The Plaza lingered on to the end of the twentieth century as a movie house, but it finally went the way of most neighborhood cinemas. Fortunately the beautiful and distinctive façade has been preserved.
The green-tiled roof is the first thing you notice. The little round-topped dormers give the building the look of a European palace.
Terra-cotta suppliers got rich on movie houses like this one.
The marquee has been kept, which is lucky, because it was an important part of the look of the building.
Charles Geisler, who lived in the South Hills neighborhoods all his working life, was a successful architect who specialized in small to medium-sized apartment and commercial buildings. Much of his work had a tint of the Spanish Mission style. The ground floor of this building, put up in 1923, has probably changed, but the upper floors are unusually well preserved, with tiled overhang, nine-over-one windows, and carved wood brackets, making this an excellent example of Geisleriana.
This little building looks like the little brother of the building next door. Father Pitt has no direct evidence that Geisler designed it, but the two properties were under the same ownership in 1923. Given the notable similarity in the treatments of the rooflines, it is reasonable to suspect Geisler, even if we cannot yet convict him of the design.
The Rex is attributed to Geisler in city architectural surveys, although it has been remodeled more than once, and old Pa Pitt would not be surprised if one of those remodelings was under the direction of Victor A. Rigaumont, who had a prosperous practice converting the silent generation’s movie houses to up-to-date Art Deco palaces for the talkie era.
Built in 1914, the Garden was designed by Thomas Scott, who was responsible for a large number of buildings on the North Side and lived within walking distance of this one. Its last years as a theater were a bit disreputable, but it was spared the drastic exterior changes most other theaters suffered. It is now on its way to a new life as an apartment building; and, while we wish it might have been made a reputable theater again, at least the splendid terra-cotta front will be preserved.
The Manor, which opened in 1922, was designed by Harry S. Bair, who did a number of theaters around here (including the Regent, now the Kelly-Strayhorn in East Liberty). As the caption says, it was “a distinct departure from the conventional,” and the Tudor half-timbering of the exterior advertised the sumptuous club-like atmosphere of the interior. Today the exterior has been simplified, and the building expanded, but it still feels like an outpost of Merrie England on Murray Avenue.
This gable on the Darlington Road side of the building still preserves all its intricate diagonal brickwork and half-timbering.
These little chimneys should have their own separate landmark status.
Almost nothing remains of the original interior, though the Manor is still a movie house, now divided into four small theaters. Originally, the lobby was a feast of luxurious furniture and decoration.
And that was just the entrance lobby. If you were meeting someone or just waiting for something, you could retire to the parlor:
There was also a men’s club room with the atmosphere of an old English manor:
After all that, movies seem almost superfluous, but the auditorium was just as luxurious as the rest of the building:
Old Pa Pitt particularly likes the arrangement of tropical plants in the orchestra pit.
Today, although the Manor is still a very pleasant place to take in a movie, almost nothing is left of that sumptuous interior except a bit of ceiling and this fine chandelier:
The 1922 pictures all came from a two-page feature in Moving Picture World for August 5, 1922, and we reprint the text of the article here (making a few silent typographic corrections).
A fairly large building for the little town of Imperial. The depth of the building and the blankness of the ground floor make old Pa Pitt wonder whether it was used as a theater.
One of the most cheering indicators of new vitality in McKees Rocks is the Roxian, beautifully restored and adapted as a concert venue. Its glorious terra-cotta façade looks as fresh as when the building was put up.
According to its page at Cinema Treasures, this theater opened as the Braverman in 1928, just at the beginning of the sound era, but was soon renamed the Boulevard Theatre. We can see multiple layers of renovations, the most significant of which happened in 1937, when it was given the Victor Rigaumont treatment. Mr. Rigaumont was Pittsburgh’s most prolific architect of neighborhood movie palaces, and indeed his works can still be found all over the Northeast. Here the Art Deco panels on the second floor are certainly his work. The later ground-floor treatment was beamed in from the parallel universe where Spock wears a beard. After the theater closed, this was used as a Cedars of Lebanon hall for some years. Now it is a nightclub belonging to the Beechview-based Las Palmas empire, which also includes half a dozen Mexican groceries, a restaurant, and a radio station.
Old Pa Pitt apologizes for the poor pictures. The sun was behind the building, and he had gone out with nothing but a phone in his pocket, not expecting to take pictures; then a delay in his other business left him with nothing to do for half an hour on Brookline Boulevard, one of his favorite commercial streets in the city.
Though the Manor has long been subdivided into four small theaters, part of the original ceiling remains in the lobby, and this chandelier, according to staff at the theater, is an exact replica of the original.
This silent-era neighborhood movie palace has a circular history. It was built as the Olympic Theatre; when the theater closed, the building became an American Legion hall and remained in the Legion’s hands for decades; then it was converted to a nursing home. In 2019, a video-production company called Cut ‘N’ Run Productions (with an officially backwards apostrophe before the N about which old Pa Pitt can do nothing) spent a good bit of money making the building look like itself again, and it is once again in the movie business and looking splendid.
That little alley to the right of the theater is Parody Way, one of Father Pitt’s favorite alley names in Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh architect Victor A. Rigaumont designed dozens of movie houses, large and small, all over the Northeast. Most of them are gone, but a few remain, and this is one of them. It’s still open and still showing movies on a single screen.
