What’s the opposite of your big screen, as seen from the couch, or a laptop (ipad?) in bed?  Think Radio City Music Hall. Think Grauman’s Chinese.
​
The movie palace was, arguably, invented in America. Where else would “palace” find itself appended to the synonym for (last century’s original technological obsession), the “moving picture?” (Possible answer, if I wanted to argue with myself: “in England, where they’re called “Picture Palaces.”) 

Movie palaces were ubiquitous by the time I came along, which explains why, in 1976, a hard-nosed crew of us enthusiasts fought so hard to keep the doors of The St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat Spanish Baroque confection in Staten Island, open for business. It was our birthright, we assumed, to watch movies in elegance on a giant screen; we’d grown up looking up, at “intermission” or before and after the main feature, at one splendid dome or another.  

In actuality, there are no real palaces in these United States, with a few exceptions — Vizcaya in Miami? Hearst Castle in California? The former home of the Archdiocese of New York, which now happens to be a hotel?The President lives in a house whose only notable attribute is its whiteness. Palaces–Buckingham, Windsor, the Doge’s domicile — are for princes or kings, and, in America, we’re not supposed to have a reigning monarch, or even a true aristocracy.

Raised in the 1950’s, I thought of our beloved Cincinnati movie palaces — the Grand, the RKO Albee, and, yes, the Palace (later the International 70), with their extravagant smoking and powder rooms, the Albee’s “hall of mirrors” (reminiscent of Versailles) and soaring domes, as — echoing the Communist rhetoric of our day–“people’s palaces.”  But in the land of free enterprise, they’d been built to lure the home-grown upper crust.

What was the first ever movie palace? Some say the Regent Theater (designed by the estimable Thomas Lamb,) which opened in NYC’s Harlem in 1913, followed almost immediately (1914) by Lamb’s million dollar Strand Theatre on Broadway — back when a million was a million. By 1929 there were already – springing up like so many elegant Chanterelles — roughly 21,000 movie palaces coast to coast. Lamb and his colleagues could hardly keep up.

When the San Francisco Fox opened in June of 1929, newspaper and magazine advertisements proclaimed, "No palace of Prince or Princess, no mansion of millionaire could offer the same pleasure, delight, and relaxation to those who seek surcease from the work-a-day world...You are the monarch while the play is on!"

The whole thing had really started as an attempt to make upscale opera crowds investigate movies, an experience that, prior to 1913, had consisted of sitting in “flea pits,” on wooden benches, while ushers waved lighted sticks of citronella (“punk”) to keep the insect population at bay. But as a business-school grad once confided, it’s not the “classes” but the “masses” you want to serve if you’re an entrepreneur, and serve the masses, the moguls and impresarios did, with enthusiasm. 
​
So, thanks to all this enterprise and the average person’s desire for a little glamor, we still have the palatial (Grauman’s) Egyptian, and Chinese theaters, New York’s United Palace (one of the original “wonder theaters”), and who could ignore five  “Palaces” still at this point listed as standing and operational? The Palace Theatre (Albany, New York), The Palace Theatre (Marion, Ohio), The Palace Theatre (Cleveland, Ohio) — aka Connor Palace, The  Loraine Palace Theatre, (Loraine, Ohio) and The Palace Theatre (Louiseville, Kentucky)? No doubt there are other unabashed palaces, so named, still open for business;  if there’s one I’ve ignored, please let me know...

Afterthought:
When it’s all finally over and we come out together into the sunshine, let’s go back into the shade together in the sanctuary of one or another elaborate dome and watch together in the dark.

Spotted recently by a friend, Thom Moon, in the Dayton Daily News (source: AP): “She was just like, ‘Mama, when this is over, can we go to the movies?’... She went through the whole process of going to the movies. She said, ‘We can get popcorn and each have our own drink and each get a candy.’”
“She” turns out to be five years old, but she could be me! Or just about anybody I know, with the possible exception of Trevor Noah, who admitted to Stephen Colbert that he actually likes being sequestered. Everyone else seems to miss being out in the world; in social media, “the movies” come up a lot in a fantasy sense of “what I’m gonna do when this is all over.” 

