THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 15, 1995 TAG: 9503150006
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 231 lines
GRAY SKYLIGHT PUSHES through a lattice of rotted timbers high above the balcony and trickles with the rain into the darkened Colonial Theatre.
In the gloaming below, dust and soot and bird droppings mat once-plush velvet seats. Slabs of fallen plaster foul the aisles. Pigeons chorus from the orchestra.
A lifetime ago chandeliers cast brighter light on this cavern of a theater, and on Virginians who filed in a thousand at a time. On its stage they witnessed the Three Stooges, Eddie Cantor and Mae West, and blackfaced Al Jolson dropping to a knee to sing ``Swan-nee.''
If they didn't care for the Colonial's fare, they could wander a couple downtown blocks to the Wells, the American or the Strand. To the Norva, where an 18-piece orchestra scored the pictures. Or they could head for the big Loew's State, where Sam Simmons commanded a mammoth pipe organ and an underaged Milton Berle performed with his mother in the wings.
Not now. The Colonial hasn't seen an audience since the '70s. Floors sag underfoot. Stairways have turned to pulp. Flashlight beams twitch over piles of splintered lumber and dangling electrical wires. Modern visitors are more spelunkers than theatergoers.
But the Colonial survives.
And it is not alone. None of downtown Norfolk's big theaters operates today, but most of the buildings that housed them still stand. The suburbs, too, are dotted with smaller theaters built 50, 60, nearly 70 years ago.
Some, like the Colonial, have fallen into decay. Some have been gutted and converted to other uses. Others are dark but largely intact.
Regardless, they remain buildings that drew people together, that loaned them escape from Depression and world war.
That earlier generations remember as places of opulence and pomp, where seeing a movie was an occasion.
Eighty years ago, the Colonial was in its prime. Behind its soaring, curved proscenium was a stage 70-feet tall and 40-feet deep, plenty of room for even the most lavish vaudeville performances - such as ``Pocahontas,'' which starred 101 American Indians from Williamsburg.
It had competition. In 1915 the 2-year-old Wells Theatre also staged live comedy and melodrama, as did the Academy of Music on East Main. Photoplays showed at the American and at the Strand, a former vaudeville house. The Granby Theatre had just opened, replacing a theater of the same name.
The Academy burned in 1930; today the Selden Arcade stands in its place. The other buildings remain, however: In the 1930s the Strand was revamped into a Hofheimer's shoe store. It might not look much like a theater from Granby, but it's unmistakable from the rear.
The American, later renamed the Victor, met the same fate: It was emptied and converted to a Lerner Shops store, which still stands.
The Wells, restored to its original Moorish grandeur, is the home of the Virginia Stage Co. And the Granby still looks its part. Its tiny ticket booth overlooks the city's dormant main drag, though its glass has been punched out, and behind its locked doors, the auditorium remains in fairly good shape.
In 1919, the Attucks Theatre opened on Church Street, playing to black audiences banned from or relegated to the balconies of downtown theaters. Cab Calloway, Nat ``King'' Cole and Moms Mabley played there, on a stage whose curtain portrayed Crispus Attucks's death at the Boston Massacre.
The 250-seat Byrd went up at 225 E. City Hall Ave. The Norva, opened in 1923, boasted an orchestra and 1,600 seats, and presented both vaudeville and silent films.
Out in tiny Cradock, not yet a part of Portsmouth, the Afton Theatre entertained shipyard workers, and in Berkley a piano player dubbed ``The Professor'' held court at the Rex.
The Rex is long gone, and the Byrd, renown for its Westerns, was bulldozed in the 1960s. But the Afton, stripped of its seats, has prevailed at 42 Afton Parkway. Its walls display hand-painted murals.
After 75 years the Attucks - which spent a couple of decades as the Booker T movie house and a few more as a Stark & Legum store - is dark but essentially intact. Its Crispus Attucks curtain survives.
Great care and $2.2 million transformed the Norva from an idle theater to a health club in 1980. Its lobby is now filled with Nautilus equipment, and patrons enter through a door in the back of the old auditorium. Space once occupied by seats and stage are now racquetball courts and aerobics studios.
