If you missed last week’s post: It’s end-of-August hot in St. George, Staten Island, my neighborhood, where the St. George Theatre (a 2,672-seat movie palace I ran with a group of brave entrepreneurs in 1976) still stands, within walking distance of New York Harbor. I‘ve stayed pretty close to home this summer, but in my imagination I can go anywhere, so I’ve hit the virtual road: Chicago and parts west.

​Last week I toured the Chicago Theatre, a 3500-seat Versailles-tinged Rapp & Rapp palace. Then, after renting a car, I made my way to the marker that indicates the start of a storied highway, old Route 66. To remind you just why I’m taking this virtual journey, you have to know how mythic that road is. Its signature song, written by Bobby Troupe, but made famous by Nat King Cole, contains an itinerary thousands of pilgrims have already followed, even though the Mother Road, as it’s sometimes called, doesn’t exist anymore as part of the highway system. No problem: the National Parks Service, thanks to an act of Congress, is in charge of preserving what they call “the historic Route 66 corridor,” and if you ever plan to motor west yourself, they’ve got plenty of info. The parks service wants you to know about national parks along the way, but I’m interested in old movie theaters, especially palaces, in whatever condition I may find them.

After Chi-town I made a virtual detour in Springfield (not part of the song lyric) at the Route 66 Drive-In... Next stop, St. Louis, where I toured the “fabulous” St Louis Fox, a 4,500-seat Siamese/Byzantine theater, restored to all its 1929 glory. Now you’re all caught up!

I’m cruisin’ into Joplin, Mo., eager to see the Ampersand Sculpture – joys of the road! The sculpture is the logo of Kum & Go, said to be one of the nation’s largest convenience store chains, certainly the one with the oddest name! Written on the ampersand’s surface are graffiti referencing things Joplin’s famous for: Route 66, of course, and those heroes of Joplin lore, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, whose apartment above a garage was their hide-out while they robbed various Joplin stores and banks. Their stay didn't end well, involving a shoot-out with the cops. It still exists, having seen service recently as a B&B.

Unfortunately theater preservation has not been Joplin’s long suit, but the magnificent Fox at  415 South Main Street, happily still survives, as a church and a little bit more. A mission-style exterior reveals an opulent auditorium, originally capable of housing 1,179 worshippers (or patrons). It’s landmarked, and well cared for by the Central Assembly Christian Life Center, a congregation that cherishes the theater just the way it always was. (Who knows if older church members recall seeing the movie Bonnie and Clyde at the Fox?) According to Gary Shaw,  Joplin’s Mayor, who is also involved with the church, “I remember hearing someone say that these buildings like the old Fox are national treasures...that actually belong to the community...the owners are just caretakers.” I like that! The Fox’s primary role these days is as a sanctuary, but Central Christian has maintained the chairs, carpet, ticket booth, and tapestries. Movies are shown occasionally, and the Fox, like my beloved St. George and many other movie palaces, provides a stage for graduations, weddings and other cultural events. So whether you just drive down Main Street and peek in the door or get lucky and arrive when there’s a movie showing, know that the Fox is standing, in pristine condition, and loved. A lot of other theaters haven’t been as lucky. 
            
Now you go through St. Louis,
Joplin, Missouri,       
And Oklahoma City is mighty pretty.

Oklahoma City was settled in a single day, specifically April 22, 1889. Ten thousand settlers, eager for the land-grab (of former Indian lands) arrived in wagons, on horses, mules, and bicycles, and any other form of conveyance an eager prospective landowner could propel from the start line of the race to a piece of property on which a claim could be staked. The land in question went from “a scrubby patch of grassy prairie,” according to Sam Anderson (author, Boom Town) to a city almost overnight. This, he thinks, may partially explain why O.K.C. as natives call it, is so eager to transform itself in the way of an ideal city. Whatever locals do, they do with enthusiasm: urban renewal in the 1950’s took most of the city’s downtown by storm, leaving ghosts of some magnificent movie theaters. Gone are: the State, the Airline Drive-In, and the Midwest Theatre. 

​Since the State would have been a theater well worth visiting on this trip west, I’ll content myself with quoting from its Cinema Treasures entry:

Architect W.T Vahlberg designed the State Theatre as Streamline/Moderne. At the far end of a Hollywood chic lobby was a dramatic, sunken lounge.

