken or  stolen or sold off, by one or another desperate operator, so when the “Committee to Save...” takes over, the new and the borrowed come into play. 

In 1976, as movie theater operators, we were fortunate to be running a palace that was largely intact. Okay, so the organ was long gone to a pizza parlor in Texas, sold off for parts by a short-sighted building owner; one lone torchere lamp with a chipped alabaster shade and broken foot was hiding in the custodian’s closet. Some hasty research revealed there had been twenty of these lamps, all sold off, with one wounded soldier remaining. We didn’t own the St. George, so never would have thought to replace nineteen lamps; but there were some broken stained-glass items, among them a “Fire Hose” door that sheltered one of the six New York City Fire Code-approved cloth hoses in our auditorium. Whether any of these actually worked and could put out a fire, nobody knew, but somehow it seemed important to replace the decorative door for the hose in the alcove, back of the orchestra. The story of what became of this item I’ll save for later. Meanwhile, here are a few case histories of theater organs, those most-borrowed (or bought or stolen) of movie palace artifacts. Like great coral reefs, theater organs have a life of their own, and are so much more than a sum of their parts.

What’s a “Wonder Morton?” Well, if you’ve heard of New York’s five Wonder Theaters, all built by Loews in the 1920’s, and each with a Morton “Wonder Organ,” you know the answer. Those theaters include: 
The Jersey City in Jersey City, The Paradise in the Bronx, The United Palace of Cultural Arts in Washington Heights (formerly Loews 175th Street), The Valencia in Queens, and The Kings in Brooklyn. 

To anyone familiar with the delicacy and varying fates of theater organs, it’s surprising to learn that any theater has its original instrument intact.  From the above list, only the United Palace has this distinction, thanks to the fact that it went directly from movie palace to church (Reverend Ike’s) in the seventies. The reverend was a wealthy guy who saw to it things stayed the way they were, or improved. Accordingly, the UPCA, now a mixed-use house that includes worship, movies, concerts and all manner of events under its gleaming dome, is in the process of restoring its original house organ, which was rendered unplayable when a lighting grid fell on it. Meanwhile...

What happened to the other four Mortons?

The Valencia in Queens is, like the United Palace, a church, but, unlike that palace, hardly wealthy. Despite the fact that The Tabernacle of Prayer for All People has kept the interior of the Valencia painted (if not the original colors), the organ which was once the theater’s glory, has had a long journey, and does not reside in its original alcove, hence the sixth theater mentioned in today’s title. Acquired by Peter Schaeble in 1965, the organ was built into an underground studio at his home in Rosedale, Long Island, where it apparently spent several decades, leaving the Schaeble family for good in 1996. At that point, it became the property of one Jasper Sanfilippo of Barrington Hills, Illinois,  but idled its pipes in storage, before finding its final home, the Balboa Theatre, in San Diego, Ca., where it currently plays on. The Valencia Morgan is definitely “something old,” and, in a way, has been “borrowed,” theater to theater.
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The Jersey City, like so many palaces, had its hard times, saved by a vigilant group, The Friends of the Loews, beginning in 1993. Somehow or another, its Wonder Organ had already left the premises, but no problem; here’s where the borrowing comes in. The Paradise in the Bronx, a sister Wonder Theater, had originally sold off its instrument, with parts ending up in various places, some as far off as Canada. Those parts were rounded up by an enthusiast, Bob Balfour and all was donated to the Garden State Theatre Organ Society, which happily installed the instrument at the Jersey City, where it plays on to this day. That’s beyond a borrow, it’s an incarnation!  

Though I haven’t yet been to the Jersey City, Robert Endres, our friend and unofficial Projection Historian, tells me a colleague of his plays that instrument on certain weekends to rave crowds. Winter’s past, and I’m on it soon, promising a story.

