FYI
Hooray For Hollywood
A Warner Brothers Theatre Retrospective
Saturday, March 14
Stroll among original Warner Theatre artifacts and enjoy foods of the 1930's.
By invitation only. RSVP by March 4
Sponsored by
The Mahoning Valley Historical Society
and
The Youngstown Symphony Society
http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/united-states/ohio/youngstown?page=1&status=all (http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/united-states/ohio/youngstown?page=1&status=all)
Learn about all the movie theaters that have been here over the years.
I need some help from my WEST SIDE friends about a former West Side theater ... the Schenley Theater. Is there anyone who can recall seeing movies at this theater and can describe what it looked like inside. Please keep it to this theater and what it looked like inside. I already know all about the Mahoning Theater because I worked there during my high school years at Chaney.
The building is still there. I believe it is now named the Gran Professional Building.
I know that the building is still there, but that is not what I need to know. I need to know what the Schenley Theater was like inside as a theater ... how many seats, what was the style of the decore? The Schenley was part of the Wellman chain of neighborhood theaters and drive ins ... some of them beautiful such as the Belmont, Newport, and the Uptown and some of them a dump such as the Mahoning. If you go to the Cinema Treasures link that I provided, you will see all the theaters that have been posted so far for Youngstown, and at this point the number is 38 and there are still more to be posted.
Towntalk, do you know what year the theater opened? Maybe the Vindicator archives
on Google News might reveal some info and photos(?)
:)
There are problems using Google News Vindicator archives ... 1. The archives are not complete. 2. You can't use key words to do a search. The best that can be done is to spend hours trying to find when the Schenley ran its first ad, then hope that there might be an article or ad announcing the opening. The trouble is that not every page of every issue of the Vindicator is available. I could perhaps try to get the information from the public library as they have helped me in the past, but before I do that I would like to find it on my own so I won't wear out my welcome at the library.
I stumbled onto an article that would suggest that there were two Schenley Theaters, one prior to 1923 which was possably demolished, and a second Schenley that we are most familiar with, but when I search the archives of the Vindicator between 1919 and 1923 I find no ads for the theater. This is not unusual since many of the early neighborhood theaters did not do much if any advertizing, and the newspaper did not publish a list of all the theaters and what was playing until the late 1920's to early 1930's. In all, during the late 1920's and late 1940's there were a large number of neighborhood theaters bases on the theater pages of the Vindicator, and it would take a lot oftime to compile them all, then go to the main public library and search all the city directories to get the names, addresses, number of years they were in operation.
The Mahoning Valley Historical Society is doing just this, but since there are many other things they have to research, it's going to take a long time before they cancome up with a reasonably complete list.
It is definitely frustrating digging through the archives on Google. It took me many
hours to find the articles about Parkway Tower for this same reason - but I have to
admit that it was very satisfying when I finally did stumble upin the information
and especially the photos.
:)