Here we see the Capitol Theater. That is, the Capitol Theater is to be under construction. And it’s early summer, probably of 1928. You can see the framework for the marquee is already in their framework. And all steel frame construction, it’s a very well built building.

Before the Capitol, Harper’s Plumbing Supply was on this site. It was a frame house that had been here since the mid-19th century. It had been various things including a famous seamstress shop. That building came down as well as a couple of others when the Capitol went up.

But don’t worry, Harper’s Plumbing Supply did not go out of business. They just moved to Washington Street, where they stayed in business until the 1960s.

 This is the Capitol just prior to opening on December 10th, 1928. You can see at this point, the letters are not in the marquee yet.

This is the Capitol just prior to opening on December 10th, 1928. You can see at this point, the letters are not in the marquee yet.

Work is still being done. Somebody up there putting bulbs in the bottom of it. That’s the original marquee. 2000 102,000 bulbs. Exactly.

Unknown number and the underside where that fellow’s putting a bulb in right now. Yeah, we have currently we have 2000 bulbs in the in the new marquee with 160 underneath and you see coming that very badly drawn caricature of Al Jolson. Because coming was Sonny Boy.

We were billed as the Million Dollar Theater. That’s an exaggeration. It was more like 750,000. The seating was also an exaggeration. They said we had 2500. We’d never had 2500seats.They liked to say everything was grander than it was, especially in an alternative theater. Also, when reporting to exhibitors, they could indicate they had more empty seats than they actually had. Everybody was doing it. It was an acceptable lie. 

This is one of the few shots we have of the mezzanine foyer. That is the area right up the stairs. It’s one of the very few pictures we have of the theater before the 1939 renovation.

And you can see we had a grand piano in there. A Gill, Brian Gould, Branson, Grand Gilberts and grand piano. We had two of them. Apparently, at one point we were told one of them wound up at another theatre because the Kallets also owned the theater in Oneida. They opened in 1937 and one of our pianos, possibly that piano wound up in that theater. And it’s still there. We’ve seen it. It’s yellow with polka dots or something that was weirdly painted.

But it is a gold branston piano, which indicates that’s probably it because there aren’t a heck of a lot of gold brands pianos around here. They had to be imported specifically for the occasion.

That’s the original 1928 carpet. You can see these little mirrored type things. That’s exactly what we have on each side of the organ chamber.

We had those upstairs. We had two of them before they put the new fabric up. You could actually see where they had been on the wall, but they were taken down in 1939.

They had painted it, as it is mentioned in the caption, gold with kind of like a distressed black effect. So you can kind of picture what that might have been like. They actually were on display for a little while before they came to the Capitol because it was kind of a big deal.

The furniture is of a more classical antique look.

In 39 everything was streamlined, so it looks pretty much like it does now.

Prior to 1929 you want it to feel like it was more of a grand kind of a room up there. The style of the room was Spanish Moroccan, and you can see the upholstery has that kind of an influence of both of those. And a lot of the time in theaters of the day, they would pick a style from a list, pick a design from a different list, pick a name from another.

There are other theaters that look almost exactly like the Capitol. A lot of that is based on the architect. Our architect was Leon Mumford Jr. And so other theaters, Lempert theaters, have a distinctive look to the inside, which we’ll talk about in a little bit.

Also, this theater was built by the Kallets locally and the Commerfords, were the chain. The Commerfords had a tendency to order their supplies from the same place, so you see a lot of fixtures in our theater that are very similar in other areas. In fact- they’re identical.

We went to Pennsylvania to visit as we found some of the things shockingly the same… almost exactly the same. And that was kind of startling.