Page 34 - Summer 2022 inLEAGUE with 46th National Conference Program

OLDEST

(continued from page 31)

4) Ethnic cultural centers

And finally, there are several old ethnic community
halls such as the Bohemian National Hall in Cleveland
(1896), which have primarily functioned as cultural
centers.

So, using these criteria, how many of America’s 259
pre-1900 theaters can legitimately claim to be “pri-
marily performing arts”? I found 77 (30%).

Number of years a movie theater

With the invention of motion pictures in the 1890’s (the
first screening of a movie at the Lobero was in 1897)
and their widespread popularity by the 1910’s and
20’s, many opera houses realized their only hope of
survival was to transition from live performances to
movies. I thought it would be interesting to see how
many of America’s pre-1900 opera houses became
movie theaters for a decade or more.

How did some theaters resist morphing into movie
theaters - the answers seem to be varied. Some grand
theatrical venues like Philadelphia’s Academy of Mu-
sic and Cincinnati’s Music Hall were big city institutions
which could find enough ticket buyers willing to pay
for top-notch live culture. The bigger anomalies are
the small city theaters which survived as performing
arts only. In the Lobero’s case, two grand new mov-

1812 Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia

ie palaces were built in Santa Barbara in the 1920-
30s (the Granada and the Fox Arlington), so for the
Lobero to try to compete by showing movies would
not have made financial sense. Furthermore, Santa
Barbara possessed enough moneyed, sophisticated
residents who were willing to support live theater and
music that the Lobero was able to carry on its tradition

PAGE 32 | INLEAGUE League of Historic American Theatres