The Orpheum Theatre

222 N. Michigan Street · opened November 14, 1910 · listed closed 1934 · site now a parking lot

Vaudeville came to town on a circuit, and the circuit built its own house. The Orpheum Theatre at 222 North Michigan Street was opened by the Orpheum Circuit on November 14, 1910, with five acts of vaudeville — the circuit's standard bill, routed week to week through its chain of Midwestern and Western houses. It seated 2,000, a full legitimate house by the standards of the day, and it was soon both a vaudeville and a movie theatre, the combination that the business settled into everywhere in the 1910s. Its position in the downtown that photographs preserve is fixed: in the Michigan Street views of 1927 it stands a door or two south of the State, in the same dense block of signs as the Granada — the walking record of the street names it still open in 1927 and closed by the early Depression years. The theatre record lists it as closed in 1934. The site is now a parking lot. The Orpheum matters to this record beyond its own bills: it was the circuit house, and when the Palace opened twelve years later it opened as an Orpheum-circuit house too — the circuit's second South Bend room, built to a palace's scale as the business changed under it.

Sources

1. Cinema Treasures, Orpheum Theatre (222 N. Michigan St.) — opened by the Orpheum Circuit November 14, 1910, with five acts of vaudeville; 2,000 seats; listed closed 1934; site a parking lot.
2. Jim Grey, "Downtown South Bend in 1927" (Down the Road) — the Orpheum's marquee in the Michigan Street photographs of 1927 and its closing about the turn of the 1930s.