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212 N. Michigan Street · opened February 16, 1927 · closed May 16, 1971 · demolished July 6, 1971
The chain palace. The Granada, at the northeast corner of Michigan and Colfax, was built by Balaban & Katz, the Chicago circuit whose name was synonymous with the deluxe picture palace, and opened on February 16, 1927, with Lewis Stone in An Affair of the Follies. It seated 2,500 — the largest film house the city ever had, the Blackstone's equal and the Palace's near-equal — was designed by Karl M. Vitzhum, who also designed Elkhart's Lerner Theatre, and opened with a three-manual Wurlitzer organ played by Floyd N. Young. By 1941 it was operated by Paramount Pictures through its John Balaban subsidiary, the same management the State came under — downtown's screens consolidating into the studio system. In the 1927 photographs of Michigan Street the Granada is the new anchor of the north end of theatre row, its marquee sharing the frame with the Orpheum and the State.
It outlasted its row by design and by size, and its end was the redevelopment era's: closed by ABC-Great States on May 16, 1971, with Robert Mitchum in Ryan's Daughter as the last feature, and demolished on July 6, 1971 — seven weeks from last picture to rubble, its ground taken into the Associates Superblock era of downtown rebuilding and the US 31 rerouting, where Michigan and St. Joseph streets now merge. No preservation campaign of record formed for the Granada; the fight for the palaces in this city was spent on the Palace a block south, twelve years before the Granada came down.
Sources
- Cinema Treasures, Granada Theatre — the Balaban & Katz opening of February 16, 1927, the opening feature, the Wurlitzer and its organist, the Vitzhum design, the Paramount operation by 1941, the May 16, 1971 closing and the July 6, 1971 demolition.
- Jim Grey, "Downtown South Bend in 1927" — the Granada new in the 1927 photographs and the superblock account of its ground.