History

Southwest Floridians have been going to the movies for over a century. At first the film fans were frontier women and cowboys, then wealthy Victorian snowbirds. In the '20s, saucy flappers lined up at ticket counters. During the two world wars, there were soldiers and their girlfriends. In the '50s, the suburban families arrived. Though the patrons changed, the allure of the movies stayed the same. From Fort Myers to the Everglades, moviegoers sought entertainment, escape and fun.

On Sept. 1, 1908, John T. Hendry introduced Fort Myers' first movie theater. The Royal Palm was located in a two-story wooden building on First Street, between Hendry and Jackson. Hendry had "the latest Edison moving picture machine," as well as a wife who pounded out tunes on the piano to accompany the silent films.

At the premiere, the Fort Myers Press reported that "pictures. as real and life-like as scientific invention can make them" were projected on a large piece of canvas. The experience so enthralled patrons that the film was shown repeatedly for the next three hours to a standing-room crowd. In the next few months, Hendry added electric fans and a Victor phonograph machine. For over a decade, patrons were pleased with their movie house.

But by the teens, sophisticated winter visitors and longtime residents were clamoring for something new. In 1915, local entrepreneurs Gilmer and Harvey Heitman stunned them with the Arcade Theatre. Its elegant interior had deep-red velvet curtains, plush carpeting and comfortable seats. Ushers in handsome red uniforms with pillbox hats directed patrons to their seats with flashlights. Outside on First Street, a proper marquee proudly displayed the newest film titles in lights.

Eighty-four-year-old Fort Myers resident Allen Ellis remembers the early days of the theater. "I saw silent movies at the Arcade. When I was a kid, some of the high-school students paid me 25 cents each to read the captions. They were seniors, but they couldn't read or write," he says.

In the 1920s, the population of Southwest Florida nearly doubled, and a booming economy gave people money for entertainment. New theaters debuted in downtown Fort Myers. The Lee was located on Main Street, and the Ritz (also called the Omar) was established in the upscale Patio de Leon.

Most notable of all was the Royal Airdome Theater. Located on Main Street on the north side of First, the Airdome vaguely resembled an amphitheater. According to Fort Myers resident W. Stanley Hanson, "The building was made of corrugated iron with an open roof. You could see the stars." Like the other theaters, the Airdome showed movies every day but Sunday. The Saturday feature was usually a blockbuster. In October 1925, The Mark of Zorro with Douglas Fairbanks sold out.

As quickly as the region's giddy days came, they went. The late '20s saw the real estate boom go bust. A hurricane decimated the state's economy, and the Great Crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression. Soon wealthy winter visitors stopped coming and local folks cut back on luxuries.

While the Airdome Theater closed, all the other Fort Myers theaters remained open. Some used gimmicks to increase patronage. Robley Greilick's grandmother won a refrigerator at a raffle at the Arcade Theatre.

But for the most part, people kept coming because of the movies. For 10 to 25 cents, they could lose themselves in the slapstick antics of the Marx Brothers or Charlie Chaplin. Then there was Hollywood's collection of heartthrobs. "My sister and I went together on Saturday and sat through three shows with Tyrone Power or some other gorgeous men," Stanley Hanson's wife, Mary, remembers.

Going to the movies had become so popular that new theaters opened during the Depression. Mildred Sherrod of Immokalee remembers seeing Gene Autry movies at Mary Davis' theater in LaBelle. Longtime resident Joe Risley recalls that the place was located across the street from Flora and Ella's Restaurant. "Because the roads were so bad, it took forever to go to Fort Myers," he says. "The new theater wasn't fancy. The wooden seats weren't terribly comfortable, but it sufficed for the time."

In Everglades City, movies were shown at the community center built by Barron Collier. Arita Parker remembers paying the nine cents' child admission to see Gene Autry and Roy Rogers' movies. "It was the social event for the week because there wasn't much to do," she says. Years later she and her dates went to the movies. "It was understood when you grew up in Everglades City that your first date was to the movies because the whole town was there," she says.

According to author Jean F. Matthews, Fort Myers Beach got its own movie theater in 1938. The little cement building with wooden seats was located on the Gulf side of the famous arches at the beach entrance. Because the structure was open, it droned with mosquitoes. Just before a performance, an employee went through, row by row, spraying a flint gun full of insecticide.

In September 1941, a new theater debuted in Fort Myers. Linda Holdsclaw remembers going to the Edison on Saturdays. "You bought your tickets in the hallway and then there was a little concession stand with popcorn and Jujubes and that sort of thing. Parents brought us and dropped us off," she says. "You could go in and see the same movie all day long."

Three months after the Edison Theater opened, the nation went to war. Local movie theaters did what they could to support the war effort. Many held scrap drives. Patrons brought rubber, metal and newspapers to exchange for tickets. In the darkened theaters, people saw their first moving images from the front. At the beginning of each film, a Movietone newsreel showed the latest war news. Following the news were the cartoons. The movie came last. There were no commercials.

After the war, Margaret and Arnold Haynes of Naples opened a new theater on Third Street South (where the Marissa Collections store now stands) not far from where an earlier movie house had operated before the war, in the Old Naples Building (the current site of Fantozzi's). Located in a military Quonset hut next to the Beach Store, the new theater offered everything a moviegoer could want. It had a ticket window, a vending cart with popcorn, and a soda machine in the lobby. What Denyse Smith Mesnik remembers most is what happened in stormy weather: "The sound of the rain was so loud on the metal roof, you had to pay close attention to hear the movie."

Throughout Southwest Florida, men, women and children enjoyed their Saturday matinees and evenings at the flicks. But it was not an experience shared by everyone. Segregation meant that blacks in Fort Myers were not allowed in the downtown movie houses. Beginning in 1935, they could attend the Grand Theater located on Anderson Avenue. Glada Green went frequently. "My husband and I used to go when we were dating in the 1940s," she says. "Before that there were pictures after school. I remember The Lost City. We didn't get all the parts."

Sometimes the curiosity of what the "white" theaters were like got to black residents. Jacob Johnson of Fort Myers remembers, "During the '40s-during the war-one of my friends was a bellhop at the Bradford Hotel. The Arcade had a back door. He invited me to go in the back with him and sit near the screen. No one knew we were there."

In the community center at Everglades City a rope separated black and white patrons. But questions arose when Seminole Indians arrived. Parker recalls, "The Seminoles weren't black, so they wouldn't sit with the blacks. They weren't white, so they wouldn't sit with the whites. In the end they sat off to the side by themselves."

In the 1950s, drive-ins became popular. They charged admission by the car, not the individual, and were perfect for increasingly suburban Southwest Floridians. At drive-ins in Naples, Fort Myers and North Fort Myers, families piled into their station wagons with their kids dressed in pajamas. Usually after a cartoon and a trip to the snack shack, the children were asleep and the adults could watch the movie.

Jody Hendry remembers the drive-in near where the Edison Mall is today. "It was very popular," she says. "You used a coiled light pick to keep the mosquitoes out. They had little speakers you put on the windows. The whole parking lot would be full." Holdsclaw remembers another form of mosquito control at the drive-ins: "They had a fogging machine that drove through the parked cars and fogged for mosquitoes."

During the 1960s and 1970s, national and regional changes destroyed the old movie houses. The public increasingly turned to television for entertainment and news. The final blow was the new culture that led people to abandon their downtowns for suburban malls.

Today, the downtown movie theaters are gone. Only the Arcade Theatre in Fort Myers is left standing, and it has been converted into an arts center. But movie memories keep playing in the minds of Southwest Florida's old-timers.