Thursday, July 26, 2012

The Regent Movie Theater

The Regent Movie Theater operated at 88 Main St (between Greenwood Avenue and N. Hollywood Avenue) from 1915 to 1926. A 1926 Movie theater guide lists the seating capacity as 800.


The Juggernaut showing at the theater in 1915 was a 30 minute movie that had been filmed in South River, New Jersey. A three minute version of the film is available here on Youtube




Above is from The Music Trade Review, 1915. The music business kept up with the movie theater business because the many new theaters had increased the demand for "automatic pianos."

The two articles below were in the same issue of Moving Picture World.


Summer polio epidemics created havoc in the movie theater business.  The summer, 1916 New York City area polio outbreak was particularly bad.

A 1922/23 Film Year Book lists Sol Coleman as the owner of The Regent at 86 Main Street.


Above: The building that housed The Regent Theater can be seen on the far left in this photo (photo courtesy of the Newark Public Library) taken by Dr Sam Berg in October, 1964 as he documented the area before it was destroyed to make way for I-280.

In 1925 The Strand Theater, renamed The Beacon in 1941, opened at 129 Main Street diagonally across the street from where the The Regent had been.


Tuesday, July 24, 2012

South Side of Main St Between Steuben St and Mitchell Place, Oct 1964




Above: The building in this photo had been built in 1924 as The Strand Building and the Strand Theater opened in 1925. In 1941 it became The Beacon.



Above: The Barn restaurant on the SW corner of Steuben St and Main St





Above: Looking SW along Main from the intersection of Main and Grove; Kings Supermarket would be at photographer's back



All of these photos were taken by Dr. Sam Berg in October, 1964 and document this historic neighborhood shortly before it was bulldozed to make way for I-280. The photos are from the Berg Collection and are courtesy of the Newark Public Library. The north side of Main St is here in another post. 



Sunday, July 22, 2012

Hotel Suburban


Built in 1926, the Hotel Suburban at 141 South Harrison St had 225 rooms.
















In February 1960 radio personality Dick Kollmar and his wife, columnist Dorothy Kilgallen opened up a supper club called Paris In The Sky on a newly created 11th floor in the hotel. The club featured a Paris street scene with six shops and touted its unique view of the Manhattan skyline just ten miles away.


"Dick Kollmar spent $25,000 to reproduce a typical Parisian street, complete with six shops, on the glass-enclosed terrace of his new rooftop spot, Paris in the Sky, over in East Orange, N.J. But Paris never had such a view of the skyline of Manhattan." (From a newspaper column under the name Cholly Knickerbocker, Palm Beach Daily News, February 20, 1960, p.4)



 1960
Above: The Rose Room


Above: The Mimosa Room

Below: The Crystal Room






Below: an ad from the 1965 West Orange High School yearbook

Below is from a March, 1960, syndicated NY gossip column carried in newspapers around the country:


"My New York By MEL HEIMER TV-NEW YORK--A party-goer, I am not. I could put up with them in my youth and indeed, occasionally I was the star attraction when, with four glasses of ginger ale under my belt, I recited all verses of The Highwayman. Now, in my dotage, I am inclined to shy like a frightened fawn when confronted by more than four persons in a group. However, I suppose the real reason I don't go to them In New York these days is that I'm tired of looking at other newsmen. By this time, we have exhausted our remembrances of stories we have covered and I no longer get snide Mel joined pleasure from muttering, "Hey, did you see the party, the dame giving this party? Looks just like an unmade bed." The other night, however, I broke the house rule and went up to Dorothy Kilgallen's and Dick Kollmar's East Side mansion for a cocktail joust celebrating the opening of Dick's fabulous, $500,000 "Paris In the Sky" restaurant in East Orange, N. J.-and it was a pleasure. To begin with, outside of Dorothy there weren't any other newspapermen there. I was ahead of the game right off the bat; THE PLEASURE WAS ALL MINE because the people looked so pretty. If I can drop a name or two, assorted souls such as Celeste Holm, Julia Meade, Madge Evans, Sidney Kingsley, Earl Blackwell, Gypsy Rose Lee, Ben Gazzara, Janice Rule and Candy Jones were there. They all looked as if they'd just hopped out of the bathtub. Stop hooting. Where you live, this may seem to be a small thing, but in grimy Manhattan it is not every day in the week that you run across such a gaggle of citizens who look so clean. Everyone was terribly well behaved and nobody walked up to someone else and said, "You know, I never did like you," and popped him on the nose. Now, I appreciate a good brawl as well. as the next man, but sometimes, after a hard day at the typewriter and the gin rummy table, it's nice to know that your fellows of the evening are going to be polite to one another. It Is too much to hope for, of course, that EVERYONE would be polite to one another. I noted that one celebrated former model went up to one celebrated singer and said, "You have mascara on your cheek," and the singer looked at her meditatively and said, "O. K., your teeth are crooked." But you know women. * * * * THERE WAS SMALL TALK, NATURALLY, because no cocktail party that ever was held was without small talk--but somehow, show-business people's small talk is so much more interesting than other people's. When the men gathered in little knots, they didn't talk about whether their Chevy got more miles to the gallon than Joe Doakes' Ford. And while they gossiped about people, of course, it was Big Gossip and the people they talked about were household names. Somehow, that seems to take a little of the edge off the curse of gossiping. I don't know why. I guess the most bizarre part of the evening was when everyone piled Into a couple of buses for the ride over to East Orange. There's nothing wrong with riding buses, except you don't expect to see Hope Hampton, Dorothy Kilgallen, Celeste Holm, etc., on them after you pay your 15 cents. I know I once rode down Fifth avenue in a bus with Yvonne de Carlo and, while nobody rushed up for autographs, it still seemed unnatural to me. Miss Y. de C. should be seen in nothing less than a Mercedes. Anyway, the people were pretty and the voices were kept low and everyone seemed to have a good time. Over in Jersey, they found "Paris in the Sky" to be as lush as touted, with a 68-foot terrace facing the New York skyline, a replica of an old Montmartre street and reproductions of six Parisian shops. Before the evening was out, however, I found myself talking newspaper talk with Miss Kilgallen. I suppose it figures. At least I didn't tell her I got more miles to the gallon with my Jag than she did with her Rolls."







Below: Hotel Suburban building (now an apartment building) on Google maps 2013



Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Kindergarten 1951/52, Miss Stewart, Afternoon Class

                                        Photo courtesy of John Hoagland, a student in the class

Teacher: Miss Ethel Louise Stewart; Students identified at this time: Dante Chinni, Armando Braz, Patty O'Connor, John Hoagland, Billy Van Tassell, Bob Wasner, Joseph Amirkhas