With all the pre-pandemic talk of nobody going out to catch the brief appearance of The Irishman at precious few actual theaters a few months back, and the current flap about how this enforced imprisonment at home will surely kill movie exhibition once and for all, it might be curtains for the theater business. Or is it? When our personal and very individual liberations finally do occur, popcorn in the dark with a safe six feet between viewers may well be the new obsession; you heard it here first.
Yes, and from someone who spent a year of her life running a movie palace, Staten Island’s St. George Theatre, back in 1976, when, believe me, amongst 2,672 seats there was likely to be at least six feet between scant moviegoers who showed up one week for John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King.  Here’s a backward glance:
 
There were movies that were right for a movie palace in an urban setting — and then there were the movies we wanted to show. Romantic entrepreneurs, we should have passed on The Man Who Would Be King.  John Huston’s adaptation of a story by Rudyard Kipling starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine was wrong, wrong, wrong in a neighborhood that craved Taxi Driver, Shaft, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We booked King anyway, an expensive mistake that cost us a nearly empty auditorium for a week — but gave me an afternoon.

In that year of trying to keep the St. George Theatre’s doors open, I seldom watched a whole movie. I caught glimpses of whatever was on screen, as I passed from my office to the restroom, the candy stand or the manager’s office. As I walked back and forth, I felt I had seen the movie, especially if it wasn’t very good. When it was good, I lingered for stretches by the concession stand with a small buttered popcorn.

The Man Who Would Be King was the exception. It was lush, a tale of two adventurers in search of treasure. The tones of the movie are reddish gold, they matched the theater itself, the brocade and gilded statuary, especially when the light from the film shone on all that gold leaf. The characters in Kipling’s story are eventually undone by their own greed and a hunger for power, something I could barely imagine, struggling as I was to pay our rent on the theater and our house. 

Two people bought tickets for the show. Counting me, that made three of us in a 2,672-seat theater — talk about social distancing! I settled into my perch in the empty balcony. I would never sit there again or feel that free again, as we slipped, one week at a time, through what was to be a disastrous year. But in my memory of that afternoon, I am completely happy. I ate my popcorn right down to the grannies at the bottom of the box. Huston’s adventure story was the movie for that moment in my life, filled with the right blend of desperation and bravado. 

Afterthoughts:
1. The movies as a business and pastime were only about ten years old the last time a pandemic ravaged America:

Yes, eventually, even somehow movie 
theaters.  Meanwhile it’s April, that time again. I never pass through this month without thinking about a certain Grand Opening, though it’s been almost half a century.

The 9th fell on Thursday last week — maybe nobody pays attention to days of the week right now – but forty-four years ago, in 1976, we did. We were counting: six days, five days, four, three, two, one, and then...blast off. It was, in fact, a Friday that year, April 9th, the day we opened our movie palace. 
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The 2672-seat St. George Theatre was ours, we’d rented it, a gilded slice of “Spanish Baroque” extravagance within sight and sound of New York Harbor in Staten Island. Blazing Saddles — only two years old — was the main feature, doubled with Woody Allen’s Bananas, an already ancient comedy. Every other movie we would show from that point on would open on a Wednesday — matinee day — that’s how the movie week typically began. But Friday was the best we could do for our first show:  it had taken us so long just to get the cobwebs out, the wall sconces bulbed, the carpets more or less scrubbed clean of the last proprietor’s soda syrup, to stock the booth with carbons for our (even then) antique carbon-arc projectors.  

What did it take to get a theater, especially that kind of theater, operational in under ten days? Every moment after we handed our first check to the landlord had a dollar sign attached to it, and showing movies was the only immediate way to recoup our considerable investment. The six of us who styled ourselves managers practically slept at the theater that week.The coffee machine hadn’t been installed yet, but it didn’t matter, we were running on adrenaline, hope, and pizza. 

The previous tenant had left in the dead of night, taking with him everything you’d need to start up a theater: tickets to fit the AutomaTicket machine in the box office, cleaning supplies, carbons, even light bulbs. It goes without saying that there were no food supplies, with the exception of some dirty popcorn cups we’d found in the closet of the concession stand. Much later, I learned that our predecessor had been re-using the cups after collecting them from the auditorium; the concession company kept a record of how many popcorns had been sold by counting fresh cups used, so re-using cups was a way of grabbing some unrecorded sales. Too bad the health department didn’t know...

Ever clean a movie palace? It took a small crew of us all Tuesday night to relieve the burgeoning mouse population of the spilled popcorn and other edibles the previous tenant had left behind.  As luck would have it — or maybe it was no coincidence at all — a traveling light-bulb salesman you may have read about in a recent post showed up on Wednesday afternoon to dazzle us with his display case full of incandescents. SATCO. I remember the name clearly: I wrote the installment-plan checks for some time. 

That same day three of us loaded a Volvo wagon to the roof with $181 worth of popcorn, oil, butter sauce, Good n Plenties, Reese Cups, Charleston Chews, Snickers, and the like. Then we stopped off at International Meat Market where Joe, our friend and local butcher, sold us, at no mark up, a case of Sabrett’s ball-park hotdogs and gave us the name and number of a small Italian bakery. Thereafter, every morning, whoever opened the theater’s red and gold doors would find inside a tall grocery bag filled with mini-Italian breads, each one slit down the side, ready to receive its hotdog. 

