Rooftop Garden Theaters
In the late 1880s, inspired by European designs, architects and building planners decided to make use of a structure’s roof as an additional place to provide leisure or entertainment to patrons. Early versions of these theatres began to populate Broadway venues and mixed entertainment and socializing. Open air layouts (with some covering for the entertainers) decorated with plant life and lighted trellises (often arched ones) were common among early roof garden theatres. These early theatres sat somewhere between 400 and 2,000 patrons and were made accessible by the still recent invention of the elevator.
As this design trend developed it the roof garden theatres became enclosed but many of the decorative elements remained. Into the early 1900s there was still a small demand for multiple auditoriums per building (this was long before the era of twinning theatres or multiplexes), architects began simply stacking one theatre on top of the other.
The Proctor’s Theatre in Newark, NJ was an eight story building that housed the Lyceum (later the Penthouse Cinema) on the upper four floors of the building. In the shot above you can see the full Proctors building, and the windows at rear of the Lyceum auditorium at the back of the structure attached to the main theatre entrance but rotated 90 degrees (detailed shot below).
Below is a photo of the auditorium of the Lyceum, you can see the arched trellis spanning the theatre that was borrowed from the open air designs. The painting and decorative elements all play on the early open air roof garden designs. The canopy of the theatre was loosely hung fabric that suggests clouds, giving an outdoor feel.
There were a number of other double-decker theatres built throughout the early 20th century, notably the Elgin & Winter Garden Theatres in Toronto, and the Century & Valencia theatres in Baltimore, Maryland. You can see the theatre’s marquee below advertising films at both the Century and the Valencia.
Roof garden theatres can be seen as design that directly influenced the atmospheric architecture style popularized by architect John Eberson.
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