Old Melvin Theatre on Chippewa Street

It is just an old building, right? Wrong.

 

This is my understanding of what I’m looking at. This single-screen cinema theatre (theater) was established in 1914. One year later, the popularity of the silent three-hour movie Birth of Our Nation, originally called The Clansman, would create an explosion of this type of new-fangled movie theater across the country. Before that wave of single-cinema theaters, there were 5¢ Nickelodeons, another American business invention, that showed much shorter films in a more austere environment.

Done