Neighborhood theaters and Drive-in Movies

[tonyb]

When we did our restoration / renovation of our 1928 apartment we quickly learned that you have to fight against the cheap stuff, the cheap work, the cheap materials tooth and claw. Everything today is geared toward cheapness.

From fake wood floors to what feels like styrafoam molding, we fought with contractors, sub contractors, suppliers, etc. to use "real" materials like they did in '28.

We won most of the battles, the parts of the moldings we had to replace are real wood - not styrofoam, not particle board and the one door we made is solid wood and heavy as heck. Also, we got reclaimed glass for our cabinets and reclaimed wood for the kitchen floor. All look and feel great.

We also found a company in Chicago that makes tiles as close to original "1920s sanitary movement" tiles as current safety standards allow - and those tiles look and feel great versus the "sheets" of tile they tried to sell us. But I couldn't win the "don't use dry wall" battle and one bathroom ceiling that had to be replaces and a few parts of walls here and there are dry wall not plaster. At some point, you just can't fight anymore even if you're right, even if it's your money, as the time, energy and effort needed work against you

It drives me nuts when I'm cleaning the walls to go from feeling the heavy, solid, dense plaster walls of '28 to the cheap, garbage, "I could push my hand through it" walls made from dry wall - I hate that stuff.

Overall, we won about 80% of the battles and are happy we did as living in the apartment we can tell the difference. But we learned that every thing is oriented today toward cheap quality and quick installation that will look good at first, but won't last. The entire home renovation / restoration industry is so oriented that way - and to be honest, most of the clients want it that way - that we were outliers that "irritated" those who dealt with us.

And, yes, it costs more to do it our way and I assure you, we are not rich, but do believe that - in most cases - the extra money will pay off in the longevity of the materials. And beyond that, as noted, the real stuff looks (most of time) and feels better.

An old friend in Seattle sunk a bunch of work and money into a 1902-built house that had suffered greatly at the hands of remodelers. Among the craftsmen he hired was a fellow who made new walls look and feel like old walls. Yes, he used drywall, which he perforated and onto which he applied a plaster-like compound. On a curved wall in the corner of an upstairs room he added dyes to the compound which left a lovely streaked effect. Dude knew his stuff. He did walls and walls only.

 

[Fading Fast]

An old friend in Seattle sunk a bunch of work and money into a 1902-built house that had suffered greatly at the hands of remodelers. Among the craftsmen he hired was a fellow who made new walls look and feel like old walls. Yes, he used drywall, which he perforated and onto which he applied a plaster-like compound. On a curved wall in the corner of an upstairs room he added dyes to the compound which left a lovely streaked effect. Dude knew his stuff. He did walls and walls only.

Wow, that was so what we wanted and couldn't find anyway to get it. And you can only have so many subcontractors before the project becomes stupid expensive and unmanageable. But boy does he sound like the guy we wanted.

To be fair, the contractor we hired helped us find and use reclaimed wood and glass, which made a big difference (the glass is old, quirky, wavy and "heavier" at the bottom where it flowed down over time). And he was fine with things like brush painting (most want to use spray and give everything a lacquer-perfect finish - which is what people want today, but is not at all period), but on the walls - no luck.

 

[tonyb]

Wow, that was so what we wanted and couldn't find anyway to get it. And you can only have so many subcontractors before the project becomes stupid expensive and unmanageable. But boy does he sound like the guy we wanted.

To be fair, the contractor we hired helped us find and use reclaimed wood and glass, which made a big difference (the glass is old, quirky, wavy and "heavier" at the bottom where it flowed down over time). And he was fine with things like brush painting (most want to use spray and give everything a lacquer-perfect finish - which is what people want today, but is not at all period), but on the walls - no luck.

Details matter, for sure. Another friend who has another 19-oh-something house near the place I alluded to above salvaged moldings and doors and old windows, etc. from a house slated for demolition right nearby, largely because most of that stuff matched what was originally in his place -- a large single family house that had been converted to a triplex several decades ago, by people who gave no apparent thought to maintaining its original style. Like that other friend, he has been undoing those earlier "improvements."

 

[LizzieMaine]

A lot of those kinds of renovations were done in the early 1940s under the "Homes For Defense" program -- there was a shortage of housing for workers in defense-related industires, and the FHA offered a low-interest loan program to homeowners who would turn parts of their houses into as many apartments as possible to house these workers. Aesthetics had nothing to do with it, and homeowners were strongly encouraged not to place such considerations before getting the maximum available space out of a given house. It was suggested that any family living in a two story home owed it to the war effort to confine themselves to the first floor only and turn the upstairs into one or more separate apartments. A great many old Victorian houses were subdivided this way before the end of the war.