A proper concession stand ought to have its own soda-head, and a friend had a friend who knew a restaurant plumber. On Thursday he ran a line from the drinking fountain to the candy stand, no charge, as long as we bought the requisite canisters of Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, and Orange syrup from his brother-in-law for the rest of the year.

Gabe, the projectionist local 306 had assigned to the St. George, showed up on Thursday afternoon expecting two days back pay. The contract specified 7 days, including a Wednesday matinee, whether we were dark or on screen. Matinees would always lose money, but we’d always run them, since we had to pay a projection shift anyhow. Gabe was more or less a permanent fixture in the booth, having worked the St. George almost as long as I had been alive.

By Friday, opening day, the tickets we’d ordered still hadn’t arrived, but in a room off the mezzanine, we found a few old rolls and loaded the steel-plate ticket machine with them, red for ADULT, green for CHILD.

I was worried about money:  just ten days before we’d had $15,000 in the bank, and now we were down to $2000, enough to buy a car, but not enough to run a movie palace for much longer than a week.

5:45 PM, almost time to open. Our first customer, a tall woman in an Indian print skirt showed up, paid a buck fifty and presented her ticket to the usher, who tore it and handed her back the other half. At the concession stand she asked for a box of Good n’ Plenties and a small popcorn. It came to $1.15, and she laid two one dollar bills on the counter. side by side. I gave her back the eighty-five cents, and she disappeared into the darkness beyond the glass and mahogany that separated the lobby from the inner sanctum of the theater itself. I smoothed out her two bills in the wooden tray. Should we frame these? I wondered.  We’d been open for a minute and a half, and taken in two dollars and sixty-five cents, including her ticket and edibles. It was a lemonade-stand moment.

Five minutes passed. Dean, my partner and husband, asked me to hand him the newly-installed concession-stand phone.  “Are we on time?” he asked Gabe in the booth.

“Rollin’ at six, kid.”

Dean had intended to make a speech from the stage to the small group of people who’d, by this time, settled into their seats, but it was too late, it was almost showtime. The lights went down, and a scratchy "Coming Soon" bloomed on screen, followed by a couple of trailers. A speech might have puzzled the audience, or even annoyed them: it was a bigger moment for us than it was for them, who only wanted to see Blazing Saddles and eat whatever they’d bought, sitting together in our  extravagant dark. 

Afterthought:

​Paulie, one of the St. George’s original staffers, recalls the week before we opened, watching a trial Projection run, from the balcony:

“I had no idea what a carbon-arc projector was...A few of us heard they were going to test the projectors. We took a short break and settled in the balcony. The silver screen lit up, a huge adrenalin rush, our efforts coming to fruition, a couple minutes of pure excitement, and then the scene turned into molten Swiss cheese and settled to the bottom of the screen. Lights went dim. Wow!!!”  

What Paulie’s describing is, of course, the film burning through.  Carbon Arc is, after all, fire...

I’m home, are you?  Stir crazy, and longing to wander? Here’s my remedy: take a virtual walk — I recommend it. Yeah, you can look up any of a number of tours on the ‘net, but who needs that, when you have your own imagination?  If you’ve lived in your neighborhood any length of time, it can be interesting to see if you remember the shopfronts or houses in their correct order; how many have changed since you moved in? In my deeply urban Staten Island community, St. George, on the edge of New York Harbor, houses soon give way to shop fronts and public spaces. Let’s go walking.
After a steep descent from Fort Hill Circle, my street, studded with older Tudor and Dutch Colonial homes, I turn left, heading downhill for the harbor and the ferry.  

It’s all hills around here, kind of like a rough-edged San Francisco. Half a block, and we pass the Fort Place Deli, an institution in St. George. But when I moved in, almost fifty years ago, this squat red brick building housed an odd little insurance agency, with newspaper clippings taped to the windows: pictures of houses burned down or crashed cars, apparently someone’s idea of marketing. Women inside sat behind manual typewriters. Walking uphill at night alone in the dark in St. George was lonely and dangerous, but some time in the late seventies, the agency packed up its Royal typewriters and stole into the darkness, and the Fort Place Deli opened its door. Other than a place to buy beer or ice cream or a sandwich, the deli was a sanctuary, till ten every night, a place to duck in, just in case you needed to, a good thing, in a ragged ‘hood where muggings were on the rise.  