The (Bronx) Paradise is at least standing and no longer ‘plexed. After some rough trade, it was restored and opened briefly as a performance center, but currently serves as the home of World Changers Church, under the aegis of a televangelist, Creslo Dollar, who works in the mold of Reverend Ike. Good news for the Paradise: the theater is occupied, so restoration efforts will be preserved, and, with luck, landmark status will protect this Eberson (Italian Baroque Garden) atmospheric. Sadly the theater has no organ, but there is some solace in knowing its original instrument is only a few hours south, in Jersey City...

Which leaves us at last, under the sweeping newly restored marquee of Loews Kings, (The Kings) on Flatbush Avenue, in Brooklyn. Sadly, there is no working Wonder Organ left there, though its original console is on display in the lobby. The story of the organ’s travels is too lengthy for this post, but you can read all about it and more about the other New York Wonder Organs in an excellent post by the Garden State Theatre Organ Society Right now, the organ chambers at The Kings are filled with HVAC and lighting equipment. Several very new things have, for the time, replaced a very old treasure.

Afterthoughts:
1. I promised to fill you in on what became of the fire hose door from the St. George Theatre.We had ordered a stained-glass replica of the broken door from a local artisan, who ended up donating his work (we were too poor to pay for it) in hopes that, when the door was installed, we’d put a small sign on it with his name; but that never came to be. We went out of business in 1977, parting with a hostile landlord.The two stained glass doors, one original but cracked, one an exact replica, remained in the basement of our house for some time. The theater was closed and would, we were sure, be torn down. One day, while moving some paint cans around the furnace room, I accidentally tripped, and, sadly, both doors were broken. So to something old and something new, you could add something lost. 

2. Under the subject of “something lost,” how about the Albee Theatre in downtown Cincinnati, which sat on movie palace death row until 1977, the same year we left the St. George? Several things rescued from the Albee happen to survive in Columbus, just a few hours north. I have always meant to drive to Columbus and visit them, but meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from a letter to the Cincinnati Enquirer, dated November 19, 1978:

It is not surprising that a lifelong Cincinnatian should have the I’ve-been-here-before feeling when he, for the first time, steps through the heavy, ornate brass doors of Ohio’s official theater in Columbus.
It is called Ohio Theater and is located directly south and across the street from the Capitol building. The feeling of familiarity is bona fide. Those beautiful doors once graced Cincinnati’s late, lamented Albee Theater, which was zapped from Fountain Square in the name of progress. Additionally, inside near the doors are two heavy brass “ticket posts” in which ticket-takers place stubs. Those, too, came from the Albee. There is more. In the upstairs foyer are two ornate, wrought-iron benches with brilliant red velvet seats – also from Cincinnati’s historical show house.

“All of those things came here from Cincinnati after the last showing at the Albee,” explained Don Streibig, the busy and vigorous manager of the Columbus theater.

Life goes on, but theaters are eternal.

3. I had originally intended to mention chandeliers as an interesting case of theater artifacts that are borrowed or exchanged, but this post grew into one focused on theater organs.  Still, there’s always another week, and I may explore chandeliers as a subject in and of themselves...If, by some chance, you remember a favorite theater chandelier, let me know in “comments”...

I’m fixated on the word ODEON. You’re likely to have seen it on some or another marquee. The word sounds Greek, and it is:back in sword and sandal days, an odeon was a space dedicated to sports, singing, or poetry (think “ode”); not quite a theater, but almost. Greek theaters were roofless, but odeons were enclosed, and some of the roofs were pretty fancy, supported often by the masts of ships sunk in battle, or elaborately carved beams.The most magnificent odeon in all of Greece is rumored to have been the Odeon of Herodes Atticus on the southwest cliff of the Acropolis at Athens.  Built around 160 A.D, it held 4500/5500 patrons, under a ceiling constructed of beautifully carved beams, actual cedars of Lebanon, and was elaborately decorated with various works of art.

Sounds kind of over-the-top, like a movie palace...!