In 1926 construction was under way on yet another downtown movie palace, this one at 340 Granby St. The newcomer was housed in a massive, 19th century edifice that had seen use as a department store and a furniture showroom.
Dubbed ``Dixie's Million-Dollar Dandy'' when it opened in May 1926, the Loew's State wowed audiences of 2,000 with three daily shows of five vaudeville acts and a movie. A 12-piece orchestra accompanied the silents, along with Sam Simmons, the organist, on ``Loew's Thousand-Throated Mighty Wurlitzer.''
A goldfish pond occupied part of the lobby. Twenty-foot-tall, stained-glass windows flanked the balcony. The seats were velvet, dusty rose and deep red, and behind the stage dressing rooms occupied two floors.
``That was deluxe,'' said Sydney Gates, appointed to manage the new venue. ``We had a footman in those days who would open the door for the people - big guy, dressed like a general. When you'd buy a ticket, you were greeted by a doorman. He had a lot of stripes, too. And he'd say, `Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Gates. I hope you enjoy the picture.'
``You'd walk through the lobby, and there was an usher to greet you and take you to your seat,'' said Gates, who turns 94 Thursday. ``You don't get that any more, do you?''
Today the Loew's seems merely a line of pink storefronts, save for one detail: Far above the street, its brick bears faded lettering: ``Norfolk's Leading Theatre,'' it says. And: ``The Pick of the Pictures.''
Behind one storefront is what's left of the lobby. The fish pond and the concession stand that replaced it are gone, as are the lights that dangled from three concave recesses in the ceiling. Paint the color of a motel swimming pool curls from the walls.
But beyond the lobby, the Loew's is in remarkably good shape. Stained-glass chandeliers hang over the orchestra. The walls bear two huge murals, one of a matador and a clutch of admiring senoritas. Some trash-strewn dressing rooms retain a mirror or two, along with sockets for the bulbs that once lit them.
In the projection booth, a seemingly impossible distance from the stage, chunks of spotlights and carbon-arc projectors are scattered on concrete floor amid snips of film. Some of the celluloid captures Clint Eastwood in a cop movie. One strip is a test pattern for the area's first 3-D movie, ``Bwana Devil,'' released in March 1953.
A musicians' tunnel leads from beneath the stage to the orchestra pit, which is as it was except for the Wurlitzer: The $50,000 instrument was sold for 2 cents on the dollar in 1969.
As impressive as it was, the Loew's was not the most important theater of its day. That distinction belonged to the Newport - a small, rather unadorned house nestled amid a row of storefronts and apartments on Newport Avenue, just off 35th Street.
William S. Wilder was written off as crazy when he opened the Newport in February 1928; until then, nobody had attempted a first-run movie theater in the suburbs.
But the Newport thrived, and with it a host of theaters sprang up in the region's neighborhoods. The Bayne opened at the Oceanfront in 1932, and in Lafayette-Winona the Park, Willard and Fairmount began shows.
Wilder opened the Colley in 1936, and as his empire grew, so did that of Nathan and Rose Levine, who put up a chain of small theaters, a couple bearing contractions of their names, the Rosna and Rosele. The Riverview Playhouse opened on Granby. In the '40s, the Suburban joined the fray at Wards Corner, and the Beach opened a few blocks from the Bayne.
On Church Street, the Booker T now had plenty of company. ``Christ, there were five or six theaters right there,'' said Gates, who owned the Gem, at 815 Church. ``That's all people had to do, was go to movies. What else was there to do? And in those days, of course, a black couldn't get into the white theaters.''
The Newport had started a movement away from the business district that, years later, would be furthered with the advent of shopping mall multiplexes. The Granby theater district welcomed its last new cinema in 1938, when Gates built the 225-seat Roxy.
Big downtown theaters weren't dead yet, however. Over in Portsmouth, Wilder built what was arguably the area's finest movie theater: The Commodore.