Now we’re facing the back wall of the St. George Theatre, the focus of this blog, a 2,672-seat house built for Vaudeville in 1929. Two tiny windows at the top of that back wall enclose the projection booth, its carbon arc projectors, if they still exist, silent hulks, though once they housed actual fire. When the single bulb that hung from the  booth’s ceiling finally burned out, three quarters of a year after we lost the theater, hardly anybody noticed, but I wept. 

Turning right, we pass the Brighton Heights Reformed Church, originally a landmarked Civil War-era white clapboard and brick construction with a copper steeple, but these days, after the 1996 fire that destroyed the building, a very useful if ugly brick structure, with a pre-fab steeple. It houses a vital soup kitchen, so I’ll stop complaining. I have my memories.

Turn left at the church, walk under the new ripple-front LED marquee, and we have arrived at the St. George Theatre. Much of the theater is, I’m grateful to say, just as it was, but a few things have changed. New gold doors have replaced the red-painted ones, a definite improvement. And then there’s the LED marquee.

How is it possible to miss the old one, which leaked so badly, leaving a rust stain on the sidewalk that turned to ice in winter and often caused, on the steep hill leading down to the ferry, a considerable walking hazard? I offer in my defense that I have some German blood, which predisposes me to nostalgia, probably why I miss letters on a track.

I dug into my blog files and found this post, from 2014; I offer it to conclude the virtual tour:
 
Aluminum Marquee Letters 10/1/14
I’m sitting in my car directly beneath the marquee of what once was our theater. Despite the fact that around fifteen years ago someone chose to cover the marquee — like a badly iced cake — in beige stucco. Although it’s been forty years, I can blink my eyes and see the steel tracks that used to run around three sides, and the erratically flickering St George Theater in curved neon centered above.
 
My original intent today was to get a cappuccino. The space to the right of the theater — a failing barbershop when the marquee still had its tracks — is now a coffee bar. I’m waiting in my car beneath a red NO PARKING ANYTIME sign, just long enough for the barista to make my double shot. When it’s ready, she gives me the signal. I dash in, slap a five dollar bill on the counter, grab my drink and run back to the car. I’m late to leave for my next appointment, but sitting beneath the marquee for even a brief time is a kind of transport, like falling down a mine-shaft in time. I sip my coffee and tumble. 
 
It’s 1976. Jim, a senior usher, is teetering on a 15-foot ladder on the uphill side of the marquee. A dangerous wind threatens him, as he tries to keep his balance while hanging that most fragile of items, black-painted aluminum marquee letters. It’s Tuesday night. A new movie starts on Wednesday. It’s Jim’s job to spell out,  The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, for all to see. It’s an impossibly long title. He has to substitute an upside-down M for the W, and two capital I’s for the L’s. We inherited our incomplete set of letters — and not much else — from the previous theater manager, who pulled out in the dead of night. At least he left us the means, more or less, to spell out the names of the movies that would break our hearts, week after week, failing, one title at a time, to fill our cavernous auditorium. A gust of wind causes the ladder to sway, and Jim drops a precious capital G. There is no sound quite like the sound of breaking cast aluminum, a surprisingly brittle material. Almost like glass but not quite. What’s a substitute for G? 
 
I shake myself back to the present, press the button that starts my post-millennial Volvo, and pull out from under the marquee’s shadow.
 
Afterthoughts:
I hope, reader, this finds you well, safe and at home.  Some time when it’s okay to do so, you might try walking in your own locale, if you’ve lived there longer than a few years, to see what the buildings are telling you to remember. Even in neighborhoods where there are few shops, you might be surprised what comes to mind -- neighbors who’ve moved on, for example, or buildings that were torn down. Meanwhile, do it virtually, maybe even using Google Street View,,,

Below are some comments from 2014; Paulie, who keeps in touch, worked on the theater staff. Dean, as you may remember, was and is my husband.

​Paulie
10/4/2014  5:00 am
For a moment I was in the car with you in front of the theater, I could see the ladder. The sidewalk in front of the theater was on a hill, making the right side of the marquee a much higher climb than the left. The ladder was on the right, a formidable height. A blonde high school kid was next to the ladder, he was quite energetic and a little nervous, as he steadied the ladder at it's base. The wind was blowing, black cast aluminum letters were being passed up the ladder and others were being passed back down. There were a lot of voices and then a quick yell to watch out, as the G came crashing down, some more yelling and voices, much louder this time, followed by a period of calm, I could hear the wind again. The high school kid was at the base of the ladder, steadying it, but cautiously looking up, there was an unusual movement above, the edge of a white panel popped out, the wind quickly gushed underneath extracting it from the marquee. Flipping erratically, the panel fell towards the ground, the high school kid moved quickly, but the edge of the panel caught him on his nose and mouth. There was a sudden pain in my upper lip, I couldn't help but look in the mirror, everything looked fine, good, I smiled. It was a slightly crooked smile, a smile that has brought unique character and many compliments to my life ever since that windy day. I am not sure what a substitute for G is, but after watching Kris Kristofferson and Sarah Miles in that film, I certainly figured out why that sailor fell from grace with sea.
 
