Ornate Olympia Theater Lost to Progress

Where was the Olympia Theater? Trust me, it’s confusing. The Olympia was right around the corner from the Arcadia, another of five cinemas in early 20th-century downtown Portsmouth. Arcadia was inside the Franklin Building, which still stands on Congress Street. Hard to believe both beautiful stages were razed to make way for commercial office space.

It’s important to remember that Vaughan Street was once among the classiest tree-lined thoroughfares in the city. The colonial Assembly Hall where George Washington attended a dance in 1789, stood roughly across from where the Olympia was later built. Another early theater, the Cameneum, was there as well until it was turned into a livery and burned in the late 1800s. The once-stately buildings later gave way to a pedestrian mall.

Opened in 1915, records indicate that the Olympia was suddenly the most profitable theater in town, offering both silent films and vaudeville acts. An electric sign at the corner of Vaughan and Congress streets pointed the way to the 998-seat theater. An early edition of “The American Organist” reported that Alexander Bilbruck was the organist at the Olympia in 1920, before “talkies” arrived. The organ is visible in the orchestra pit here. Decorative features include painted cherubs, American flags and a female figure with arms outstretched at the peak of the proscenium arch.

Portsmouth was typical of small cities where locals flocked to the movies in the 1920s and 1930s. With at least four screens active (the Music Hall was dark almost two decades), downtown was the place to be on a Saturday night. While the Olympia and the Colonial were the “classy” venues, the Arcadia offered free gifts including cheap dishware to draw audiences.

Americans still loved the movies in the 1940s, but downtown was often dark during World War II when lights were “blacked out” to avoid creating a target for the air raids that never came. By the 1950s, televisions were common in the home and movies began moving to boxy unglamorous cinemas at the local mall. Public transportation, once fast and efficient throughout the Seacoast, also gave way to highways and private cars.

A reader who once visited the Olympia frequently by bus from Rye as a boy adds this footnote: “The film companies used to ship the cans of film to the theaters by bus package express. On a given day, when shows were changing, we would have theater employees waiting for a particular bus to come in from Boston or New York with the cans of film for the night’s show. Don’t you know they would get quite excited when a shipment was misrouted! Of course, film was expensive, so there were no extras. Movies were shipped at the last minute after being used by some other theater. Eventually some enterprising trucking companies that delivered right to the theater got into the business and that bus traffic went away.”

Copyright 2018 J. Dennis Robinson