Category:Eric Theater, Allentown, Pennsylvania

Object location	40° 36′ 18″ N, 75° 27′ 56″ W	View all coordinates using: OpenStreetMap	40.605000; -75.465556

Eric Allentown 

former movie theater in Allentown, Pennsylvania, United States
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Instance of	movie theater
Location	Allentown, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania
Street address	4th Street & Hamilton Street, Allentown, PA 18102
40° 36′ 14.28″ N, 75° 27′ 55.45″ W
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The Eric Theater, was located at Fourth and Linden streets. Originally a 1,200 seat theater, it was owned by the Sameric Corporation of Philadelphia. It opened on June 25th, 1969.

The Eric was the first new theater built in the Central Business District in almost forty years. It was built on land cleared in the early 1960s during a redevelopment project. The theater was a square, featureless building which was built along modern (1960s) lines. It was to anchor a development called "Hamilton Center", which was to include a supermarket, a drug store and smaller stores in the block between Linden and Hamilton Streets, on the east side of North Fourth Street on a bluff overlooking the Jordan Creek. Although the theater was built, the remainder of the development never materialized.

What made the Eric unique was it's capability to show 70mm films that projected in much higher definition on the large single screen. It also had the capability to show Cinerama, Todd A-O, and CinemaScope films. It also had a multi-channel sound system including surround speakers which provided increased fidelity.

In June 1974, the Eric was first modified to show two films, becoming the "Twin Eric". In March 1979 the theater was expanded to three screens, and into a five screen complex in May 1983. United Artists Entertainment purchased the theater in May 1988 when it purchased the Sameric Corporation.

The end of theater-going in Allentown began in the 1970s with the opening of theater multiplexes in both the Whitehall and Lehigh Valley Malls. The opening of the Lehigh Valley Mall, in particular, led to a downturn in shopping in the "Downtown" shopping area of Hamilton Street. The Capri theater closed in 1981 due to lack of attendance, and this was followed by the Colonial in 1982 for the same reasons. This led the Eric to be the last cinema in the Downtown Shopping area of the city. With its expansion to a five-screen theater in 1983, the Eric tried to compete with the suburban mall cinemas, which it did for just over a decade.

In 1989, the Budco Tilghman Street 8 opened which also competed with the Eric for major new releases, and when Carmike Corporation announced a 16-screen cinema to be built along Airport Road in 1996, it was evident that the future was with these larger multi-cinema complexes. (In addition, these multi-cinema complexes led to the demise of the Whitehall and Lehigh Valley Mall theaters).

The Eric closed on July 18, 1999 not long after the Carmike Cinemas Allentown-16 opened. When the Eric closed, it ending nearly a century of theater-going in the downtown area. The Nineteenth Street Theater, in the West End, is the last cinema in the city, although it also is a stage theater, being the home of the Allentown Civic Theater. After the Eric closed, there were several redevelopment projects proposed, and in early 2002, it was announced that the former theater was to be redeveloped into a business complex, anchored by the Social Security Administration and other government offices. The redeveloped building opened in June 2003.