MOVIE THEATERS From nickelodeons to multiplexes, the evolution of motion picture houses in Cleveland reflects national trends. The Empire Theater (opened on Huron Rd. in 1900) was built for vaudeville, but it interspersed cinema as early as 1901, when customers viewed a short film of Queen Victoria’s funeral. According to the dean of local movie critics, W. WARD MARSH, Cleveland’s first actual movie theater appeared two years later in 1903, when The Great Train Robbery began showing at the American Theater on Superior Ave. near E. 6th St. It was operated by Samuel Bullock, who endeavored to give his house respectability by paying women to enter the darkened auditorium. Bullock eventually became part-owner of 5 movie theaters and a founder of the Cleveland Motion Picture Exhibitors Assn. By WORLD WAR I, the city was dotted with silent movie houses bearing such fanciful names as Wonderland, Fairyland, Moonlight, Lark, See It, and Enjoy U. A total of 32 movie listings appeared in 1917, including 7 downtown, 15 on the east side, and 10 on the west side.
The period between the world wars was the heyday of motion pictures. At the newly-dubbed PLAYHOUSE SQUARE a four-theater complex was built in 1921-22; the ALLEN and the STATE featured movies from the beginning, while the OHIO and the PALACE added them later. Playhouse Square’s many cinematic neighbors included the STILLMAN (built in 1916 on Euclid Ave. west of East 12th St.), the Miles (opened in 1913 on E. 9th St. at the intersection of Huron and Prospect aves.), and the HIPPODROME (built in 1907 on Euclid Ave. west of East 9th St.). The Stillman showed movies from the start. The Miles featured vaudeville initially and soon converted to movies with successive rechristenings as the Great Lakes Movie Theater, the Miles (again), the Federal and, finally, the Carter. The Hippodrome began as a high-end showcase for operas, plays, and vaudeville performances and evolved to a movies-only venue by the early 1930s.
The opulence that characterized most downtown movie houses often spilled over into the neighborhoods. An Aztec motif marked the Doan Theater at St. Clair Ave. and E. 105th St., while the Granada on Detroit Ave. at W. 117th St. boasted a starry sky twinkling from the ceiling above its Spanish-style decor. KEITH’S 105TH ST. THEATER near Doan’s corners featured accoutrements such as an ivory, rose, and gilt lobby and 3,000 rose-velvet seats. One of the last of the great neighborhood houses, the COLONY THEATER at SHAKER SQUARE, gave Cleveland one of its finest Art Deco interiors. Specialty houses also made their appearance. The city's first art theater, the Little Theater of the Movies, opened at Chester Ave. and E. 9th St. in 1927 with the Russian classic Potemkin. Drive-in movies made their local debut in 1938 at the forthrightly named Drive-In Theater on Northfield Rd., where the ushers rode bicycles and the soundtrack initially was dispersed through 8 large speakers mounted atop the outdoor screen. During WORLD WAR II, the public's appetite for news was met by a downtown theater specializing in newsreels: the Telenews near PUBLIC SQUARE.
Movie houses adopted a number of devices to cope with their first great threat, the economic downturn of the Depression. Most pervasive was Bank Night, which offered cash prizes to those whose names were drawn. About 30 local theaters successfully challenged a 1936 police ruling that the practice violated state anti-lottery laws. Other popular audience come-ons included China Night, Crystal Night, and a Bingo-like game called Screeno. Double features also were common by the mid-1930s. If such gimmickry couldn't restore prosperity, World War II, with its gasoline rationing, made the neighborhood movie theater the home front's most popular form of entertainment. V-J Day (15 Aug. 1945) marked the apogee of the movie theater, as a total of 101 venues were listed in Cuyahoga County. Besides 12 downtown houses and 2 drive-ins, they included 68 theaters in the city and 19 in the SUBURBS. Typically, movies opened locally in one of the 6 first-run houses downtown before being released to the neighborhoods. Most of the area’s film distributors were centralized in or near the FILM EXCHANGE BUILDING at 2108 Payne Ave.
The postwar impact of TELEVISION and the rush to the suburbs was cataclysmic. Forty of greater Cleveland’s movie theaters were gone by 1952, their spacious auditoriums appropriated by such heirs as bowling alleys, churches, and furniture stores. Among the casualties were the Ambassador, Jennings, Knickerbocker, Lincoln, Memphis, Moreland, Norval, Rex, Rialto, and Stork. Even the proud first-run theaters downtown had screened their last major feature by 1969, although the EMBASSY THEATER (709 Euclid Ave.), held on until the mid-1970s by showing action-type karate films. In an ironic twist, the Lake Theater at Euclid Ave. and E. 17th St. was converted into studios for WJW-TV. A few other venues were granted an ignominious reprieve as "skin houses" for the showing of adult movies. The highest-profile example was the Heights Art Theater, a former neighborhood house in the COVENTRY VILLAGE BUSINESS DISTRICT. Although it didn’t begin showing “skin flicks” until later, the 1964 obscenity case of JACOBELLIS V. OHIO went all the way to the US Supreme Court.
Cleveland-area drive-in theaters enjoyed a brief postwar zenith with 10 in existence by the 1950s and 16 in 1974. Land scarcity increasingly pushed them outside county limits and this, combined with the arrival of the VCR (accompanied by the rise of film-rental operations like Blockbuster) led to drive-ins’ near demise by the 1980s.
The real wave of the future for movie houses began with the construction of the first modern suburban shopping center theaters in the 1960s. The first twin theater appeared at Parmatown in 1967, and the first quad (4 screens) at Westgate in 1971. Many of the surviving older theaters were converted to twin or triple screens, and new "multiplex" theaters were subdivided into more but ever smaller spaces in order to attract a fragmenting audience and maximize the benefits of automated projection equipment. When Hoyts Tower City Cinemas opened in 1991, it gave downtown 11 movie screens where none had existed for years. Movie listings in 1995 yielded only 27 theater locations within Cuyahoga County, but among them they harbored a total of 145 screens. Serious film buffs also had alternative, niche options such as the CLEVELAND INTL. FILM FESTIVAL and showings at the Cedar-Lee Theater and CLEVELAND CINEMATHEQUE.
After changing ownership in 1998, Tower City Cinemas held on for almost two more decades and, for 30 years, was the home of the highly-touted Cleveland Intl. Festival. The complex’s death spiral began in 2019 when the Festival moved its showings to Playhouse Square. The Covid-19 epidemic drove the nail in further and, by 2024, the operation was closed permanently. Other multiplexes were shuttered around this time, including those in CLEVELAND HTS., RICHMOND HTS., and Solon.
Today, virtually all Cleveland-area theaters (roughly one dozen) have multiple screens and the most significant challenge is surviving in the world of streaming. Without question, services such as Netflix, Prime, and Peacock have negatively affected theater attendance and revenue. However, streaming also has become a powerful way to promote theatrical releases, and some new films are shown in theaters before being made available to viewers at home. Looking ahead, a small bright spot is that theater operators have human nature on their side: Going out to a movie can be a special social occasion, particularly in the case of upscale venues like Silverspot Cinema, which combines movies with dining opportunities, extra screenings, and private events. Net-net, the future of movie theaters is not altogether bleak. People connect at the movies.
John Vacha
Updated by Christopher Roy 13 February 2025