Dean Thompson
10/7/2014  4:52 pm
Paulie I remember that night—you, the high school kid, racing in from the street and asking me for the keys to the letter room. 

"What happened? What broke?" I wondered.

"Jimmy dropped a G. The wind took it right out of his hands."

"There's only one more G, Paulie…"

I passed the keys to you, and you started to race to the end of the lobby. You then abruptly stopped, turned with that sly crooked grin and said, "Well, I guess this means we can never book King Kong, ya know?"

There are so many uses for a movie marquee; this one, featured on a morning news show, got my attention. Then Aladdin, the aqua neon offered up hopefully — this was a local theater, a place of dreams, perhaps even a palace, like the one the impoverished boy in the famous tale, finally inherits after defeating the evil sorcerer. 

As it turns out, I had a palace once, or rather, I (we) rented one, the 2,672-seat red and gold St. George Theatre in Staten Island, New York. It was a single screen movie house in 1976, and, though our dream didn’t last, it has managed somehow to generate almost as many tales as A Thousand and One Arabian Nights did. Closed or open, movie houses are all about tales and escape. We all need a little of that these days, so I offer the story of the light salesman, a genii, not unlike the one in the story of Aladdin. This guy could almost have come out of a lamp; he was that full of magic...

The St. George Theater under our command, had only been open about a week. Grosses for Blazing Saddles and Take the Money and Run, our first double feature, had depressed our booking agent, and still we thought we were doing pretty well. Some cash, any cash, seems good to newbie entrepreneurs.

Into the lobby strode a man wearing a hopeful smile and lugging a large sales case.

“I’d like to show you some light bulbs...” he began, extending his hand to Dean.

“We can’t buy that kind of thing door to door,” Dean countered, but somehow, the man had already made his way past the usher’s station to the candy stand. There, he  quickly unlatched the heavy four-sided sales case, covering the counter with every imaginable size, color and shape of lightbulb — flame-shaped, pencil-thin, clear with a glass rosebud in the center — each screwed into its own special socket. With a Robert Preston flourish, he pulled a cord from the side of the case, and gestured for someone to unplug the butter warmer.

Row by row the case came alive as he hit the switches; it was like watching E. Power Biggs play the pipe organ at the Fillmore East.

“These are for accents — and these... are long-lasting! These two lines are utility.” He paused a moment, not wanting to rush things. “Now these... are for your chandeliers and sconces!” He gestured approvingly at the three dark shapes looming above the lobby. 

It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that, before selling light-bulbs, he’d apprenticed with a hypnotist.

A group of us gathered, and someone came up with a notebook:
• 15 stained-glass exit signs, 1 bulb each
• 4 fire hose door signs, 2 bulbs
• chandelier in the outer lobby, 24 candles
• chandeliers in main lobby?  (we didn’t know what they contained, having never cranked them down)
• footlights, 24
• backstage lights, 7
• aisle lights (too numerous to count)
• 22 sconces
• statuary illumination?
• bulbs in dome? 

The list ended with the biggest question mark of all, the main chandelier, which, we imagined had at least 80 empty sockets, although we couldn’t figure out how — or if it was safe — to crank the thing down. There were niches and indentations with outlets we’d never dreamed of, which we found from time to time, crawling around the catwalk and in other out-of-the-way places, some with bulbs dating, perhaps to the second world war, rusted into their sockets.

Back at the candy stand the euphoric salesman slid his hand into the a crevice of the sales case and, with another flourish, withdrew a hand-held calculator, one of the first I’d ever seen. I wanted that too!
“It all comes to just $917.60!” he told us, beaming.

A full fifteen seconds passed. “We don’t have that much money,” Dean said.

“Oh...that’s okay, you can put it on time!”

So we did. Time was something we didn’t have much of either, but we didn’t know it yet.

How could we refuse him? — so earnest! — and his bulbs did make the theater a little less dusty and cave-like. By the following spring, the first of them had begun to burn out, but meanwhile, thanks to the genii/salesman, we had light.

Afterthought:
As for the theater named Aladdin that got me started on this reminiscence, there are two such listed in Cinema Treasures, one in Colorado, and the other, which is the one whose marquee picture matches the image I saw. It’s at 3017 Milwaukee Avenue in Portland, Oregon, and I applaud their message of solidarity.