The auditorium carried a rust colour scheme, featuring stadium style seating with gradual floor rake that became quite steep near the rear of the house, resulting in excellent sight lines. Gorgeous, heavy drapes adorned a gracefully curved screen. Indirect lighting throughout the interior bathed the space in soft hues.

Shortsighted urban development caused the State Theatre to be razed in 1971, a sad loss to downtown Oklahoma City.
 
Only the Centre Theatre, 1600 seats, which opened in 1947, featuring James Stewart in Magic Town, survives in any true sense. It was closed on April 30, 1976, right smack in the middle of the bad old seventies, when theaters were meeting wreckers’ balls everywhere. But the Centre had the questionable good luck to stand on the site of what would eventually become The Oklahoma City Museum of Art, which restored the lobby and rescued a mere 200 of the Centre’s original 1600 seats. As my husband says, “You win some, you lose some, and some are rained out.” I consider this situation a rain-out. 

Before we leave town, I’m stopping for a selfie at The Milk Bottle Grocery,  a short red-brick building that stood on old Route 66 beginning in 1930. The giant sheet-metal milk bottle, that tops the building like a steeple, was added in 1948. 
            
You see Amarillo,
Gallup, New Mexico...

Amarillo’s in the Texas Panhandle, around 250-odd miles of dry hot driving. I arrive to  find the Paramount, its pueblo/Deco exterior and “blade” marquee intact. It’s part of the carefully preserved Route 66 Historic District! But wait, it’s not a theater anymore, not even a church, but a cleverly disguised office building and (sigh) a parking garage. I thought the Michigan in Detroit was the world’s only movie palace serving as a garage, but I was wrong. The historic district is a marvel, with several preserved gas stations and a motel, but the theater, its crown jewel, is a shell. 
            
The 1,163-seat State Theatre, one of the last remaining downtown Amarillo theaters by the late sixties, is gone too, but not forgotten. I found this moving testimony from a commenter, ronnwood, at Cinema Treasures.
 
...It seemed an enormous palace of a theater when I went to see my first movie there July 13, 1966, “BATTLE OF THE BULGE”. The Downtown theaters were places that had always existed to me because they were built long before my arrival on this planet. At the time I never had a thought that they would ever be gone. I saw 106 movies at the State. The last was a re-issue of “JAWS” February 14, 1976, my 8th time to see the sharkfest. Somehow the State slipped into oblivion while I was excitedly seeing flicks in all the new multi-screen theaters. In '78 they tried to keep it going by showing Spanish movies...Amarillo National Bank bought up the whole block, leveled everything, building their new Plaza II skyscraper on the east side, and a 4-level parking garage on the Polk St side where the State and Victory Theaters were located. A big concrete wall where flickering lights once beckoned movie goers. 

Thanks, ronnwood, for reminding me how I took for granted the palaces in my own hometown. Gone are Cincinnati's Albee, its Grand and  Capitol theaters. In the sixties, it was just so easy to go to the suburbs. The palaces were always going to be there, weren’t they? 

I’m off to Gallup, New Mexico where, happily the El Morro is open and showing movies! See you next week.

According to Google Maps, it takes six minutes at midday in Chicago to get from the end marker of Old Route 66 (a highway that doesn’t actually exist anymore except in song lyrics and the memories of aging drivers and myth) to the Chicago Theatre at 175 State Street, a theater that still does exist and shows the occasional movie. Route 66 was the first serious U.S. highway, running from Chicago to L.A. (more than 2000 miles all the way as the song goes), open for traffic in 1926. The 3,880-seat Chicago Theater is only a little older — five years — debuting in 1921 with Norma Talmadge in The Sign on the Door. But why Route 66 in a blog dedicated to movie palaces? I’m a sucker for poems and songs that list places I’ve never been, and, maybe you guessed it; my favorite jazz station recently played the aforementioned song, Nat King Cole’s famous rendition of “Get Your Kicks on Route 66.” a song that always tickles my desire to hit the road. It’s basically a list of towns and cities starting in Chicago and ending a little north of L.A. Now here we are at the tail end of summer. “Wow,” I thought. “Wouldn’t it be fabulous to drive old Route 66, the parts that still exist, trolling for old movie theaters?” No time or money for that this year, but what about a virtual car trip? The Chicago theater seems to resemble my own St. George Theatre in Staten Island, which I helped run for a year in 1976. So why not start the Route 66 tour on State Street, within six minutes of the start-point of the road that has variously been called “The Will Rogers Highway,” “The Main Street of America,” and simply the “Mother Road?” Maybe I really will drive this itinerary some time, but for now it’s a virtual trip. I’m starting in Chicago and working my way west, a few keystrokes at a time.

