The River Park Theater

2929 Mishawaka Avenue, River Park · opened February 12, 1927 · closed June 8, 1987 · the building stands, in use as a photography studio

The neighborhood palace, and the longest-lived of the neighborhood houses. The River Park Theater opened on February 12, 1927 — four days before the Granada — with Colleen Moore in Ella Cinders, and a Reproduco pipe organ opened by Professor Charles Mathis. Its neighborhood, River Park, was then newly a part of South Bend (its merger into the city is carried in the communities record), and the house was built to a neighbourhood's scale with a palace's manners: the trade press of November 10, 1928, already finds its owner, Joe Vogel, renovating and redecorating it, "one of the most popular neighborhood houses in the city." It never modernized its booth: to the end it remained a carbon-arc, single-reel house, its projectionist's testimony preserved in the theatre record — a machine room the multiplex era passed by entirely.

It closed for the final time on June 8, 1987 — the last picture Walk Like a Man, the last weekend matinee, the day before, a Disney reissue, The Aristocats — having outlived every downtown house except the Morris and run sixty years in one neighborhood under one name. Its last operator was the RR Entertainment Group, which also ran the Forum Cinema and, across the city line in Mishawaka, the 100 Center Cinema; that house is Mishawaka's and is noted here only as the same operator's. The building survives in commercial use. The River Park's record is the measure of the neighborhood-house era: built in the palace decade, sustained by a walkable neighborhood, and closed not by television's first blow but by the video-and-multiplex decade of the 1980s.

Sources

1. Cinema Treasures, River Park Theater — the February 12, 1927 opening and opening feature, the Reproduco organ and its organist, the June 8, 1987 closing and final feature, the building's present use.
2. Motion Picture News, November 10, 1928 (via the theatre record) — Joe Vogel's renovation of the house in its second year.
3. Projectionist testimony preserved in the Cinema Treasures commentary — the carbon-arc equipment, the last weekend's bills, the RR Entertainment Group's operation.