A Century of Stories

July 15, 2016

THE STATE THEATRE AT 100

When Traverse City’s Lyric Theatre opened its doors on July 4, 1916, it already had competition. Two other theaters had long since staked claim to Front Street. But it was evident from the moment the Lyric’s long line of gilt front doors swung open to the enraptured public, this particular movie house was special.

A newspaper article about the new theater’s opening gushed: “A glance through the four double door entrances shows that one is about to enter a house that is strictly bigcity style.”

What that reporter couldn’t know, of course, is how resilient that chic house of “big-city style” would prove to be. Over the next century, the theater would survive not one but two fires, witness cinema’s evolution — and its own — then endure a tragic decline, and finally, a rebirth so grand, the Motion Picture Academy of America today considers it the No. 1 movie theater in the world. Here, the Northern Express raises the curtain on the storied history of 233 E. Front St.

A GRAND OPENING

The Lyric opened in a complex of build ings owned by Julius Steinburg, a shrewd and clever man who had, at age 21, disguised himself as a woman to avoid military conscription and fled Czarist Russia.

Part huckster, part visionary, Steinburg in America quickly evolved from traveling peddler to wealthy merchant. His grandiose plans in Traverse City: to open “the finest opera north of Chicago,” one that would compete with the City Opera House, a mere block away.

He placed an ad for one of his stores, proclaiming his demands to the public: “$10,000 must be raised at once to complete Steinburg’s Magnificent Block. Goods will be slashed and prices ruined to accomplish this result.”

The Steinburg Opera House opened in 1894, but it turned out that the City Opera House wouldn’t be his chief competitor for long. Silent films soon shouldered into his business. But perhaps ironically, it would be a cinema that made his block truly magnificent. The Lyric was built in space Steinburg owned around the same time performances at his opera house ended.

While Steinburg’s opera house vanished with a whisper, his Lyric arrived with a bang. Over 3,000 people crowded Front Street for its opening day. Some of the first films that played at the Lyric were D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance and Charlie Chaplin’s The Cure.

As for other details about the Lyric’s opening day and year, they’ve been challenging to uncover, said Sally Michel, a Traverse City Film Festival historian; the Traverse City Record-Eagle’s 1916 archive was lost in a fire.

Michel only discovered the Lyric’s opening date when she combed through newspapers from Manistee and read about an organ player who was headed to Traverse City for a theater opening. More details emerged last year when a stash of 1916 newspapers was discovered in an estate sale, enabling Michel to find an article detailing the Lyric’s opening.

A THEATER ABLAZE

Fire is a regular visitor to this history. One broke out before 2:55am on Jan. 17, 1923, when someone rang the fire station and said simply, “They want you at the Lyric.”

Firefighters arrived in a minute, but the building was already ablaze. Worse yet, three occupants of the apartments housed above the theater — Mrs. E.J. Miller and Mrs. Frank Anderson and her young son — were trapped atop the burning roof.

Flame and smoke had blocked the hallways. Their only escape had been through a window on top of the portico above the theater’s entrance.

As the fire blazed, the three stood atop the burning structure, shivering in their night clothes, barefoot and screaming for help. Firefighters clambered up a ladder to bring the refugees down, averting tragedy. “Mrs. Miller’s condition was serious,” the Record-Eagle reported. “Her limbs were nearly frozen, and she fainted from the cold just before being carried to safety.”

THE AFTERMATH

The theater was a total loss. The roof had caved in during the firefight, and all that remained was smoking ruins. The buildings on each side, however, were saved, including the shuttered Steinburg Opera House, which by then was used for storage.

In a time when entire blocks, and sometimes entire cities, were felled by fire, losing only the Lyric was considered a victory for the firefighters. The team, which included 30 volunteers, had braved cruel conditions; temperatures had hovered around zero that night, and the men reportedly had to chop ice from their hands and boots as they worked the hoses.

The cause of the fire was never discovered. It had started under the stage, and officials speculated that the source might have been spontaneous combustion. Another theory was raised that an organ repairman from Chicago had unwittingly sparked the blaze. It made sense; he’d worked just hours before the fire at the exact spot the flames had started. Nevertheless, the newspaper reported that the fire’s origin forever would be unknown.

“Apparently the case of the fire that destroyed the Lyric Theatre early Wednesday morning will remain a mystery,” a reporter wrote.

In addition to the three lives rescued from the rooftop, only a cash register that contained $100 was saved. The region’s oldest instrument, a double bass that had been stored in the basement, was lost. Musical scores had become ash. Mrs. Miller lost a fur coat, reportedly worth $1,600 then, which is $22,500 in today’s dollars, according to the Consumer Price Index inflation calculator. The total damages were estimated at $75,000, or just over $1 million today.

Nonetheless, theater chain Fitzpatrick & McElroy Co. vowed to rebuild from the Lyric’s ashes and construct on Front Street the largest and most modern movie theater in northern Michigan.

Company officials said the fire had not been completely unfortunate because they had already had their eye on the property and had hoped to acquire it from the Steinburg estate, demolish the theater and build a modern movie house.

“GEE KID, AIN’T IT SWELL?”

The new Lyric theatre reopened on Dec. 19, 1923 with the film Hearts Ablaze, based on a novel by Traverse City resident Harold Titus.

The film had been released earlier in the year but was held by the theater company for the special occasion. The new theater was loudly proclaimed to be the finest north of Grand Rapids.

“Throngs find the theater even more beautiful than advertised,” a reporter noted. “Every patron emerged with an exclamation of praise ranging from ‘It is lovely, indeed,’ to ‘Gee, kid, ain’t it swell?’” According to the newspaper article, the movie went over well and included extra snippets that featured the novelist working at his home on Washington Street. It does not say whether Titus actually attended the event.