The Chicago Theatre, a Rapp and Rapp beauty, was the flagship of the Balaban & Katz chain, from the time of its opening through the Jazz Age and into the 1950’s. The facade, glazed in off-white terra cotta, echoes the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, while the  interior is based on impressions of Versailles. It started life with stage shows (a 50-piece orchestra) and organ accompaniments on a (mighty, of course) 4 manual 29-rank Wurlitzer that, with an added console, allowed for tandem concerts of a husband-and-wife team, Crawford and Anderson. This theater has never seen truly dark times, thanks to several handings-off that mark its career, ending as a movie house with Pitt Theaters who saw it safely into the keeping of a preservation committee in 1985. A year later, spruced up, it opened with Frank Sinatra and a brand-new marquee.The original marquee (whose lines you’ll recognize in some of the older posters for Chicago, the musical) is currently in the Smithsonian, possibly the only theater marquee so honored. What can you expect of a marquee recognized  as an official emblem of its city?

I’ve never been to the Chicago, but what makes me want to go is its resemblance to the St. George, also roughly 3,000 seats at its inception, with faux gilded boxes containing statuary to the left and right of the stage, and a generally “stacked” feel, that is, a steep descent from the top of the balcony to the lip of the mezzanine. Ours is Spanish Baroque and the Chicago is French, but hey, a palace is a palace. If I really was starting my road trip this week and I moved fast enough, I could catch Billy Joel there in concert on the 23rd, then head out. 

West. The American compass has no other direction.

If you ever plan to motor west
Travel my way
Take the highway that's the best
Get your kicks on Route 66.
            
I’ll  make my way down to the Route 66 Marker, but wait. According to historic66.com, the marker at the corner of Adams Street is a bit apocryphal.

“The start of Route 66 has moved a few times...” so we’ll mosey on over to Franklin and Lake Shore Drive -- something having to do with a change in street directions — then on to our first stop, a Drive-in Theater in Springfield, Illinois. I know, I know, according to the song, my next stop ought to be St. Louis, but the songwriter, Bobby Troupe left out a lot of interesting towns and highway diversions. He was on his way to Hollywood to make it big, no time for sight-seeing. But I’ve got plenty of virtual time, and I can’t resist the Route 66 Drive-In, just two hundred twenty miles south and west of Chicago.

Open from Memorial Day to Labor Day, it’s $7.50 a head, which gets you a double feature and, since it’s been twinned, you can mix and match Chinese restaurant style: one movie from the A screen and one from the B. My reluctant choices would be the Christopher Robin movie and the Solo: Star Wars thing; but it doesn’t really matter what you’re watching at a drive-in. It’s about your windshield becoming a movie screen. The theater had an early first life as Green Meadows, commencing with a single screen in 1974, not exactly the high point of drive-in theater culture. It closed in ’82 and stayed that way for a while until a local family which operates a theme park, Knight's Action Park and Caribbean Water Adventure, took it over and re-named it for the old highway, remains of which are nearby. With its iconic 66 sign, the drive-in is a favorite of international tourists who come to Chicago, rent cars and do the 66 pilgrimage. Ah, the power of song lyrics!
            
It winds from Chicago to LA
More than two thousand miles all the way
Get your kicks on Route 66
​
Now you go through St. Louis...

There’s been a lot of theater heart-break in St. Louis.  The list of “closed and demolished” made me wonder if I should just drive on through, but then, to counterbalance, there’s the Tivoli and the Fox. (The Sun is worth a drive-by, just for that rays-of-the-sun marquee; it’s a performing arts center these days.) Let’s see what’s goin’ at the Fox.  If only it were 2008; I could catch the local-boy-wonder, Stan Kann, at the mighty Wurlitzer. He started off playing that instrument, then had a long stint on TV (77 appearances on the Tonight Show, etc.) and in the movies, returning for his last decade to play at the Fabulous Fox, again. The ATOS inducted him into their hall of fame, then named him Organist of the Year in 2003. This bit is intriguing: According to Mary Strauss, “Stan Kann was a one-man show, regaling audiences with his natural comedic personality, his exploits with his vacuum cleaners and his virtuosity on the mighty Wurlitzer organ.” What’s with the vacuum cleaners?  BTW, I looked up Mary Strauss, to find out why she’s quoted on the subject of Stan Kann, and found in her what every saved theater must have, a champion. When the Fox  was endangered, in the terrible 80’s, she’s the one who turned it around.   