As you know from reading this blog, I have a mystical link to such a palace, a 2,672-seat Spanish Baroque house, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, which I had a hand in running, in 1976. The word ODEON appears nowhere on that theater’s marquee, but the St. George does have a soaring dome, and, like the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, our palace has statuary, paintings (of bullfighters and senoritas), and elaborate carvings. The Athens venue seated nearly twice as many spectators, almost as many as Radio City Music Hall, way before there were microphones. The acoustics must have been awesome. 

The first odeons on the American continent happen to have been sad little affairs, “nickelodeons,” store-front theaters that cost only five cents, with rude wooden benches, seating a small number of people. There was an Odeon worthy of the name on 145th Street in NYC, a Thomas Lamb theater,  (listed as a “negro” theater as late as 1955). But the name Odeon never really caught on in America. There were, to my knowledge, no theaters named Odeon in my hometown, Cincinnati, and not many in the rest of the U.S. of A. In fact, of 256 theaters with that name that are standing and, in some sense, open worldwide, only around four are in the U.S.

Hopping the pond, you’ll find the reverse: over there the name is something like Loew’s or Fox, and you could say there is something very much in the name ODEON in Leeds, Leicester, Portsmouth, Surbiton, and a number of locales. in the UK and Europe. Oscar Deutsch, who scattered Odeons all over the English landscape, was certainly off the same bolt of theater tapestry as Loew, Fox, Graumann, Pantages and other U.S. moguls. His first theater in what was then the town of Brierley Hill astounded the local residents on opening night in 1928, but frightened them too: they had to be assured the balcony of this grand theater would actually hold their weight. Like many theaters of the day, the Brierley Hill sported a sawtooth motif borrowed from ancient Egypt — an architectural style reminiscent of Graumann's Egyptian, echoing the 1922 discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun.

There were some 257 theaters in the Brit Odeon chain, and perhaps what distinguishes them is the fact of their existence in a very industrial landscape, with an eye to details that would survive that landscape. What poet William Blake called “the dark satanic mills” had had a lasting effect on the  towns Oscar Deutsch traveled through. Deutsch was a blue collar lad himself — son of Birmingham scrap-dealing immigrant parents from Hungary — so he knew his theaters had to withstand pollution of various kinds. Accordingly, he utilized various materials that would resist smudging, such as faience. with rounded Deco corners, presumably for easy cleaning. These  “picture palaces,” as they’re called in the UK, reflect a variety of styles, from Assyrian/Egyptian to Art Deco and Moorish. 

The second theater Deutsch opened, and the first to actually bear the Odeon name was 
in Perry Barr, a suburb of Birmingham. The name Odeon had been a quick choice, suggested by an employee returning from a vacation in Greece. Certain representatives of the chain over the years claimed it as an acronym for Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation, and, who knows, some people probably believed that! There might have been even more Odeon picture palaces, if Deutsch hadn’t died of liver cancer in 1941. Then, so true of chains everywhere, the Odeon family of theaters went through a series of owners. In the bad old seventies, when so many palaces and neighborhood theaters were demolished here, almost half the Odeon chain went down. It’s then owner, aptly named Rank Leisure, fought like Ebenezer Scrooge for their rights of demolition. 

Much of this info comes from an excellent if sad article in The Guardian, “Closing Credits: the Battle to Save 1930s Odeon Cinemas,” For me as an American movie palace enthusiast, reading about the fall of the Odeons is a Ground Hog’s Day experience, which is to say, Deja Vu: this cinema’s turned into a Bingo Hall, that one’s a supermarket, or car park, or Jehovah’s Witness Hall — just like here, where churches, warehouses, storage facilities, and even basketball arenas house the remains of what Ben M. Hall referred to as, The Best Remaining Seats. 

The name Odeon still survives in what’s left of the original chain, a list added to, with theater acquisitions all over Europe. These days the whole kit and caboodle belongs to AMC. Well alright, the name persists, if referring largely to ‘plexes and the like, so, I agree with Juliet (Act 2, Scene 2)

What’s in a name? 
 
