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New York City: Claremont Theater, Manhattanville - 1915
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1915 Edison Manufacturing Co.
The Claremont Theatre
3320-3338 Broadway (a.k.a. 536-540 West 135th Street) in Manhattanville.
The village of Manhattnville was established in 1806 in a valley at the crossroads of Bloomingdale Road and Manhattan Street (Broadway and 125th Street).
The community was the site of churches, a grade school, and Manhattan College (1853). A ferry terminus on the Hudson River, a mill, and a brewery contributed to a thriving enclave that had about five hundred residents at mid century.
- (excerpt) Karen E. Markoe / Encyclopedia of New York City - Edited by Kenneth T. Jackson
''The Claremont Theater is one of the oldest structures in New York City planned specifically to exhibit motion pictures, originally called ''photoplays.'' Located in north Manhattanville, at the southeast corner of Broadway and 135th Street, the theater opened in November 1914. Commissioned by Arlington C. Hall and Harvey M. Hall of the Wayside Realty Company, it was designed in the neo-Renaissance style by Gaetano Ajello, an architect best known for apartment buildings on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The building has three distinct fronts, including a clipped corner façade where the auditorium's entrance was originally located. This distinctive arrangement enhanced the theater's visibility and increased the amount of retail space. The corner, consequently, received the most elaborate decorative treatment and is embellished with an elegant low relief depicting an early motion picture camera set on a tripod. In 1915 Thomas Edison produced a short film (seen here) in which the theater's entrance is prominently featured. Filmed from across Broadway, it depicts groups of men, women, and children exiting the building. The second floor accommodated a large restaurant and ballroom, known under such names as the Broadway-Claremont or Clarendon Restaurant, and later, the Royal Palms Ballroom and Roof Garden. Until the early years of the Depression, area residents gathered here to eat, drink, and dance. Beginning in the late 1920s, the storefronts were leased to automobile-related businesses and by 1933 the theater closed and the interior was converted to an automobile showroom. Despite such changes, the exterior is well-preserved and remains a symbol of the growing popularity of the motion picture in the early twentieth century.''
- Designation List 375, Landmarks Preservation Commission / June 6, 2006
Lincoln Highway Groundbreaking - 1915
A promotional film for the Lincoln Highway from 1915, this short reel shows a groundbreaking ceremony for Carl G. Fisher's dream project, the first coast-to-coast automobile highway. Conceived by headlight entrepreneur Fisher, also said to be the first car dealer in US history, the man, like many an American, seems to have become a visionary in the eternal quest of making the almighty buck. In fact, the Lincoln Highway was the first memorial to Abraham Lincoln, predating the monument in Washington, DC by perhaps more than ten years.
So They Tell Me - 1919
Weirdo Video Exclusive So They Tell Me, circa 1919, skewers the top headlines of its day, the World War I era. Crude animation attempts to punctuate the sardonic and off-color humor supplied by political raconteur Warren W. Brown(?). Though the jokes are somewhat esoteric by today's standards, the tone straddles between bombastic entertainment and nativist propaganda. Targets include labor activist Eugene Debs, Prohibition, the League of Nations, the Wobblies, Russian & German instability, the Bolsheviks, and fat women in bathing suits and burnt Christmas pudding. An interesting snapshot of the mood of the US during the war at the beginning of the last century, WWI.