 

[tonyb]

A lot of those kinds of renovations were done in the early 1940s under the "Homes For Defense" program -- there was a shortage of housing for workers in defense-related industires, and the FHA offered a low-interest loan program to homeowners who would turn parts of their houses into as many apartments as possible to house these workers. Aesthetics had nothing to do with it, and homeowners were strongly encouraged not to place such considerations before getting the maximum available space out of a given house. It was suggested that any family living in a two story home owed it to the war effort to confine themselves to the first floor only and turn the upstairs into one or more separate apartments. A great many old Victorian houses were subdivided this way before the end of the war.

I suspect that some of the extant examples survived later "urban renewal" efforts because, as multi-family structures, they still pencilled out during the era of white flight.

Those close-in districts surely have turned around in more recent times, in many cities, anyway.

While I'm friends with people who have saved such houses, have put them back into a good condition sensitive to their original architecture, I know I'm not the person to tackle such a project myself. Don't have the skills, nor the interest in acquiring them. Not at this point in my life.

 

[Fading Fast]

Details matter, for sure. Another friend who has another 19-oh-something house near the place I alluded to above salvaged moldings and doors and old windows, etc. from a house slated for demolition right nearby, largely because most of that stuff matched what was originally in his place -- a large single family house that had been converted to a triplex several decades ago, by people who gave no apparent thought to maintaining its original style. Like that other friend, he has been undoing those earlier "improvements."

I know I've mentioned it before, but we got moldings, fixtures, medicine cabinets, tiles, etc. from other apartments in the same building that were doing renovations as they were just throwing the stuff out. We were psych to get the stuff as - being from the same building - it all fit and was what had originally been in our apartment. And it's neat that we could keep it all in its original building even if in a different apartment. To each his own, but we were stunned at how people couldn't care less about the original stuff.

 

[AmateisGal]

Our small town (1600 people) in western Nebraska had a drive-in theater and a downtown theater. I never got to go to the downtown one as it was in a sad state of disrepair by the time I was born. They tore it down probably 20+ years ago.

But oh, the drive-in theater...I have terrific memories of going to it not only as a kid, but when I was in high school and a few years in college, as well.

 

[BlueTrain]

It seems a little surprising that a drive-in would last as long as an old-fashioned downtown theater but that seems to have been the case. That is, if there was one. I suppose it may have been just as difficult to find the right place for a drive-in as it was for a movie theater, which required a special building. When I moved to the DC area around 1973, there were still four or five drive-ins around here, although I'm thinking of a lot of territory, maybe a fifty mile circle more or less. But I can only remember a handful of single-screen theaters. One only showed old movies, too old to be called re-runs. One was noted for it's huge screen when multi-screen theaters were coming in. All the same, some of the multiplexes are very nice theaters even if they aren't much like the old theaters I went to when I was still in public school. A particularly sad thing to me was how some of the older theaters ended their days showing adult-only movies.

 

[Fading Fast]

While most of us (I think) think of drive-ins as being on a road somewhere in a not heavily populated area (as least I normally do), growing up, there was a drive in, literally, just outside the Holland Tunnel on the Jersey side in an insanely densely populated part of New Jersey where buildings are piled on top of buildings and everything is jammed up next to everything else. I can't exaggerated how tight this part of Jersey is - as a kid I remember being mesmerized driving by as there was none of NYC's impressiveness, but all of its crowdedness without the height.

But right there, close to the tunnel there was a drive-in theater. In a way, it looked like an old in-city baseball stadium where a space seemed to have been carved out of the surrounding density and this thing - a drive-in theater or baseball stadium - was plopped down. It was very cool to be coming out of the tunnel at night as the egress road was elevated and you could see the movie screen for a few minutes of driving.

 

[BlueTrain]

I've not been through the Holland Tunnel but I've been through New Jersey and I've been to Oklahoma. Drive-in movie theaters aside, cities and towns large and small in the past tended to be crowded. There was little of the sprawl that started when cars became widely owned and a suburb consisted of very large houses on very large lots. Some neighborhoods in the District of Columbia were considered suburbs when they were built. For most towns and cities, main highways went right through the middle of town, too, creating serious traffic issues. They were eventually solved by the building of bypasses, which in some cases, resulted in a strip development, overcome years later by the construction of yet another bypass.

