Early Stories of the Crandell Theatre
“Walter S. Crandell, of New York and Chatham, says that while it is not an absolute certainty he will erect a theater, store, and office building on the vacant lots on the property known as the Crandell homestead on Main Street, it is his intention to do so if possible.” So reported the Chatham Courier on March 19, 1925, the first official mention of the Crandell Theatre to come. The vacant lot was once the home of Crandell’s grandfather Solomon, one of Chatham’s earliest settlers who built the village’s first general store.
Silent “photoplays” had been screening in Chatham since 1907. Cady’s Hall, the long brick building on Main Street that now houses Bimi’s and Pookstyle, showed these early moving picture shorts on emerging projectors. Beginning as an opera house and alternately known as Allen’s Theatre, Cady’s continued to host both vaudeville acts and film screenings well into the 1930s. At one time the large second floor housed a miniature golf course and a dance studio operated by one Senor Zamboni. In the 1970s, Ellsworth Kelly moved his studio to the cavernous second floor and produced his “Chatham Series” and many other works there.
Vaudeville shows and silent films were also shown at the first Chatham High School in those early days of cinema. But in 1923, the year Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton started making feature films, and Disney founded his animation studio, the interest in moving pictures exploded. When William H. Housman bought a lot in 1923 near the village’s Park Hotel (the Central Square building now owned and being renovated by the Shaker Museum), he announced his intention to build “a modern theatre that will seat six hundred or more persons.” Some in the village thought that plan was excessive. “It requires nerve to erect a building of this sort in a village of 3,000 population at the present time,” said one local in the Chatham Courier.
But the freight lines that run through the village once supported a passenger line, carrying day travelers and visitors to Chatham’s bustling Main Street. When Harry Houdini directed and starred in Haldane of the Secret Service in Valatie in 1923, or performed his act at Cady’s Hall, he stayed at the Park Hotel. Other traveling acts often stopped in Chatham on their way from New York to upcoming shows in Montreal. Mr. Housman’s plan, which never materialized, wasn’t so nervy after all.
By 1925, with the New York City premieres of Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and MGM’s epic Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, Chathamites were craving a movie palace of their own. Walter Crandell, a hometown boy, Chatham civic leader and member of the New York Stock Exchange since 1909, was, to many, the man for the job. “Not only will a building of this sort supply a need that has for a long time been apparent in Chatham,” wrote the Courier, “but it will be a monument to Mr. Crandell’s loyalty to and love for the village where he was born and where he grew to young manhood.” During his time on Wall Street, Crandell likely watched movie houses spring up across the city. He clearly understood that this new entertainment was becoming a national passion.
One year later, on Christmas Day, Crandell’s theater opened its doors. Sitting where his grandfather Solomon’s home once stood, Walter Crandell’s vision for a movie palace found a permanent place in the heart of Chatham.