Heritage / Theatre N

Your Cart \| Your Account
Your shopping cart is empty

Wilmington's Movie Theater Heritage

Movies in Wilmington and across the country were first shown in amusement parks in the late 1800s.
The first motion picture shown in Wilmington was "The Kiss" in 1896, which appeared at the Garrick Theatre on 828-830 Market Street and possibly at Shellpot Park in North Wilmington.
In the years immediately before and after 1900, opera and vaudeville theatres, such as the Grand Opera House on 818 Market Street, Dockstader's Wonderland at 7th and Shipley Streets and the Garrick Theatre, featured motion pictures in between or at the end of live performances.
Storefront theaters, dubbed nickelodeons, became popular in the early 1900s. Wilmington had several on Market Street including The Nickelodeon on 515-517 Market Street, which was later renamed The Savoy.
When the nickelodeons began to decline in 1910, entrepreneurs built large, comfortable movie houses. In 1910, the Grand Opera House was converted into Wilmington's first movie palace.
By 1913, the year that the Playhouse opened, five movie houses were operating on Market Street: The Pickwick, The Lyric, The Palace, The Majestic and The Victoria.
In the 1920s, a number of regional theater chains sold their movie houses to Hollywood studios; in Wilmington, The Garrick, The Majestic, The Queen and The Arcadia theaters were sold to Warner Bros.
When movie sound technology developed in the late 1920s, movie theaters were modified to accommodate talking feature films; by 1936, Wilmington theaters such as The Polonia on 405-407 Maryland Avenue were promoting their sound systems.
Sound and the approach of World War II helped establish box office hits and movie idols. In 1939, the Warner Theater on 210 West Tenth Street featured the Bette Davis film "42nd Street." The actress and studio executives visited Wilmington on a train dubbed the "Warner Bros. Special" to promote the movie.
After the war, there was a decline in the movie industry. The baby boom led many people away from urban communities to suburban areas, and movies competed with television for a mass audience.
By the 1960s, many shopping malls offered a movie theater along with parking and easy access to highways. As a result, fewer people came to cities to watch films.
In 1962, the Ritz Theater at Delaware Avenue and Adams Streets was demolished to make room for Interstate 95; soon, most movie theaters on Market, French and Tatnall Streets were razed or taken over by other businesses.
The longest operating movie theater in Wilmington was The Rialto on 220-222 Market Street, which opened as The Lyric in 1908. Its final show on March 5, 1982, was a double feature: "Master Killer" and "Maniac."
The Grand Opera House and the Playhouse are still open and offer a variety of live performances.
Today, the City of Wilmington is reviving the downtown movie experience by offering independent films at Theater N at Nemours on 11th and Tatnall Streets.