In my hometown, one place I am most familiar with for the period of the 1950s and 1960s, the downtown was naturally two parallel rows of buildings, mostly two or three stories high with a few rather higher. The building touched each other on either side and it was that way for a stretch of about three or four blocks. There was a gap of a few blocks, then another section of the same road, also about three or four blocks long, built the same way. That was the part that ended at the train station and had already begun to decay when I lived there and the trains no longer stopped. Yet another two blocks near the courthouse was dense, but only on one side. Some neighborhoods of rather nice houses had very narrow lots and the houses were close to one another. The town was decidedly urban, though it was by most standards, a small town. One could walk most places if you lived in town, at least if you didn't live more than two or three blocks from the main street. But you had to drive to the drive-in.

 

[BlueTrain]

I was leafing through a book I have about movie series (not serials). You know, the Hopalong Cassidy series, the Range Busters, Tarzan and so on. It's recent enough to include James Bond, at least the early ones.

In the college town where I went to school, there was a movie theater named the Warner. Only much later did I learn that it was owned by Warner Brothers studio. That came to an end even before I learned about it. I even wonder if any of those movie theaters there are still open.

 

[tonyb]

I know I've mentioned it before, but we got moldings, fixtures, medicine cabinets, tiles, etc. from other apartments in the same building that were doing renovations as they were just throwing the stuff out. We were psych to get the stuff as - being from the same building - it all fit and was what had originally been in our apartment. And it's neat that we could keep it all in its original building even if in a different apartment. To each his own, but we were stunned at how people couldn't care less about the original stuff.

I subscribe to Architectural Digest and Dwell and Elle Decor. Frequently featured in such rags are accounts (accompanied by lots of pretty pictures) of NYC apartments that had been gutted and made over by their new owners, often with the guidance of "name" designers. The results are often stunning, which you might expect, seeing how the renovations cost a whole lotta dough and were carried out by people who really know their stuff. But I'd wager that for every such project worthy of inclusion in those publications there are hundreds (thousands, probably) of projects "inspired" by those super high-end renovations which, from my perspective, are mostly a big waste of money and violations of good aesthetic sense.

I wouldn't wish to live in a museum, but I know not to fight what my living space has to offer. Antiques and modern pieces can play together well, but this 1977-built suburban ranch-style house will never be anything but a 1977-built suburban ranch-style house. I sure as hell ain't gonna give it the "Country Living" treatment, nor the "high-rise uptown condo" look.

 

[BlueTrain]

I seem to have left off the main point in my post above. My question was, why are movie theaters name "Bijou?" The name of the book was Afternoon at the Bijou.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's a French loan-word that means "elegant, ritzy, super-deluxe." Theatre owners in the Era had no shame whatsoever about naming any frowsy fly-blown fleapit "The Bijou," because after all, in show bidness you don't sell the steak, you sell the sizzle.

There were a lot of theatre names that have no particular meaning other than as a theatre name. I get asked all the time "What's a 'strand,'" and I explain that it's named after the Strand in Times Square, which was some punkins when it opened in 1914. That Strand, in turn, was named after the Strand in London, a street which was the center of that city's theatrical district in the 19th Century. We're the center of our local theatrical district in the 21st Century, as in we're the only theatre on the street, so I guess it's still somewhat relevant. Calling a theatre "the Rialto" is the same idea, except the street in question was in Venice instead of London.

Other popular theatre names in the Era usually followed the same idea of implying cosmopolitan elegance and swank, even if the theatre in question was a leaky beaverboard shack with peanut shells on the floor.

 

[BlueTrain]

I think there used to be a one-frame comic strip that appeared in the paper when I was little called "Some punkins." Or something like that. Another single-frame comic was "There outta be a law."

Neither movie house in my hometown had a claims to grandeur. They happened to be across the street from one another; neither are still open. In fact, I don't think there's a movie theater anywhere there now. One of the two was originally named the "Royal." It was remodeled sometime in the 1950s and renamed the "LaVon." The owner of the building was named Von Court. Another theater in the closest town (of about 35,000) had a big movie theater but I don't remember the name. It was rather impressive but details are long forgotten. But I was more impressed by the parking garage in town.

 

[vitanola]

It's a French loan-word that means "elegant, ritzy, super-deluxe." Theatre owners in the Era had no shame whatsoever about naming any frowsy fly-blown fleapit "The Bijou," because after all, in show bidness you don't sell the steak, you sell the sizzle.

Small point: "Bijou" referred to a "little jewel or trinket" . It suggests "small and elegant". A neighborhood house or a small town theater might be called "The Bijou", but a big presentation house? Never!