The rest of her speech — A rose by any other name would smell as sweet — happens to remind me of its inverse, just how much the destruction of gorgeous old picture palaces really stinks. 
. 
Afterthoughts:
1. In some respect, I think we fare better on this side of the Atlantic, when it comes to saving palaces; so many, like my own St. George Theatre, have been rescued by local groups of entrepreneurs or fans or simply determined individuals. For an inspiring example, read why Marcus Loew was, after all, right!  

2. The Odeon of Herodes Atticus, mentioned at the beginning of this post, rocks again — has for several decades, as a matter of fact. It was revived as a performance space in 1950. Check out the above link for a list of people who’ve held forth there including among hundreds of performers, Maria Callas, the Bolshoi and Sting.  

3. Read this fascinating blog on the deaths of so many of Deutsch’s Odeons.  
 
4. Other “What’s in a Name?” posts on different common theater monikers:
What's in a (Theater) Name? "Roxy" and Its Evolution
and
Odeon Theatre, Tucumcari NM  
Odeon Theatre, Mason TX
Odeon Theatre, Glenwood Springs CO

On December 26, 1933, The Staten Island Advance ran an article headlined, “Actors Robbed at St. George Theatre”  “...the robberies must have been committed between 9 and 10 P.M., while ... vaudeville was in progress. The thief is believed to have calmly walked in the stage door and entered in turn each of the dressing rooms being used by the artists.” Performers’ wallets, handbags and jewelry were apparently never recovered.
 
Those dressing rooms were stage left; I remember them well, though by the time I saw them, they were strewn with rubble. The St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace I (and some other unlikely entrepreneurs) took a hand in running in 1976, was built for Vaudeville every bit as much as for movies.  

Not every surviving movie palace had this dual purpose, and the difference usually shows in the acoustics. The St. George is a “stacked” house, with acoustics so “sweet” you can stand center stage without a mic and be heard in the last row of the upper balcony, sans echo. 

Sweet though the space is and was for live presentations of various kinds, by 1929, when our theater opened, the actors, mimes, comics, trained animals, jugglers, and magicians who might once have been the main show had already become a shabby and depleted lot. The great Vaudeville circuits had been broken up by then, and it was movies, the talkies, everyone wanted to see. Ironically, the robbers chronicled by the local paper probably didn’t get much of a haul from down-at-heels actors that chilly night. 

Vaudeville had had a good long run. Orpheus, a musical demi-god in Greek mythology, had kindly lent his name to the Orpheum Vaudeville Circuit. Essentially founded in 1886, it was a West Coast/Midwest enterprise initially, tremendously successful until “picture shows” finally kidnapped and hauled away America’s heart. There were 45 theaters in the Orpheum Circuit by1920 (after the smaller Vaudeville circuits and East Coast and West Coast circuits had combined), down from several hundred the decade before. Live shows of fourteen or fifteen acts a night had been reduced to seven or eight, just enough to window-dress whatever moving picture the house had to offer up. 

One more circuit merger formed KAO, Keith-Albee Orpheum, offsetting the fact that the movie business kept grabbing more and more slices of the audience pie. Then, in 1927, a snake-in-the-grass named Joseph Kennedy (yes, that Joe Kennedy, a Prohibition rum-runner and the daddy of future prez, JFK) pulled a slick one. Joe is known in some circles as “the man who killed Vaudeville,” and here’s how he did it; Kennedy managed to get a majority of KAO, which he promptly sold to his buddy David Sarnoff who formed RKO, (Radio/Keith/Orpheum), a company devoted entirely to the movies. Kennedy then got the sadistic pleasure of firing the head of KAO, Edward Albee (the “A” in KAO, aka “Mr Vaudeville”) telling him, “You’re washed up, Ed. You’re through.” 

There’s no business like show business.

