GEM THEATRE – In 1932 C. Wilmot Milbury added the Gem Theatre onto the back of the big brick store at 10 Bridge Street. It opened July 14, a few months after Fred Sipes' silent-movie theater closed.
The Gem was Frenchtown's first talking-movie theater, unless you count Borough Hall, where talking movies were shown earlier that year by a company renting the venue.
The Star was charmed by the “beautiful” lighting fixtures suspended from the ceiling and the green and gold tapestries covering walls and ceiling. As for the audio, “every word was audible and clear, and deserves a big amount of praise.” Although it wasn't quite air conditioned, it did have “cooling machinery.”
To avoid conflicts with church activities, the Gem would show no movies on Wednesday nights, and would show no movies for profit on Sundays. The Gem ran a bus service on movie nights to bring Milford residents in for the shows.
Gloria Sipes was 7 when it opened. Even though the new theater had effectively put her dad's theater out of business, Gloria would remember the place as her “magic carpet.” The Gem's “walls were elegantly arrayed in aqua moire material, and the seats were in staggered rows to allow for unobstructed viewing.”
The Gem would eventually be run by Milbury's son, Wilmot Arthur “Monty” Milbury, who had a passion for cinema.
“Monty Milbury, the manager, was a soft-spoken, polite young man,” wrote Gloria Sipes Paleveda. “His mother, gray haired, dignified Mrs. Milbury, sold the tickets seated in a small, square, glass-enclosed booth, which was situated at the center top of the railed ramp to the theater. The price back then for children was 10 cents; but long after many of us had passed our 12th birthday, Mrs. Milbury still charged us only 10 cents. I'm sure she knew that Frenchtown did not have a preponderance of tall children, but rewarded her faithful regulars with a temporary lapse of memory about our age.”
Despite Gloria's support, the Gem was badly hurt when its next-door neighbors, the Apgars, sold their uptown vegetable garden, bounded by Upper Twelfth and Eleventh streets, for the construction of the bigger and better Barn Theatre, which opened in 1939. Ruth Apgar said Monty Milbury never forgave her.
A 1940 ad in the News indicates that the Gem was valiantly struggling. The ad lays out the program from Oct. 17 to 29, changing its movies every two or three days, presenting a double feature for two nights, offering a Wednesday “guest night,” and giving away a bicycle at every Saturday matinee. And the movies were first-run – “Knute Rockne All American” (Pat O'Brien, Ronald Reagan), “Strike Up the Band” (Mickey Rooney), “Down Argentine Way” (Carmen Miranda and Don Ameche).
The town could not support two movie houses, and the Gem closed later that year. In 1947 the operator of the Barn Theatre rented the Gem and showed Westerns and B-movies there while the Barn showed first-run films. But this lasted less than a year. Dave Gano, whose childhood range included that part of Bridge Street, told me that the calendar in the box office was perpetually showing October 1947.
In 1975 the Gem Theatre was dusted off by Peter Stuart Hare of Upper Black Eddy, Pa., to become his Frenchtown Auction Gallery. Seating capacity was announced as 250. (In 1979 Sarge Russell would give the number as 305, but he recently said he might have made that up.) In 1976 the theater was in use once a week by auctioneer Bill Holland, also of Upper Black Eddy, who turned it over to John Hedgepeth of Ringoes, who passed it along to Thomas McDonald II. He closed the place in 1978, saying “There just isn't enough money in Frenchtown.”
His son told me another reason: The landlady, Irene Dabrowski, was driving them nuts by continually raising and lowering the rent. She lived upstairs. She was a character. When I called her to find out what would become of the building, she picked up the phone, and instead of saying “hello,” she announced, “Barely living.”
The Russell brothers, Sargent and David, bought the building from Dabrowski in 1979. Sarge briefly considered showing movies there, but came to his senses, and remodeled the entire building, including the theater, for apartments and shops.
In the 1980s, Joe Oboulafia, who owned a movie theater in Newtown, Pa., bought the old projectors and the neon sign, which had been gathering cobwebs in the cellar. Oboulafia used that sign during his brief revival of the old drive-in movie theater near Ringoes. He conveniently named the enterprise the Gem Drive-In.
From "Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia"
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