Hearts Ablaze was considered one of the most notable films of that year, portraying the devastation of pine forests in Michigan by the “ruthless axe of the pioneer lumbermen.”

The movie and Titus’s novel upon which it was based, “Timber,” helped spur a conservation movement in Michigan that led to reforestation and enthusiasm from legislators to spend money on fighting and preventing forest fires.

As for the structure of the new Lyric itself, the newspaper made one prediction that turned out to be unfortunate. The paper proclaimed that the ingenious building was immune to the danger of fire. It took a quarter century, but time would disprove that promise.

MORE THAN HEARTS ABLAZE

On Saturday, Jan. 3, 1948, fire again struck the Lyric Theatre. It was the city’s biggest fire loss in more than a decade, with damages estimated to run around $150,000, or $1.5 million in today’s dollars. Again, the cause of the fire was never determined.

A woman in the Miller Apartments, which were housed in an adjoining building, was the first to notice the fire at 6am; she was awakened by a crackling noise.

Residents fled. Within minutes, the entire building was in flames. By 6:30am, the roof collapsed, compromising the firewall between the theater and the building next door.

Firefighters battled for four hours to keep the fire from jumping to adjacent buildings, and they succeeded, despite disadvantages. (The city had recently invested in upgrades for the fire department, but the aerial ladder truck it had ordered had not yet been delivered.)

The fire was thought to have started in the rear of the building, near the stage. The custodian reported that when he left at 1am, everything was normal.

Once again, a mystery fire. And once again, an undaunted visionary — this time new owner Butterfield Theaters — came forward, determined to rebuild again, this time better than ever.

FRONT STREET GETS AN ICON

It’s hard to imagine today how modern the State Theatre must have looked to the people of 1949. But when it opened on June 30, 1949, its sleek, avant-garde style was jawdropping.

It boasted a bold facade of red macotta tile, a marquee blazing with hundreds of lights, and a sign reading “State Theatre” in a style emblematic of post-World War II chic. Inside, enormous murals — futuristic depictions of the symbols of the region, pine trees and cherry orchards — covered the east and west walls.

The first film shown at this new incarnation was It Happens Every Spring. Tickets cost 35 cents for adults, 12 cents for children.

The Record-Eagle called the theater “one of the finest and most modern movie houses in the state.”

At that time it was the third theater on Front Street. Across the street stood the Tra-Bay, and a block over was the Michigan Theater, which had opened in 1941. The entertainment page might have appeared crowded with ads from competing theaters, but in actuality, Butterfield owned all three.

AN ERA OF DECLINE

The 1970s saw controversy and change. For the first time, X-rated movies came to the State. The first one, A Clockwork Orange, a violent depiction of a strange future, prompted little reaction. Next, in August, came Marlon Brando in Last Tango In Paris.

That one got people upset. It was scheduled for a limited run at the State, and people wrote letters to the editor for or against the right of the theater to show the sexually explicit movie. An op-ed bemoaned how the violence of Clockwork sparked no outrage, while the sex of Tango wound people up.

The county prosecutor determined he could not prosecute the theater under obscenity laws.

Sixteen people from Michigan Right to Life and a group called Morality in Media protested on Front Street. But that didn’t stop filmgoers from seeing the movie. In fact, each showing was so packed that people had to line up an hour before showtimes to get seats.

Times were changing in other ways.

Traverse City had embarked on an era of sprawl. In September 1975, the Plaza Cinema opened where the Meijer parking lot now stands in Garfield Township.

In 1978, the State closed so that the theater could be “twinned,” divided into two smaller theaters.

On Sept. 9, the last movie to play on the single screen was The End, starring Burt Reynolds.

Rotary Charities considered buying the theater because that’s where they performed their variety show each year, but it proved to cost too much. The theater re-opened as a twin theater in time for Thanksgiving.

In the early ’80s, the George Kerasotes Corporation (GKC) bought the theater from Butterfield, and it was the scene of much labor strife.

In December 1985, just after Christmas, three projectionists were among 35 employees statewide who were fired and replaced by lower-cost, non-union employees.

It was an awkward scene in Traverse City, where the theater manager had worked with his dad, a part-time projectionist, whom he had to fire.

A THEATRE REBORN

Look at pictures of the State from the ’70s or ’80s or ’90s, and you’ll see a place in decline and disrepair.

GKC Theatres, which Carmike Cinemas would buy out in 2005, finally abandoned the State in 1996.

Businessman and philanthropist Barry Cole bought the theater that year and planned to turn it into a performance art center. That fizzled when not enough money could be raised, and bickering among partners ended in a lawsuit.

Interlochen Center for the Arts took over the theater in 2003 and continued the quest to turn the theater into a performing arts center that could host concerts, symphonies and live theater.

As those plans went along, however, the nascent Traverse City Film Festival (TCFF) borrowed the theater for its first festival in 2005.

TCFF founder Michael Moore and dozens of volunteers prepared the theater for the opening of the festival and, for the first time in almost a decade, a film came to life on the theater’s silver screen: Mad Hot Ballroom.

It was a modest beginning, but the festival would change the State’s fate. Rotary Charities took over the theater the next year, and Rotary sold it to the TCFF for a dollar in 2007 with the understanding that TCFF would operate the theater year-round, After an extensive renovation paid for through countless of donations big and small, the State Theatre reopened on Nov. 17, 2007, with a showing of The Kite Runner. Since then, after so much thought, so many volunteer hours, and lots of donated money, it’s become one of Front Street’s best attractions and, according to the Motion Picture Association of America — and not just a few thousand local theatergoers — the best movie theater in the world.