- The Peabody Theater
Next time you visit the Drum Shop at 878 South Cooper, pay attention as you enter the building. See if you find traces of the ticket window or concession stand, left over from when the building was a neighborhood moviehouse called the Peabody Theater.
Back in the 1930s or so, Cooper-Young was like a small town, and trolley cars rumbled down Cooper and turned onto Young on their way to the fairgrounds. I managed to find a nice photo of the old building, taken in 1943, in the Memphis Room at the main library. Squint hard at the marquee and you can see they were showing (as theaters did in those days) a double feature: My Friend Flicka and Mister Big. A banner over the door reads “All The Best Features!”
The Memphis Room also had two other images of the Peabody, but I didn’t bother scanning them because my scanner is too slow and I was in a hurry to get home and take my daily 8-hour nap. One showed a tiny, rather plain lobby, with a little snack bar set off to one side. The other photo showed the auditorium itself, with light fixtures dangling from the ceiling. I tried counting the seats, but gave up after 600, so the building was larger than it looks from the street.
