The Northside: the smaller, newer house that brought sound first

THE NORTH SIDE · BEFORE 1929 IN THE RECORD

The Northside Theatre enters the formal record in one sentence, and the sentence gives it the city's sound first: “Sound equipment first came to Mishawaka at the newer but smaller Northside Theater,” the nomination records, before the Tivoli — generally credited at the time with the best sound in the city — reopened as a talkie house in 1929. The Northside was newer than the Tivoli and smaller than the Tivoli; that is the whole of its formal description reached, and it fixes the house in the late 1920s, built or converted in the palace's own shadow and equipped, ahead of the palace, for the technology that ended the silent era. Its primacy in sound is a useful correction to palace history generally: in Mishawaka the talkies did not arrive at the grandest room first. They arrived at the smaller, newer one, and the palace followed, with better equipment, to a capacity crowd.

The Northside stands in the standard theatre inventory as a closed Mishawaka house, demolished; its opening date, seats, address and closing are not established in the record reached, and the gap is named with its settling sources — the inventory's house file with its directory citations, the city directories, and the News-Times' 1928–29 coverage of the sound conversions, in which the Northside's first talkie program ran as news. The family-entertainment record names the Northside among the later houses through which Mishawaka's children's moviegoing ran, at pointer size from the same inventory; the children's program itself is that leg's printed gap, and it is not re-argued here.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Tivoli Theater (1997) — sound equipment first came to Mishawaka at the newer but smaller Northside Theater; the Tivoli credited with the best sound.
2. Cinema Treasures, the standard theatre inventory — the Northside Theatre, Mishawaka, carried as a closed and demolished house, one screen.
3. The family-entertainment record of this history — the Northside among the named later houses, at pointer size.