The Fabulous Fox, as it styles itself now, is “Siamese/Byzantine” style, whatever that is.  Only in a movie palace! Like its four other sister Fox theaters in Brooklyn, Atlanta, San Francisco and Detroit, the St. Louis Fox was the design creation of C. Howard Crane, peer of John Eberson and Thomas Lamb. The St. Louis Fox opened its doors in 1929, with 5060 seats, at a cost of five million dollars — around  71 million in today’s bucks. After hard times, it was rescued by Mary Strauss and friends in the early eighties, and restored for a mere two million, in under two years. That’s important in the annals of movie palace survival — no time for vagrancy or leakage to set in; and plenty of time to host home-town rocker Chuck Berry on his 60th birthday.in 1986. 

Too late for me by several decades to catch Chuck, but Bill Maher will be at the Fox before August is out. If I were going, it’d be for the place. You know what Marcus Loew said about what tickets are really sold for.

That’s all for now, I’m pulling off the road. I’ll be at the Grand Center Inn. It only got three stars, but it’s within walking distance of the Fox. Next week, on to Joplin, Missouri...
            

Summer trivia:  what theater was dubbed “The Cathedral of the Motion Picture?” Likely you know the answer, it’s the Roxy, probably one of the five or six most opulent movie palaces ever built. What would the other five be? Grauman’s Chinese? The Pantages? The United Palace, formerly Loews 175th Street (a Wonder Theater)? I’m in dangerous territory, here, like trying to name the ten greatest movies of all time (Casablanca? I daren’t go on). But I digress; why would the Roxy — or any movie palace — be compared to a cathedral? My friend, Clifford Browder, recently commented in a blog post on a visit he made to Chartres in France, whose cobalt blue windows have transfixed mortals since the 13th century, when the cathedral was completed. The rose window, he said, seemed suspended in space. Cathedrals are all about light. 

A movie palace is just the opposite of a cathedral really, no natural light at all; in fact daylight would seem like a violation of a theater’s darkness. Movie palaces — like the one I helped to run in 1976, to which this blog is dedicated, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island — aren’t cathedrals at all, but great caves, like Lascaux or Altamira, those paleolithic wonders: lightless, but soaring and filled with imagery. Early humans lived in caves, so no wonder that in the last century, which was always erupting in world wars, we busied ourselves building not cathedrals, but magnificent Caverns of the Motion Picture.

I found this interesting reflection on the transformative experience of movie palaces:
“You went to have an out-of-body, almost spiritual experience, helped along by the temporal displacement of being in an ancient outdoor ruin, or a pagan temple. The movie palaces of the 1920s were going for the vestigial memories of mankind unreeling their imaginations in ritual spaces, what was known as theater to the ancient Greeks but which still had an odor of burnt offerings. It's no accident that the earliest movie theaters, the nickelodeon arcades and bijous, were essentially magical caves.” 

I’m not sure I would credit the nickelodeon arcades with the same magic as a Wonder Theater, but I’m apparently not the only one who reverts to paleo in a movie palace; and I love that bit about ritual space. If my friend Clifford found the rose window of Chartres transfixing, well then, how about a 70mm screen with the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, several stories high and lost in a kiss? That’s why there is no daylight in these almost-sacred spaces. 

Here are five filmic caverns you might, sometime, want to get lost in. Since I don’t know where you live, I’ve tried to cover as much of the continental U.S. as I could manage.