It’s tempting to feel sorry for Albee, but let’s not forget he got his start palming tickets at a circus to which he’d run away as a young man, going on to join B.F. Keith at his less-than elegant Gaiety, a “dime museum” in Boston, which displayed such delights as Baby Alice, a dead premature infant, and a chicken “with a human face.” Using, at the outset, pirated versions of Gilbert and Sullivan. Keith and Albee left the dime museum business and went on to form the beginnings of what would eventually become KAO, with Albee the engine of the enterprise.

Two years after Kennedy told him he was “...finished,” Albee died, but he was hardly a broken man. He expired at The Breakers in Palm Beach, leaving an estate valued at two million dollars (nearly thirty million by today’s standards).  

By the time we came along in 1976, the St. George’s stage may have been vacant, its dressing rooms filled with rubble, its copious fly loft devoid of all but a dress curtain and an asbestos fire curtain; the organ had been sold off for parts to a pizza parlor in Texas, and the orchestra pit stank of urine; but the acoustics were, and are to this very day, impeccable. 

From the vantage point of 2019, the Twenties are just about a century behind us, though in 1976, that gap felt like the half century it was. Ghosts of the actors whose purses were stolen have no doubt finally vanished, though in my time the dressing rooms seemed completely haunted. Sly Stone, the only live act of any stature we managed to present at the St. George, inhabited a hastily-cleaned dressing room briefly. He was, of course, in an altered state, but that’s another story, part of the book this blog was built to support; you’ll read about it in due time. 

Afterthoughts:

1. Isn’t it strange and wonderful that the new model of business for movie palaces and 19th century theaters that have survived is a return to live theater?  Not exactly Vaudeville, the St. George and other palaces support themselves these days on a variety of entertainments, from Doo-wop to Asian circuses. The dressing rooms are full again!
2. The relationship between Vaudeville and the movies may be the subject of another post, but suffice it meanwhile to say that an amazing string of stars got their start playing the circuits: Fred Astaire (as part of an act that included his sister), Burns and Allen, W.C. Fields, Mickey Rooney, Mae West, Jelly Roll Morton, to name a few. 
3. Edward F. Albee's grandson by adoption was the playwright, Edward Albee.

 

Once a week, back in the nineteen eighties, I had a good thing going that involved the Gramercy Theatre. This will definitely reveal my age, but hey, by now you’ve probably done the math, since I keep talking about running a movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, for one year, 1976.... Anyhow, some nine years after Dean and I bombed out as theater operators at our 2672-seat movie palace, I found myself working as a cook, going to school and, on Wednesday afternoons, seeing a psychotherapist on 23rd Street; I needed her, after our spectacular failure, and while I was at it, there were some other issues. Therapy was scary, useful, but depressing, if not without its reward. You see, there just happened to be movie theaters all up and down West 23rd Street in those days, and, thanks to Local 306 — the union that had a lock on projectionists’ contracts in all five boroughs of NYC — Wednesday matinees were everywhere. As an ex-theater operator, I knew all about the matinee shift, that usually sold only fifteen or twenty tickets max; you actually lost money, but the projectionist was getting paid anyhow, so you opened. Wednesdays in the mid-eighties found me, oftener than not, at the Gramercy, a single-screen house, alone in the dark with popcorn, keeping the faith with what I called the “after therapy movie.” 

Far as I can figure, I invented this institution, which died when I stopped seeing my therapist, Leonora. I was learning a lot about my mother and boundaries, and what the weak points were in my marriage; but I was also learning it’s alright to go to the movies alone.

