BARN THEATRE – opened in 1939, air conditioned, with a knotty-pine lobby and 477 comfortable seats within. Its 4-acre site between Upper Eleventh and Upper Twelfth streets provided lots of parking space. The owners were Hugh and Marjorie Kent of Clinton, and manager was Frank Hand. Unlike the Gem Theatre on Bridge Street, the Barn had restrooms and sold popcorn.
The theater had only been open a year when it hosted a genuine celebrity. To promote the Frenchtown engagement of the 1940 Western “Ride, Tenderfoot, Ride,” Smiley Burnette (1911-1967) made a personal appearance. He was a perennial sidekick, providing companionship and comic relief for Gene Autry in that film, and for Roy Rogers in other films. The accompanying photo is from 1946.
Unlike Autry and Rogers, theater manager Nelverna Eichlin Bellis would stand for no monkey business. I'll tell you more about her in another posting.
Long after most single-screen theaters around the country had already closed, the Barn finally succumbed to changing viewing habits and showed its last movie in 1989. It was “When Harry Met Sally.”
A plan to turn the theater into a Country & Western dance hall came to nothing and the building stood shamefaced for a few years, painted mostly red, but still partly white, just waiting.
Then in 1996 the DeSapio brothers, Anthony Salvatore and James, bought the theater and remodeled it into offices and commercial space. Another brother, attorney Guy De Sapio, installed his law offices on the newly created second story. In festivities accompanying the opening of the remodeled building, door prizes were awarded and my 12-year-old daughter won a video cassette of "When Harry Met Sally." I confiscated the movie. That daughter is 35 now and with no VCRs around anymore, it might be time to give the prize back to her.
Other tenants in the ill-named "Olde Theatre Centre" have included Elaine Monn Sutula's Roger Atkinson Ballet Center, and currently Deb Shenberger's insurance agency, Hickory Driving School, H&R Block, and Secret Garden Montessori School.
The building is heated and cooled geothermally, a system that used to require an abundant source of water. Later on, the DeSapios built senior-citizen apartment houses on the Eleventh Street edge of the lot.
From "Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia"
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