Cool and Dark

The general public — those not privy to the few luxurious hotels and cars that used cooling systems early on — often first encountered air-conditioning in movie theaters, which started to widely use the technology in the 1930s. Before the window unit's heyday, Carrier produced a system for theaters that cost between $10,000 and $50,000. It was one of the few things proprietors sprung for during the Great Depression, and theaters were one of the rare places where the hoi polloi could enjoy chilly, artificial air.”   
​— Time, from Brief History:  Air Conditioning, by Katy Steinmetz

Tampa Theatre, 1942—the first business in Tampa to have air-conditioning. (Source: Tampapix)

Yesterday on the front porch over a pitcher of iced mint tea, a friend confided to me that she can’t be without at least the possibility of air conditioning in summer. Since you know this is a blog entirely dedicated to movie theaters as they were in the 20th Century, you already suspect that I’m thinking about how deliciously cool air conditioned theaters always have been (think those blue and white REFRIGERATED signs hanging from theater marquees, and those fake icicles!). How important to American culture air conditioned theaters once were, in an era when hardly anyone had more than a fan at home. In fact, this blog wouldn’t exist at all if I hadn’t arrived in New York City in 1969 with a fan that broke down after the first day. So we went looking for movie theaters to get cool in, and found The St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace, and fell in love with every gilded niche & cranny of the place. At that time the St. George was still a first-run house, the flagship of the Fabian chain, but seven years later, I’d find myself involved in running that same theater as a mixed-use house, the subject of a book about our adventures at said palace, which is, I promise you, “Coming Soon,” to borrow a little poster-case terminology.

But back to the front porch, where my friend proceeded to tell me why she can’t get very far away from air conditioning.  “I have a tendency to heat prostration,”  she told me.  “My mother had it too. It can cause me to pass out if I’m not careful.” (I checked it out: it’s called Hyperthermia, which is sometimes accompanied by fainting — Heat Syncope — and it can be a killer). But why am I writing about this in a column dedicated to movie theaters?

It could have been 1936, one of the hottest summers on record in the New York region. That would make sense, because my friend was born in 1942, and her mother, in this story, is an unmarried young woman. She’d been with some friends for a weekend, sailing on Long Island Sound, and after helping them haul their heavy wooden  boat out of the water, she got into her broiling car to drive home. Most houses had no AC in those days, and, it goes without saying that almost no cars, except limos,  had it either (Packard introduced it in some models in 1939, but only the rich could afford that kind of thing). Our heroine was sweating so hard she thought she’d melt, and things didn’t improve as she drove toward home. The last thing she remembered was feeling woozy.

She woke up in the dark: John Wayne on screen. But she hated cowboy movies! Where was she, how long had she been here?  It was cool and delicious in what turned out to be the Bronxville Playhouse, a 1116-seat theater in a tiny town close to the Westchester border. How had she gotten there?  bought a ticket?  More importantly, how had she managed to drive and park the car? It’s fourteen miles from Rye Town Beach (possibly the site of that afternoon’s sailing adventure) to the Bronxville Playhouse. These days it would take 24 minutes on the Hutchinson River Parkway to get from that beach to the heart of Bronxville; but the Hutch was incomplete until 1941, so it’s likely she took local roads. A good thing too: parkway speeds would have further tested her guardian angel.

Of all the possibilities for chilling out, her unconscious had chosen the nearest movie theater!  

We have so many ways to get — and stay — cool post-millennium. It’s hard to imagine what it felt like to be an ordinary citizen before AC became omni-present. The Rivoli in New York City was “refrigerated” in 1925. Willis Carrier, whose system had just been installed there, described the first day:

Long before the doors opened, people lined up at the box office—curious about 'cool comfort' as offered by the managers. It was like a World Series crowd waiting for bleacher seats. They were not only curious, but skeptical—all of the women and some of the men had fans—a standard accessory of that day.

It takes time to pull down the temperature in a quickly filled theater on a hot day, and a still longer time for a packed house. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the fans dropped into laps as the effects of the air conditioning system became evident. Only a few chronic fanners persisted, but soon they, too, ceased fanning. We had stopped them 'cold' and breathed a great sigh of relief. We then went into the lobby and waited for Mr. Zukor to come downstairs. When he saw us, he did not wait for us to ask his opinion. He said tersely, ‘Yes, the people are going to like it.'

The Rivoli, which, BTW, made $100,000 more that summer than the previous — had not been the first theater to experience a profound climate change. In Los Angeles, Sid Grauman's Metropolitan boasted in 1922 that, inside, it was “Cool as a mountaintop — the ice system does it...it’s always fair weather inside.”

These were giant theaters, but by the mid-thirties even the lowly Bronxville (originally part of the Metropolitan Playhouses chain) could boast AC. It’s the Bowtie Bronxville Cinemas these days, still on Kraft Avenue across from the train station — a three-screen plex, stripped down by several renovations and changes in management — but still in the biz.

I wonder which of Wayne’s cowboy flix she woke up to?  Could have been King of the Pecos, just out in 1936. In a previous blog post, my husband, who grew up in the fifties, recalls his boyhood fixation on John Wayne. It’s part of a dream, oddly fitting, because he was dreaming that he was in a theater, while my friend’s mother, so long ago, was dreaming in a theater!

​I’ll close by quoting Dean: ​

“I had a grand theater dream. Every once in a while I have one, and they almost always happen at the St. George. It was a Saturday, late afternoon, a matinee. I was in the balcony, but instead of being a twenty-nine-year-old terrified theater operator, I was a boy, maybe 10 or 11. I was sitting halfway up on the extreme left side looking down at the screen. It was crowded, two-thirds full and there was the sweet-grass smell of popcorn. It was a Western. John Wayne, visible mid-chest to the top of his hat, was looking at something offscreen to the  right. I’m not sure I heard him say anything. I was with around 2000 people, and yet I was totally alone. Isn’t that the magic of why we come to theaters?  We want to share with other people the experience of the movie, but we want to be alone — like community and privacy all at once.”