I’d been brought up, you see, to think of movies as something social: a date, double or otherwise; lunch and a movie with a friend in downtown Cincinnati, perhaps at the Albee, to see Cleopatra; a carload of folks at the Oakley Drive-In to witness The Day the Earth Stood Still. With the exception of when your sister, who worked the concession stand at the Mt. Lookout, got you in for free, with unlimited refills on popcorn, in the Midwest of my childhood, you just didn’t go to the movies alone.
This impression had been reinforced the year we ran the St. George. Mostly our patrons were roving gangs of kids, hoping to pass for adults so they could see Taxi Driver, or, the other ruse, longing to pass as children and pay just ninety cents. Dates came of course — and it didn’t matter that our balcony generally wasn’t open, sometimes they snuck up there anyhow — and if they didn’t, there were two thousand seats on the ground floor, so if you wanted to blow some weed and get it on, you could guarantee several unoccupied rows between you and the rest of the crowd. 

There were some solitary exceptions, people who came in and bought that one lonely ticket, but they were generally eccentric. Old Doctor Oppenheim, a real MD, retired, lived in the apartments just up the hill. Using her market cart as a walker, on Wednesday afternoon she made her way downhill and under the marquee, regardless of what we were showing. All she really wanted to do was buy one of our exquisite premium hotdogs (all beef, Kosher, with dijon mustard on a real hand-made Italian bread). Usually, she just bought the dog and chatted with me on the other side of the box office cage; sometimes, rarely, she’d go in past the mahogany pillars and sit in the dark alone. Then there was the jazzman; I’ve described him before, a retired (sax player? bassist?) who dressed each Wednesday in some or another spangled suit (gold lame, shimmery scarlet, sparkly green, silver) then bought a ticket to the movie, and of course, a hot dog. He’d watch the movie through the glass that divided the theater from the lobby, all the time mumbling the names of women we presumed to have been his lovers.
 
Desperate for revenue, we ran a soft-porn triple feature once (Love under 17, The Sensuous Teenager, and Love times Three), and suddenly the whole auditorium was filled with solitary men of a ragged sort. Clean up afterwards wasn’t cheap or pretty, though it wasn’t anything like what the Variety in Manhattan must have been putting up with, or certain of the Times Square houses we occasionally borrowed projection supplies from. 

It wasn’t until the mid-eighties that I discovered that other kind of solitary movie-goer, more common on the Manhattan side of New York Harbor, the discerning movie buff, reading The New York Review of Books, a coffee in hand. I don’t suppose any of these Wednesday afternoon folks were refugees from psychotherapy like me, but I’ll never know for sure. Like our St. George in the seventies, the Gramercy was a third-run house, which had somehow recovered by the mid-eighties, having been bought by City Cinemas and turned into a very successful art theater. So those people I suspected of being reviewers might just have been Vincent Canby or some other rare bird.

The best movie I ever saw after therapy, and one of the best movies I ever saw period (wow am I glad it entered my psyche from a large pristine movie screen) was Fanny and Alexander by Ingmar Bergman. I cried all the way through, in part because, in therapy, I had just revisited my own childhood, and because Bergman was a contemporary of my then-newly-deceased mother, whose memories of growing up in the early part of the twentieth century included such things as magic lanterns, those precursors of cinema, one of which is featured movingly in the film.

I am grateful to the movies all through my life, for having given me the strength to go on when things were terrifying and for catapulting me out of unendurable reality. Other people have had their churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, shrines, sweat lodges; but I have had movie theaters, many of them more sumptuous than the holiest of houses. 

It’s hard now that the experience of moving pictures, cinema, what-have-you, is relegated, more often than not, to a stack of multiplex shoe-boxes, or to the big screen in your den or a laptop, or, worse, an iphone. 

 "Whither has fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”  Wordsworth gets the last say.

Afterthought 1: 
Speaking of churches and the like, “High Church” is what we used to call Radio City Music Hall, back when we were theater operators. We visited periodically, privileged to use the employees’ entrance, where we met our friend, Robert Endres, then the head projectionist of the place. You could have put several St. George theaters in the music hall... 

Afterthought 2:
Speaking of the still-much-discussed taboo concerning going to movies alone, get a load of numbers 5,7,8 and especially 12, in Buzzfeed’s list of reasons to overcome that taboo.