Theater was not new to Portsmouth. The Capitol, on Effingham Street, had opened in 1908, and the Olympic was in business before World War I. The Colony, at 430 High St., had shown the region's first talkies. High Street also had been home to the Rialto and the Tivoli, both in the 300 block, and the State, in the 500s.
The Commodore went far beyond all of them. Sleek of design, with a tremendous screen and wonderful acoustics, it was built with government help in the closing days of World War II to answer the need for conscript entertainment.
Today it's a dinner-cinema, its orchestra studded with small tables and swivel armchairs, its Deco mood preserved. Of the other Portsmouth theaters, a few remain, a few others burned. Most were demolished to make way for new buildings or parking lots.
Urban renewal claimed a few of Norfolk's neighborhood theaters, too. Only the Attucks was spared on Church Street. The 380-seat Visulite gave way to a retirement high-rise, the Hampton to Old Dominion University, and the Memrose to Norfolk's medical center. The Rosele fell to the Ocean View Shopping Center.
Most, however, are still with us. The Rosna's marquee still juts onto 35th Street from a facade of glazed brick and aluminum. The auditorium is now the sanctuary of St. Andrews Temple. Some of its velvet-covered seats are threadbare, and a paneling-framed altar has replaced the screen. Otherwise it looks much like the Rosna of 40 years ago.
The Boulevard is the Family Dollar store at Hampton Boulevard and Little Creek Road. Its cinema past is invisible - the floor has been leveled, the high ceiling obscured by acoustical tile.
The Colley, which turns 60 next year, still screens films. In the '60s, the Levines' son bought the 550-seat theater and renamed it the Naro for his parents. It did time as a porn theater and a stage company before it was reborn as a repertory cinema in 1977.
And the Newport slumbers in Park Place. The marquee over its twin glass doors has been dismantled, and one of the doors shattered; moist, chilly air wafts into the lightless lobby.
In the auditorium, a mountain of plastic, 5-gallon buckets rises in front of the stage. Broken glass, dirt and rubbish crunch underfoot. Old hymnals litter the floor.
``I have good memories of them while they were open,'' Nathan Levine said of the theaters his father and grandparents opened. ``And at least most of them are still standing, unlike the Memrose - there isn't a trace of where the Memrose was.
``The best is to see the Naro in lights all the time.''
In 1952, South Hampton Roads had 44 movie houses and half a dozen drive-ins. Today, the drive-ins are gone, and while the region has more than 100 indoor screens, only two - the Naro and Commodore - are housed in single-screen theaters.
The others are smaller screens crammed into clusters of tiny, bare-bones cinemas in shopping malls. More recent attempts at single-screen theaters have failed. The last, the Terrace, shut down last year at age 24.
New cinemas never include box seats or balconies. Charmless but efficient, they need not tout ``Arctic Nu-Air Cooling,'' as the Newport did, or challenge the Colony's claim as ``the coolest spot in Portsmouth.'' Most don't bother with ushers.
``I think people appreciate that,'' said Tench Phillips Jr., the Naro's co-owner. ``They come back here partly because they like the fact that the owner's here, greeting them as they come through the door.''
Maybe there is hope for other old theaters. In the meantime, the 88-year-old Colonial stands dark and cold, silent save for dripping water and the coos of roosting pigeons.
Outside on Tazewell Street, the theater's marquee and ticket window are gone, and with them, clues to its past glory.
But behind this anonymous facade, the Colonial survives. ILLUSTRATION: TAMARA VONINSKI/Staff color photos
Dust and soot and bird droppings mat the once-plush velvet seats of
Norfolk's Colonial Theater.
The dressing room, left, at the old Loew's Theater is filled with
dust, old movie memorabilia and bottles. Old film still litters the
projection room floor, above. The theater is being renovated into a
TCC lecture hall.
File Photos
The Rosna's marquee still juts onto 35th Street.
The small, unadorned Newport, on 35th Street in Norfolk, was the
most important theater of its day.
Sydney Gates, 94, was the opening manager of Leow's Theater when it
opened in 1926.
KEYWORDS: MOVIE THEATERS TIDEWATER HAMPTON ROADS by CNB