The small houses: the rest of the roll

1900s — 1990s

Names the listings keep: Below the palaces and the named neighborhood houses stood a roll of small rooms that the surviving record holds more thinly. Cinema Treasures' Fort Wayne listings — thirty-six closed houses in all — preserve the Classic Theatre, the Colonial Theatre, the Eastern Theatre, the Family Theatre, the Isis Theater, the State Theatre, the Transfer Theatre, and the Wells Theatre from the small-house era, and a state theatre inventory adds a Capitol Theatre in Fort Wayne, carried under its later name, the Little Cinema. From the discount and late years the same listings keep the ABC Cinema, Cinema South, the Georgetown Dollar Movies, the Gateway Cinemas, and the Time Corners twin. These houses are named here so the roll is complete, with the record's limit stated plainly: their individual runs rest on the aggregator listings, and they were not documented to this section's standard in the press and directory sources reached. Two absences in the record deserve the same plain statement. No Fort Wayne house named the Orpheum appears in the directories, the county place files, or the theatre listings reached — the Orpheums the searches return belong to Louisville and Lima. And the Quest Club paper the county files cite — McNair E. Anthony's "Theater in Fort Wayne: 19th, 20th and 21st Century" (1998), at the Allen County Public Library — is the obvious next source for every thin entry in this section.

Sources:

1. Cinema Treasures, Movie Theaters in Fort Wayne, Indiana — the closed-houses list (36 entries) from which the small-house names and screen counts are taken; Indiana theatre inventory (PDF) as quoted in Cinema Treasures discussion — the Capitol Theatre, also known as the Little Cinema, demolished.
2. ACGSI, Allen INGenWeb, T named places — the McNair E. Anthony Quest Club paper citation, Allen County Public Library, and the county's own theatre list (Broadway, Clyde, Embassy, Holiday, Jefferson, Lyric, Majestic, Palace, Paramount, Rialto, Strand), in which no Orpheum appears.