![]() Fox managed its Dixie Theater in Macon, Georgia. A page from one of its ledgers is extant. In 1919 it placed an add with Howard-Wells Amusement Company listing their theaters in Wilmington. ![]() The company filed a lawsuit for relief from dramatically increased fees imposed on theaters by the police commissioners in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. ![]() ![]() Brooks organized a show at one of its theaters in Alabama.Īlfred Starr was involved with the company. It acquired the Savoy and Lincoln theaters in Charlotte, North Carolina's Brooklyn neighborhood. It included the Bijou Theatre and Lincoln Theatre in Nashville as well as the Royal Theatre under construction there, and the Lenox Theatre in Augusta Georgia, the Lincoln Theatre in Charleston, South Carolina, the Royal Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina, and the Lincoln Theatre in New Bern, North Carolina. In 1927, the company’s letterhead touted "Celebrating the Biggest and Best Colored Theatres in the South". History īijou is the French word for jewel and was used for theaters in various cities including New York, Chicago, and Knoxville. The fight to save the theater reached the U.S. The theater and a Masonic lodge next door were razed in the 1950s as part of an urban renewal plan and replaced by the city’s Municipal Auditorium. Boxers Tiger Flowers and Sam Langford had bouts at the venue. Performers who starred at the theater included Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, Lafayette Players, Butterbeans and Susie, Ethel Waters, and Irvin C. Milton Starr, who was part of the prominent Jewish family that owned and ran the theater, was the first president of the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA), headquartered in Chattanooga. Its Bijou Theatre in Nashville was one of the premiere venues for African American audiences in the Southern United States. It was headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. I could be wrong about this, but somehow I doubt coming generations are going to get nostalgic about the great video rental stores of their youth.Bijou Amusement Company was a movie theater business in the United States. Most vaudeville houses, of course, were eventually converted to movie theaters, and many of the latter were eventually torn down, so that today we have precious few Bijou theaters indeed, which doubtless accounts for the present sorry state of the Republic. The entrepreneurial team of Albee and Keith, said to have done for vaudeville what Rockefeller did for oil, opened Bijous in Boston and Philadephia in the 1880s, and thereafter Bijou theaters multiplied like rabbits. It later became quite popular during the vaudeville era. But the name was probably common before then. ![]() The first such joint that I know of was Hartz’s Bijou Theatre, which opened (and closed) in New York in 1870. Since theater owners have always like to advertise the attractiveness of their establishments, and since bijou has the added advantage of sounding exotic, Bijou Theater was a natural. Eventually it picked up an adjectival use as a rough synonym for “charming” or “of intricate design” with reference to architecture–e.g., a bijou cottage. The word entered the English language in the 1600s and has since resisted the most determined efforts to throw it out again. “Bijou,” originally a French word meaning “jewel” or “trinket,” was probably one of the five or six most common theater names in the country at one time (the others that occur to me offhand are Rialto, Tivoli, Adelphi, and Odeon). You say it BEE-zhoo, although depending on the neighborhood you can also get away with everything from BUY-joo to BEE-joe–when you start trying to dress up your establishment with a little dimestore French, you take your chances on pronunciation. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |