This place haunts my dreams, like Rebecca’s Manderley. I think of the drive twisting and turning through Cincinnati. It’s a night quieter than usual, and I seem to be gliding down dimly lit Central Parkway as if I’m a camera on a dolly. As I near Mohawk Place, I crane my neck and am drawn towards that familiar place at 282 McMicken Avenue. Nature has come into her own and little by little has encroached upon the street with clumsy fingers. Tucked away amidst the eroded, graffiti-laced rubble there rests the Imperial Theatre, secretive and silent. The marquee, once bright and mighty, is now dark and in a state of almost comical disarray.
The Imperial hasn’t shown a film in decades, hasn’t opened its doors to the public in years. It remains, and yet it no longer exists. One might say we can never go back to The Imperial again.
While that may be true, the brick, plaster and—miraculously—marquee still stand. One hot and humid Saturday this past month, I was able to explore this neglected building that has fueled my imagination since I first set eyes upon it.
The photos here tell a cautionary tale of what happens when you let a theater lay fallow for decades.
There are many obstacles to learning the history of a movie theater, especially a neighborhood house where advertising was relegated to small-print listings. At best, there might be an article about the theater opening, an article about ownership changing hands, and a notice when they went belly up. In the more rugged neighborhoods, there may be an occasional crime report. Generally, everything in between was business as usual—and nobody bothers reporting on that. What concessions did they sell? What type of movies performed best? Did anyone take pen to paper to describe the lobby’s lighting? Was there a profile written on the projectionists? None of these issues seem important until the theater is defunct, and we’re left staring at a disintegrating marquee and a boarded-up ticket taker booth.
Fortunately, the Imperial was more newsworthy than most. The earliest mentions lay a properly unsavory foundation to the story. In 1913, The Imperial’s manager J.H. Glassmeyer was under investigation for cooking the books. The German-language paper Tägliches Cincinnatier Volksblatt, reported a year earlier that this same Glassmeyer was being sued for breaking a 14-year-old’s arm near the entrance to the theater—at least that’s what I could glean from a translation app.
In the Summer of 1915, a massive windstorm hit the area that ultimately killed 38 people and left the city with untold damage. The following day, the papers reported that within the cavernous confines of the Imperial, the manager lit candles, the pianist began playing, and a local danced upon the stage as crowd sang along to pass the time before it was safe to reemerge.
Mostly, the stories were fairly mundane: local Romanians held meetings at the theater in 1914, Republican George Puchta successfully campaigned for mayorship at the theater in 1915, and the again those local Romanians were lectured to about tuberculosis in 1916.
Naturally with a theater of this vintage, the Imperial was built for live performances, with movies following in due course. A 1918 classified ad for a “moving picture machine” for sale at the Imperial suggests that the equipment may not have been top-of-the-line. An ad for a showing of Mabel Normand’s Mickey soon after in 1919 indicates that it most assuredly was projected via a shiny new model.
The Imperial mostly followed the trends of the industry. They hosted a “bank night” in 1939, which led to manager William Dodds being charged and found guilty of “promoting a scheme of chance.” Dodds switched up the game, adding a rule that the raffle winner had to also correctly answer a trivia question. Turns out, it was still against the law, and Dodds was found guilty again.
The marquee was upgraded at some point, the lobby redone in more neon-moderne style, and air-conditioning was eventually installed.
A glance at a 1944 listing of roughly three dozen neighborhood theaters shows the Imperial tucked away in the lower left corner with the double-bill of The Ritz Brothers’ Never a Dull Moment and The Seventh Victim. (Is it safe to combine stimulants and depressants like that?)
By 1961, not only had the movie industry eroded, but so had the neighborhood. Now known as The Imperial Follies, the city revoked their exhibition license, in part, to their showing of Doris Wishman’s nudist camp extravaganza Hideout in the Sun (“Filmed in Gorgeous Nuderama”). After an appeal, Municipal Judge Daniel C. Handley restored their license noting that, “Nudity without lewdness or dirtiness is not obscenity in law or common sense.”
That judgement was not sufficient for God’s Bible School, headed by Rev. Melvin Sharrock, who descended upon the Imperial. The frenzied protest outside the showing of the Brigitte Bardot vehicle Female and the Flesh led to eight of the evangelicals being arrested. “If she buys a ticket she is buying a ticket to enter the gates of hell,” a witness recounted Sharrock screaming at one young moviegoer.
The content was certainly a far cry from the old days, but later in the decade, the Imperial went back to its roots: showcasing a mixture of film and live performances. Only this time it was burlesque dancers in pasties and nudie movies.
At some point in the 1970s, the theater closed. It became a church for a time. I vaguely remember being told that somebody was selling mattresses there. Unsurprisingly, it became a destination for scrappers and bored teenagers seeking a place to ransack.
There are plans to renovate the Imperial and turn it into an arts complex. It will take a herculean effort to get that marquee restored and lit up. I wish them nothing but the best.
Yet, when this plan comes to fruition, I will miss that view down Mohawk Place where the Imperial sits boarded up, like a haunted theater. It always looked to me like it was protecting some dark secret.
