Category:Capitol Theatre, Allentown, Pennsylvania

Capitol Theatre 

cinema
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Instance of	theatre building
Location	Allentown, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania
Date of official opening	April 1929
Authority file  Q54315470 Reasonator Scholia Wikidocumentaries PetScan statistics WikiMap Locator tool KML file Search depicted

The Capitol Theater opened in April 1929 at 1020 Hamilton Street. The theater was owned by the same company which owned the Franklin Theater at 4th and Tilghman and the Nineteenth Street theaters..

The purpose-built theater was built in 1928, and had an interior decorated as a modern Spanish garden, with the sides of the auditorium decorated to represent the walls of the garden. Tops of trees and flowers on arbors appeared over the tops of the walls, and the ceiling of the theater gave the effect of moving clouds on a summer night, an illusion achieved by a clever lighting arrangement.

The theater had a stage and was equipped with the RCA sound-on film system to show films with sound. It was the first cinema in Allentown built with this capability. Theaters built before all required conversion and inclusion of sound equipment when "Talkies" began to be produced for mass audiences in 1928 The Capitol also had a Paige theater organ installed for silent films. The theater showed films continuously from 1pm to 11pm each day and evening.

The theater, unfortunately, had a very short life. After its grand opening, it closed in the middle of June suddenly, then briefly reopened for two weeks in mid-July 1929, sharing its advertising with the Franklin Theater before closing for good at the end of the month, likely due to financial issues with the parent company. A total of twelve films were shown at the theater during its lifetime. A probable reason for it's fast demise was that it was uncooperative with the large Rialto Theater, which was less than a block away. The Rialto would get all of the big Hollywood films, and the audiences. The Capitol Theater was basically a neighborhood theater and didn't get major films or a lot of attendance.

In August 1929, the Capitol Theater was sold and then became a dance hall. In 1945 the building was renovated and for many years it was one of several buildings used as the headquarters of the Lehigh Valley Motor Club until the club moved out in April 2019. It was torn down in November 2021 along with other buildings in the block for a new office building.