• Starting on the West Coast, it’s painful to select just one, but I’m going for cave-like interiors, and it seems to me that the Los Angeles Theatre conveys that sense of intimacy mixed with grandeur. Designed by S. Charles Lee and finished in 1931, it was to be the last of the Broadway theaters in Los Angeles, rivaling the Roxy in New York, for its amenities: not only a “screaming” room for petulant babies, but a ladies‘ lounge with sixteen separate “compartments,” each featuring a different type of marble. It also had a prism system that conveyed the image of the on-going movie to patrons not in the auditorium. But why would you stray from that auditorium, with its 65-foot wide proscenium and gold-threaded Louis XIV original house curtain, its ornate “boxes” left and right of the stage? Theaters that feature boxes, which, in movie palaces, are mostly false, give that cave-like feel to a domed space, since caves have recesses. Indeed, the ceiling of the Los Angeles is stamped with a series of recessed medallions to increase that effect.

• Heading East, we can stop for tacos and a movie in San Antonio, Texas, to visit a 1926 Meso American-themed cavern of a movie palace, the Aztec (currently Aztec-on-the-River). Originally a 3000-seat wonder, it was designed by the firm of Meyer & Holler (think Egyptian and Chinese theaters, in L.A.),  and incorporates elements of ancient Aztec design complete with polychromed plasterwork, duplicating murals, massive columns and Mayan-themed temple statuary.

• I know I covered Akron, Ohio recently, but how can you do a tour of cave-like theater interiors and not include an atmospheric?  So we’ll stop off in this fine old town, (at the turn of the twentieth century, the rubber capital of the world) for a glimpse of night stars in the dome of the Akron Civic Theatre. Those are electric stars, of course. Is it a paradox, a cave with stars?

• On the road again, we’ll head for Richmond, Virginia where we might catch a movie and listen to the originally-installed Wurlitzer at the Byrd, a 1,400-seat theater that is still almost exactly as it was on the day of its opening in 1926, quite a boast for a movie palace post-millennium. 

• And that brings us at last to my coast, the East one, where I’m in a quandary, because there are so many theaters I know to choose from. I think I’ll indulge myself and close with the St. George itself.  After all,  I ran it for a year as a movie theater. And it’s the St. George that got me started writing and thinking about movie palaces in the first place. It is the most cave-like theater I know, an amazingly intimate space, for one that housed originally 2,672 seats. I didn’t fully appreciate that intimacy until I went to hear Gladys Knight at the newly-restored Kings Theatre on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Opulent as that theater most certainly is, it’s more horizontal than vertical, so lacks intimacy. The St. George is “stacked,” with an upper balcony within shouting distance (sans mic) of the stage. The dusky statuary in faux boxes left and right of the stage, the recessed dome, and the depth of the carving in and around that dome give my home theater, still miraculously standing and operating again as a theater, the sense of a great cave, Lascaux perhaps, or at least the Luray Caverns! 

Try some theater spelunking of your own some time...

Afterthought:  Speaking of the south rose window at the back of Chartres that seemed to my friend to float in space, isn’t that what a giant illuminated screen in a darkened movie palace does? It’s all about light and darkness.  

When you run a movie theater, you see whatever’s on the screen, most of the time in passing, and in small bits.  So it was with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a movie I was happy not to see all of, since I had a hard enough time sleeping at night. The year was 1976, the theater, the St. George, a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island I was involved in trying to keep open. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were seeing the grand old place — dusty red velvet, gilded plaster goddesses and all  — to the end of its movie-exhibition career. The St. George may have been a sinking ship at that point, but while the ship was going down, we showed mostly second or third-run, a number of movies that have since either become cult classics, or, in some cases, Taxi Driver, for example, have found their way into the Library of Congress. 

I watched the Academy Awards in March, 1977 with a deal of remorse. By that time we were out of business, the St. George shuttered, the dream over. But on our small screen at home, there were more than a few of the sixty-three movies we had run on our giant grape-soda-stained  movie screen, competing for gold statues. Two of my favorites for the year, All the President’s Men (Hoffman and Redford as Woodward and Bernstein, a post-Watergate cocktail), and Taxi Driver (DeNiro as the infamous war vet, Travis Bickle), were up against Rocky (which won, launching Sylvester Stallone’s career). Bound for Glory (a romantic but not entirely accurate biopic on the life and times of folksinger Woody Guthrie), and Network (the ultimate condemnation of the corporate establishment and television) were the other contenders. Of these five, only Bound for Glory would not eventually find its way to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." That selection really means something, that, twenty or thirty years after the fact, so many Oscar contenders from a single year would have such lasting power. (If you look to the following year’s Oscars, movies nominated were Annie Hall — winner, The Goodbye Girl, Star Wars, The Turning Point and Julia. Only two of these, Annie Hall and Star Wars, were in the decades to come, deemed culturally significant enough for the Library to set aside.

