Buffalo Movie Theaters - Table of Contents

Types of Early Movie Theaters
By Edward Summer
Director / Founder, The Buffalo Film Festival

The operative terms when discussing the history of movie theaters are:

1) Traveling exhibition
2) Storefront theater
3) Purpose built theater
4) Re-purposed theater
5) Stand-alone theater

While these are fairly obvious, let me give my own definitions for these:

1) Traveling exhibition: early projectors were put on trucks, trains, or cars and taken from town to town where early films were shown in a town hall or church or school or the like usually for only one or two nights

2) The successor to these exhibitions in the late 1890s were "storefront theaters" which were just that: vacant stores with windows painted black, a sheet hung up, chairs added and movies shown. The longest operating storefront theater before 1900 that we're aware of was about 23 weeks.  This definition would also include the Lumiere exhibitions which were in a cafe in Paris, but for a very limited run.

3) Purpose built theater.  A theater constructed specifically and ONLY to show movies. This is not necessarily a stand-alone theater on its own lot, but it is also NOT a re-purposed space.

It is almost crystal clear now that the 1896 Vitascope Theater in Buffalo, NY was, indeed the first permanent theater in the world designed by an architect and constructed for no other purpose than to show motion pictures. It operated for approximately 2 years (the longest known term of any such theater anywhere in the world) and exhibited to more than a quarter of a million patrons.  The theater itself was located in the basement of Ellicott Square, but entered through an exhibition space on the ground floor via a spiral staircase (which still exists). The indications are that the theater was designed by Daniel Burnham or one of his associates of Chicago, IL, but there is no proof.

4) Re-purposed Theaters and Storefronts: Over time, opera houses, music halls, vaudeville houses were re-purposed to show movies. This was generally an evolution that began to take root around 1904-6 as vaudeville and music halls faded.  This is largely the case in the UK as I understand it, and in most of Europe. The earliest known constructed movie theater in the UK is circa 1923 as I'm told.  

There are later "re-purposed storefront" theaters. A Nickelodeon "front" was sometimes applied to a storefront making the space into a "theater." One noted was opened in Detroit in 1905 on the second floor of a building erected in the 1850s. The entrance was through a penny arcade storefront on the ground floor. The second floor theater remained open until the 1970s as a movie theater. Another 1910 theater in Detroit was a storefront later converted to Burlesque that remained in use until demolished in 1969

5) Stand-alone Theater: A movie theater constructed from the ground up on an empty lot.  

The first such movie theater is unknown. Until recently, it was believed that Talley's Electric Theater (1902, Los Angeles, California) was that theater, but recent scholarship has uncovered a photo of the building and it is, after all, a storefront theater, although it may well have been purpose-built.  Talley's theaters, in the beginning, were all storefronts, so pending more information, it's hard to tell if the Electric Theater in LA was purpose-built or not or just re-purposed as a true storefront.  

The theater in Pittsburgh in 1905 was re-purposed.

So far the trail to the first Purpose-Built Standalone Motion Picture Theater is cold. There is the 1913 Regent Theater in NYC which is an intermediary between small theaters and the true Movie Palace (the first being The Mark Strand 1914, NYC, 3200 seats, also built by the Mark Brothers of Vitascope Theater fame). It is unlikely, however, that this was the first stand-alone movie theater.


Page by Chuck LaChiusa in 2008
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