Columbus Indiana's Historic Crump Theatre by David Sechrest

Author:David Sechrest
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2013-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Crump’s Theatre program/advertisement from August 6, 1900. Courtesy of Randy Weinantz.

Was this the first time that moving pictures had been shown in Columbus? No. The earliest I was able to locate occurred on Saturday, November 11, 1905, with the opening of the Gem Theatre. Not much is known regarding the Gem other than it was located south of Zaharako’s in the Irwin building on Washington Street. The first movie shown at the Gem was The Moonshiners, which played the entire week. Admission was five cents for children and ten cents for adults. There were six showings a day, as well as vaudeville performances. The Gem moved out of Joseph Irwin’s building in January 1906 and disappeared altogether not too long after that.

Getting back to the Orpheum, the vaudeville shows didn’t resemble the crude and vulgar shows that played in many vaudeville houses across the country or even those that played at the local Third Street Variety Theater in the 1880s. The shows at the Orpheum were clean-cut entertainment for the entire family and appealed to children of all ages. Advertisements leading up to the opening declared that only high-class modern vaudeville could be expected. Also, the Orpheum in Columbus would differ from other branch outlets in major cities in that it would not provide daily, continuous entertainment. Instead, there were shows every evening at 8:15, a matinee for ladies on Wednesday afternoons and a children’s matinee at 3:00 p.m. each Saturday. Admission was ten cents for regular seats or fifteen cents for reserved seating.

The Orpheum was half the size of Crump’s Theatre, but it did have two things going for it: it offered a cheaper price and a constant schedule of amusements running a milk-route circuit. Admission into Crump’s had not changed since it opened in October 1889: tickets cost twenty-five cents, fifty cents or one dollar. Crump’s Theatre was much larger, but unlike the Orpheum, it did not offer weekly amusements. In fact, several weeks would sometimes go by with no production inside Crump’s whatsoever. But there was one big difference between Crump’s Theatre and the Orpheum: the quality of high-class entertainment. Crump’s was like a bottle of fine, expensive French wine. The Orpheum was akin to a draft beer. Crump’s capitalized on the larger productions of stage plays. It could accommodate companies traveling with three tons of scenery. The Orpheum could not. But there was a niche that each theater fulfilled within the community. The Orpheum was geared more to the common man, while Crump’s appealed to this with a higher level of sophistication. But the Orpheum wouldn’t be the only competition Crump’s Theatre would face. The amusement floodgates were about to be thrown open, and Columbus was about to be awash with a new technology.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.