Warner Theatre – Memphis Flyer

South Main Street – 1961

I’ve written before about the grand old Warner Theatre. Erected on Main Street in 1921, and originally called the Pantages Theatre, this 1,900-seat showplace was one of the most popular movie palaces in town. It was demolished in 1968 to make way for NBC’s (and now SunTrust’s) Commerce Square.

This nighttime view of South Main Street — taken by an unknown photographer and discovered in a box of Kodachrome slides tucked away in the Lauderdale Library — shows the Warner Theatre in 1961. I know the date because that’s when the movie Parrish, promoted on the theatre’s stunning marquee, was showing. The drama starred Troy Donahue, Connie Stevens, and Claudette Colbert, and lobby cards proclaimed that it depicted “More Than a Boy … But Not Yet a Man!”

Oh, how many times that same phrase has been used to describe ME — usually by my team of psychiatrists. The pills they gave me just do no good at all.

There’s wasn’t much traffic on Main Street on this evening. Though the Warner is long gone, the old Lawrence Furniture building next door (originally constructed in the late 1800s as the Lemmon & Gale Building) is still standing on Main Street, as are many of the other structures dimly visible in the old photograph.

In 1926, one of the highest-paid performers in vaudeville appeared on stage in Memphis. He certainly hadn’t made his name as a singer or dancer, and he couldn’t play a note, but it was standing-room-only when the Sultan of Swat — yes, Babe Ruth himself — stepped into the lights at the Pantages Theater downtown and chatted about his amazing career with the New York Yankees.

Built in 1921 as part of a nationwide chain, the Pantages, which stood on the east side of Main Street between Monroe and Union, was considered the grandest theater in town. A brilliantly lighted marquee stretched the full width of the gleaming white, terra-cotta facade, and every inch of the interior was covered in ornate, gilded plasterwork. When the theater first opened, it staged vaudeville acts — W.C. Fields and Buster Keaton were other stars who played there — and showed silent films. In 1930, it was sold to Warner Bros. Pictures to showcase their new “talking pictures” and the name was changed to the Warner Theater. The first “talkie” Memphians saw at the Warner was General Crack, starring John Barrymore.

The 1,900-seat theater thrived for three decades, an especially popular attraction in the summer, when families drove downtown to enjoy the newfangled invention called “air conditioning.” But the Warner — and its sister theaters downtown, including the Malco, Loew’s Palace, and Loew’s State — began to struggle in the 1960s, when smaller theaters opened in the suburbs and audiences began to stay home and watch television. In 1963, Memphis Press-Scimitar columnist Edwin Howard observed that the Warner, “one of the important links in the Pantages vaudeville chain of the 1920s, [is] still going strong as a motion-picture palace.”

Just five years later, however, officials with the National Bank of Commerce selected that block of Main Street for a 33-story office tower. On December 8, 1968, after the showing of Coogan’s Bluff, the Warner closed. The contents were auctioned off, and bulldozers brought down the old vaudeville palace a few months later. NBC’s Commerce Square stands on the site today.

PHOTO COURTESY BENJAMIN HOOKS CENTRAL LIBRARY