The Tivoli: the talkies, the receivership, and the downtown years

1929 — MAY 1958

The year 1929 remade the house three ways: another new manager; a minor fire in the foundation of the stage; and the conversion that mattered — the Tivoli passed to operation by the Columbia Picture Corporation of Chicago, in the nomination's naming, was wired for sound with DeForest Phonofilm equipment, and reopened for talkie pictures to a capacity crowd for Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl. Sound had come to Mishawaka first at the Northside, as this section's Northside entry records; the Tivoli's answer was to be credited, generally, with the best sound in the city — the palace's equipment out-performing the smaller house that had beaten it to the technology. Vaudeville, the other half of the house's founding bill, was draining away in the same years across the country: in the decade 1920–1930, the nomination notes, nearly seventy percent of America's vaudeville theaters closed or converted under the motion picture's rise. The Tivoli's stage, its dressing rooms and its ten-piece orchestra belonged to an economy that the talkies ended; the house that opened with three vaudeville acts and a photoplay closed the decade as a full-time picture house.

The 1930s were the struggle the directories record. The storefronts stood vacant in 1931 and 1932; the theater itself went through a court-ordered receivership in the Depression years; and the house operated, in the nomination's summary, at the difficulty common to its kind — a 1,500-seat room, built for the crowds of 1925, carrying itself through a decade that could not fill it. What the record reached does not carry is the texture of those years at Mishawaka scale — the bank nights, the dish nights, the serial Saturdays of national practice — and the file does not import them: the family-entertainment record prints the children's-program gap for all of Mishawaka's houses, the Tivoli included, and the settling sources named there govern here as well. What stands is the course: the Tivoli continued to operate as a motion-picture facility without interruption until May 1958, and when it closed then, it closed as the only remaining theater in downtown Mishawaka — the Century, the Temple, the Northside and the unnamed rooms of 1925 all gone from the record before it, and the palace the last of its downtown line. The nomination fixes the national frame with the Film Daily Year Book's count: 19,489 theaters operating in America in 1925, the Tivoli's year; 16,000 in 1958, the year it went dark.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Tivoli Theater (1997) — the 1929 manager, stage-foundation fire, Columbia Picture Corporation operation, DeForest sound installation and the capacity reopening with The Godless Girl; the vaudeville conversion figure for 1920–1930; the vacant storefronts of 1931–32 and the court-ordered receivership; continuous motion-picture operation until May 1958 as the only remaining downtown theater; the Film Daily Year Book counts for 1925 and 1958.