When the Stanley Theater opened in Newark’s Vailsburg neighborhood in 1927, tickets for the premiere of a silent film “The Fire Brigade” cost only ten cents.
What made this historic theater so rare is that the crew used lights cast on the ceiling to give the audience the illusion that they were watching the movie under a night sky. This type of venue was known as an atmospheric theater, which enjoyed brief popularity beginning in the 1920s. It is considered the last of its kind in New Jersey.
“There were a few moviegoers, I tell you, who would come to this theater and think were sitting without a roof over their head,” Walter Froehlich, the theater’s former custodian, told the Star-Ledger in 1986, the year it became listed on the National Register.
After years of abandonment, the owners of the building at 986 South Orange Avenue want to restore the 97-year-old theater’s lobby along with its historic marquee.
Mark Bess, architect at Blackberry Studios, the firm leading the project, said that, among the few remaining theaters in the city – including the Paramount Theater and Proctor’s Place on Market Street and Rivoli Theater on Ferry Street – few have their original marquees intact.
“You have the beautiful marquee and the grand entry,” Bess said. “We believe that has the most significant importance to the city in terms of its historic value.”
The proposal, which came before Newark’s Landmarks Commission, was approved last month. The theater’s restored lobby will eventually become the entrance into a new five-story mixed-use building with 16 residential units on the top stories, Bess said.
“We feel very strongly that this feature is worth saving and want to exact extreme care to ensure that its facade is restored properly,” Bess said. “As you’re traveling down South Orange Avenue, it really does stand out.”
Although the facade will be saved, the project requires the demolition of the theater’s auditorium, which had 2,000 seats at the height of its use. Bess said refurbishing the movie house would have been difficult due to the state of disrepair.
In his presentation to the Landmarks Commission, Bess showed photographs of the theater’s ceiling and walls exposed to the elements and beginning to crumble. But the building has interior elements, such as chandeliers, sconces, and interior columns, that could be salvaged, he said.
In 1968, the Stanley Theater became the home of an Italian-American social club called the Monella Center, which is responsible for landmarking the building, becoming the first National Register-listed landmark in the city’s Vailsburg neighborhood in 1986.
“Newark’s history is in it’s architecture and we are delighted that a portion of the landmark Stanley Theater will be saved,” said Liz Del Tufo, president of Newark Landmarks, who assisted with landmarking process back in the 1980s. “We hope that photos of the interior space with written history of the theater and the neighborhood at that time could be documented in the lobby.”
When the theater became a social club, it began showing Italian-language operas and drew some of the best singers in the world, such as Mirella Freni and Franco Corelli. After the Monella Center moved, the Newark Gospel Tabernacle owned the building.
The Stanley Theater chain was originally owned by Jules Mastbaum, who founded the Motion Picture Company of America in 1947. Their first Stanley Theater opened in Philadelphia 1914 but it was demolished in 1973.
In 1923, the company went through a merger and began operating under the name Stanley-Fabian, whose executive Louis R. Golding is credited with building the Vailsburg theater six years later, the Star Ledger reported. Stanley-Fabian built another theater in Journal Square in 1928 that still exists and was restored more than a decade ago.
For Michael Quirk, who moved to Vailsburg in the 1960s, the historic movie house was more than a place to see horror films and classic comedies. “The Stanley Theater was both an integral part of Vailsburg as well as a rite of passage,” said Quirk, who is now 70. “Vailsburg was just a great place.”