1976 had been a pivotal year: in Hollywood, in the movie exhibition end of things, and in America. Vietnam was over and so was Watergate; as the recession tailed off, working class heroes everywhere needed to believe in a rags-to-riches story, and Rocky, the best picture winner, would do well enough. Hollywood released 148 films in 1976, more than in previous years, but since movie screens were proliferating virally, lowly “buck fifty” exhibitors, like ourselves, were hard-pressed to get our desperate little hands on anything new, or nearly new. Yet we occasionally did. From IMDB’s list of the ten most popular movies of 1976, we ran the top three and two more besides.

1. Taxi Driver*
2. All the President’s Men*
3. Carrie*
4. Rocky
5. A Star is Born
6. King Kong
7. Logan’s Run*
8. The Omen*
9. The Enforcer
10. Network

Our booking agent, while he lasted, had some chops.

Memories are fragmentary: I recall only bits and pieces of Carrie, which, as a feminist, I had a lot of objections to. Besides, it was February and too cold in the auditorium, since the landlord had turned the heat off, in what would finally be a successful campaign to close us down. But the warm months had been a sweet time. Earlier in the season, I’d relished every beloved frame of All the President’s Men, Watergate still fresh in memory. As for Taxi Driver, I watched it obsessively over and over again, burning the popcorn bag down to its grannies. It wasn’t just my crush on De Niro; Scorcese really had seventies New York down cold. Times Square, especially the porn district where at least once I’d gone to borrow carbons for our aging projectors, was right there on our screen, gritty and dangerous and, of course, never boring. On those forays to Times Square, if only I’d had cab fare — Travis Bickle might have had his light on...

Afterthought 1:  De Niro actually took a few shifts as an NYC cabbie, just to get the feel of the role, so what if I'd hailed  him?

Afterthought 2: I mentioned that some of the movies we ran at the St. George became cult classics:  Texas Chainsaw Massacre comes to mind first. Cooley High, The Omen, and the absurdly misnamed Don’t Open the Window (aka The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue and Let Sleeping Corpses Lie) have their own followings. The Dragon Dies Hard, a posthumous tribute to Bruce Lee, goes without saying.

​If the movie palace impresario Marcus Loew came back for a quick look around, post millennium, having had close to a hundred-year nap (died, 1927), would he recognize the movie exhibition business? When he started, in 1904, it was a series of store-front peepshows (Automatic Vaudeville which evolved into Nickelodeons), morphing quickly (by the time of his death) into splendid spare-no-expense movie palaces like the Wonder Theaters he built in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Jersey City and the Bronx. By the time I came along, in 1976, palaces, like our own St. George in Staten Island, a 2,672-seat Spanish Baroque theater which I helped to run for one unforgettable year, were shabby affairs — or they were shuttered, like Loews Kings, in Brooklyn, a shelter for druggies, or a warehouse  or just plain torn down. For the most part, except in Hollywood, palaces don’t exist anymore, strictly as movie theaters, but have reverted largely to live performance, what many of them were originally built to serve in the first place. Case-in-point: my own St. George, built for Vaudeville, survives handily on a diet of performers, small, medium and large. Plain vanilla movie houses, multiplexes mostly, do survive, even prosper, admirable in a time when the average patron could as easily watch something of quality on any number of personal screens. But I digress. 

Returning to the slumbering, freshly-awakened Marcus Loew, he’d be impressed to find that some post-millennial theaters really are paying attention to his famous dictum, “We sell tickets to theaters, not movies.” What would he make of full meals in theaters like Nitehawk in Brooklyn, or Rooftop Cinemas anywhere? Well, whatever gets people out to the movies, be it a glamorous view or a cocktail that matches the movie, the theater’s the thing, baby. 

