By John Rhodes
Special to The Chatham Voice
I belong to a Facebook site known as Chatham History; we have more than 11,000 members, people from all over the world with a recently added member (June 11) being a citizen of Hobart, Tasmania.
Members are invited to submit photos and information related to just about any aspect of Chatham history.
Recently, one of our members suggested that, in the modern era post 1929 – talkies) there were three movie theatres on King Street which were the Capitol Theatre, the Centre Theatre and the Park Theatre.
There was, however, a fourth theatre, which was known as the Granada Theatre, dating from 1937 and located on the south side of King Street, second building east of Fourth Street; this would be right beside the Rankin Hotel.
The presentations would have been mostly B movies with an admission charge of ten or 15 cents; seating about 250 persons
In the post-war era, movie theatres did well until the advent of television and this probably had much to do with the demise of the Granada Theatre class of cinema presentation.
Circa 1950, the theatre was closed and the building was divided into two retail spaces with the more easterly portion (170, King St. W.) becoming home to the Vera Frock store which was a women’s clothing related retailor. This outlet was operated by Joe Bleiberg who was born, I believe, in 1895 and died in 1963. He is interred at Roselawn Avenue Cemetery, Toronto.
Joe was the son of Louis Bleiberg (1867-1930) and Jenny Foyer-Bleiberg (1867-1950) who were native to Austria and probably migrated to North America to escape the pogroms, as was the case with so many others of Chatham’s tiny Jewish community.
Over the subsequent years of its existence, the former theatre building hosted a number of other tenants including a London Wine store which featured a particular brand name costing very few in the way of coins and greatly appreciated by a number of my high school classmates until one day, during a sobriety-related discussion, our homeroom teacher, Mr. White, compared the consumption of that specific product as being “About one step removed from living under a bridge.”
The site of the Granada Theatre is now a municipal parking lot.
