The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Opened October 12, 1908 — closed by 1956
The Calhoun Street house: The Lyric Theatre opened on October 12, 1908, at 1014 South Calhoun Street — the Lyric Theatre Building, 1012–1016 Calhoun in the 1923 city directory — as a house for vaudeville acts and movies, designed, like the Empress across downtown, by architect John M. E. Riedel. Its career traced the downtown audience's changing tastes in a single address: a vaudeville-and-pictures house in the teens, by 1929 it was operating as the Riley Theatre, a burlesque house, and around 1942 it took its third name, the Wayne Theatre. Under that name it was still showing pictures in 1955, had closed by 1956, and was torn down in the 1960s. The downtown Hilton Hotel stands on the site today. The Lyric's surviving image is a colored postcard of the Wayne Theatre, the form in which the last generation of its patrons knew it.
Sources:
- ACGSI, Allen INGenWeb, L named places — the Lyric at 1014 South Calhoun Street, opened October 12, 1908, the Riley burlesque years by 1929, the Wayne renaming about 1942, open in 1955 and closed by 1956, demolished in the 1960s, the Hilton on the site; from a Wayne Theatre postcard with Cinema Treasures comments and Randolph L. Harter, Fort Wayne, p. 26.
- R. L. Polk & Co., Fort Wayne city directory, 1923 — the Lyric Theatre Building at 1012–1016 Calhoun.
- Cinema Treasures, Strand Theatre listing — John M. E. Riedel as the Empress's architect, with the note that he also designed the Lyric Theatre.