Still, nothing tops a movie palace: the men’s smoking lounge, plush carpeting and seats, powder rooms reminiscent of Versailles. Loew thought, among other things, that theater restrooms should be luxurious beyond belief. And there was a reason, other than a love of sheer opulence. Hard as it is to believe, even in the 1920’s, public baths weren’t strictly recreational. In New York City; on the Lower East at that time, there was, apparently, one bathtub for every seventy-nine families. So imagine how a movie patron at, say, the 2800-seat Loew’s Oriental in Brooklyn might have felt in the ladies’ lounge, with its ottomans, jeweled carpets and floor-to-ceiling mirrors?

Marcus Loew himself was born poor — on the Lower East Side, at Avenue A and Fifth Street, to be exact — the child of German/Jewish immigrants. Childhood was short: in 1876, at the age of six, Marcus had to work, selling papers in front of a Saloon after school. At nine, he quit school and did a short stint at a map-coloring plant (11 hours a day, six days a week), which ended when the laborers went out on strike. Being a natural entrepreneur, he’d already found another gig, with a young man who had access to a printing press. Soon they had their own small paper, The East Side Advertiser, with a circulation of about 500. Loew might have stayed a newspaperman forever, but he and his partner came to blows, so the next stop on his resume was a men’s store, followed by the fur trade, a big deal in those days in Manhattan below 14th Street, where he actually went into business himself as a fur broker, garnering some big bucks, before, at age 18, being forced into bankruptcy. Marriage, a second fur business and a second bankruptcy followed in quick succession, before he found a stable business partner in the fur trade, then, amazingly, met the man who would be briefly a partner, then a rival in the (as-yet-unborn) movie business, Adolf Zukor. Sound familiar? Yes, that Adolf Zukor, of Paramount Pictures.  He was also a furrier, and an immigrant.  

It was 1904. Zukor invested in something called “Automatic Vaudeville,” — basically penny arcades that featured peepshow-style movies. His rival and buddy and sometime-partner, Marcus Loew, wasn’t far behind. A year later, with the wealthy actor David Warfield, Loew founded People’s Vaudeville, at 23rd and Seventh, another arcade. Business took Loew to Cincinnati, where he intended to set up an arcade. but crossing the Ohio River to Covington Kentucky, stumbled on the model of the future, a movie theater where people could actually sit together and watch films, in a house run by an enterprising man who acted as projectionist, ticket taker, even lecturer on film. It was packed. Going back to Cincinnati, Loew borrowed some chairs and re-tooled his arcade on the model he’d seen in Kentucky, charging five cents for a 3-minute show, and selling out to 4,993 patrons in a single day. 

Arriving back in NYC, Loew retrofitted his arcades as Nickelodeons, and, arguably, the movie business was born. If you buy this version of the story, that is, because another version has it that Nickelodeons were born in Pittsburgh, PA. Either way — Cincinnati or Pittsburgh —  you could say the Nickelodeon concept opened out of town.

In 1921, The New York Times described these storefront theaters as “little places, dark and narrow,” beloved, while they lasted.

By 1917, Loew owned around twenty theaters, most of them in New York City, and straddled about seven corporations, which he finally consolidated under one holding company, Loew’s Inc. But the movie business had up and moved to Hollywood; could Loew be far behind? In 1920, he purchased Metro Pictures Corp., then, in short order, acquired a controlling interest in Goldwyn Picture Corporation (taking on Leo the Lion as a trademark and mascot), and finally signing Louis B. Mayer, then a low-budget film producer (and said to be the Harvey Weinstein of his time). Voila: MGM!

Socialist though I style myself, I am, at heart, fascinated by entrepreneurship. What, other than poverty, drives a nine-year-old to work six days a week, found a press, then (twice) a fur business, bankrupting both times, all before age 24? By that time, Loew was half-way through his life, in more ways than one. What also eternally fascinates me is that the conglomerates of today were built on the storefronts of yesterday, in places like the Lower East Side, Covington Kentucky and Cincinnati, Ohio, while Hollywood was still a small town, blooming into the place where stars are made and born.

Afterthought 1: One of the most impressive of Loew’s theaters was the focus of last week’s blog post, the Akron Civic Theatre in Akron, Ohio. It’s an atmospheric — don’t miss it!

Afterthought 2: As a native Cincinnatian, I am fascinated by the legend of Loew’s “arcade,” which he rushed back across the river from Covington to retrofit as a theater. I found a reference to it in this entry from Cinema Treasures. After it was done being an arcade, it became the Star Theatre. Some of us remember it as a Burlesque house...