 

[Fading Fast]

I subscribe to Architectural Digest and Dwell and Elle Decor. Frequently featured in such rags are accounts (accompanied by lots of pretty pictures) of NYC apartments that had been gutted and made over by their new owners, often with the guidance of "name" designers. The results are often stunning, which you might expect, seeing how the renovations cost a whole lotta dough and were carried out by people who really know their stuff. But I'd wager that for every such project worthy of inclusion in those publications there are hundreds (thousands, probably) of projects "inspired" by those super high-end renovations which, from my perspective, are mostly a big waste of money and violations of good aesthetic sense.

I wouldn't wish to live in a museum, but I know not to fight what my living space has to offer. Antiques and modern pieces can play together well, but this 1977-built suburban ranch-style house will never be anything but a 1977-built suburban ranch-style house. I sure as hell ain't gonna give it the "Country Living" treatment, nor the "high-rise uptown condo" look.

I've been in some of those super crazy "perfectly done" apartments; several of the architects we talked with showed us their work on those places (architect industry secret - even some of the very successful ones still take on small, humble projects like our as they have capacity and staff to keep employed and the "big" jobs aren't always offered to them - we ended up not using one of them, but still had interesting experiences meeting them) and they are "beautiful" in an Architectural Digest way, just, as you noted, not at all how my girlfriend or I want to live.

I respect and appreciate what they've accomplished, but being sincere, I don't really like it. It's all too perfect, too thought out, too stylized, too designed by plan; they don't feel organic, comfortable, personable. It's not sour grapes as if we had more money, we'd have done more things with our apartment, but it would not have been to give it a Architectural-Digest look.

For example, we sanded and refinished our floors which are from '28. Hence, there are many imperfections as divots, carpet tacks, and other deep bumps and bruises from almost ninety years of living can't all be sanded and stained away. We love those imperfections, but one of the "high-end" architects was horrified (she sincerely couldn't understand) that we didn't want to "rip out" the old floors and put down perfect new ones (we knew on the first meeting we wouldn't be hiring her). Another one was apoplectic that we wanted to leave the original radiators exposed - he couldn't wrap his mind around that and suggested eight different ways that we take them out (and incorporate them into a hidden unit) or, at minimum (said by him with disdain) build radiator covers.

I don't believe we are "right" and they are "wrong," it's just different tastes and desires. Those "perfect" homes feel like sets to me - not homes; but it's all just opinion.

On a very similar theme: check out this NYT article from this weekend:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/realestate/prewar-is-so-last-year.html?_r=0

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^
Tearing out the old floors (in the apartment featured in the NYT story) was a crime. I can see opening up some of the spaces, as they did, to make one or two larger rooms from what had been three or four smaller ones, but mostly what I saw in that piece was a couple hundred grand down the toilet.

 

[BlueTrain]

Well, the Architectural-Digest Look covers a lot of territory. About the only think in common throughout the spreads is that they are expensive rooms and usually real expensive. But having lived in all sorts of student housing in college (but not in a dorm), barracks in the army and an honest-to-goodness log house in West Virginia, I'm not so particular. I probably wouldn't want to live in any house that had "charm," because charm usually doesn't come cheap. But I'm married and what I want is irrelevant anyway.

One of the most famous architects of the 20th century was Frank Lloyd Wright. I don't think he ever designed motion picture theaters (but might have), but he wasn't above designing small houses. As you probably know, he designed houses he called "Usonian" houses. They are fascinating, clever, almost ingenious, thoroughly practical, very stylish in their own way and just about the last kind of house I'd want to live in. I'm rather taken by Philip Johnson's Glass House, however. But I don't think it has a basement and that's a deal breaker.

 

[Haversack]

When I was in architecture school, I came up with a list of semi-heretical questions, quotations, and musings. I don't have it immediately to hand but a couple which come to mind are:
1. Which are the most important to please, and in what order? The client, the users, the neighbors, yourself, the architecture magazines…
2. Architecture is a three-legged stool. The legs are structure and engineering, aesthetics, and human use. Don't let one dominate over the others.
3. First we shape our buildings, then our buildings shape us.

The aesthetic of pristine smooth pale surfaces everywhere and opening up all the public spaces in a dwelling appeals to many designers and to some clients. (The house as blank canvas stage upon which to stand out). It is an aesthetic that does not appeal to me. I liken it to olefin carpets. Soft and brilliant when new but quickly showing wear and dirt. And with the kitchen open to all the other public spaces, what will those pristine surfaces look like after a couple years of real cooking?