Lost Theatres of Somerville - 14-page essay now online

[ron_newman]

David Guss's essay "Lost Theatres of Somerville", published in the First Quarter 2006 issue of Marquee, the journal of the Theatre Historical Society of America, is now online at

http://www.losttheatres.org/Lost_Theatres_Marquee2006.pdf .

This is an extensive history of the many neighborhood movie theatres that used to be scattered all over Somerville, including one in Ball Square, one in Teele Square, and one that used to stand at Day and Herbert Streets, where the metered parking lot is today. The Day Street theatre had to overcome four years of opposition from local residents, and even the president and women's dean of Tufts University, before the city finally granted it a license to open in 1913. It burned down in 1942.

Guss's article also contains many old photos of and advertisements for these theatres.

(The file is a 17-page scanned-image PDF, so unfortunately you cannot search or copy the text.)

If this subject interests you, also check out the rest of Professor Guss's LostTheatres.org website, as well as CinemaTreasures.org where each theatre has its own ongoing discussion page.

Comments

[m00n.livejournal.com]

The number of old cinemas that are now parking lots is...kind of depressing.

[m00n.livejournal.com]

And on a related note, how can we convince the city to make a permanent exception to minimum parking requirements for business districts? Indeed, I'd like to see the opposite. Parking lots are bad for the neighborhood.

Also, wow, Teele Square has gone downhill a lot since the picture in that article was taken...

[ex-gnomicut.livejournal.com]

Also the Tufts Digital Library has a Lost Theatres of Somerville (http://dl.tufts.edu/view_collection.jsp?pid=tufts:UA069.006.DO.MS124) oral history collection.

[ericjay.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed the bike ride, so it's nice to be able to follow up with the text. I used Acrobat's OCR feature on the file to create a version with text. It's not perfect, but it looks like it did a fairly good job. Hopefully posting it here doesn't run afoul of any copyright rules since the author has already posted the work on his website:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/32356478/Lost-Theatres-Marquee-2006-OCR

[ron_newman]

Thanks. My browser (Safari) seems to have a great deal of trouble reading this file -- it continues 'Loading' even after it appears to be complete on the screen, and it scrolls very fitfully and slowly. Is there some way to change this into a straight PDF or maybe just a text file?

I also don't see how to search the file for text strings.

[ericjay.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I needed some place to share the file and thought I'd give Scribd a try. Turns out, it wasn't all that helpful!

Google Docs seems to be a better venue... Lost_Theatres_Marquee2006_OCR.pdf at Google Docs (https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B-wpbJ9KwLM0YTA2MzQ0MjctMTZhMy00MWVlLTgwNjEtZDU5MTkzNmNlMzA2&hl=en). It supports viewing, searching, and copying text right from the web, plus a download link (https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0B-wpbJ9KwLM0YTA2MzQ0MjctMTZhMy00MWVlLTgwNjEtZDU5MTkzNmNlMzA2) for local viewing. Best I can tell, it doesn't require a login.

[ron_newman]

I don't understand how to use the Search feature. I type 'Cross' into the search box, and it tells me there are 8 matches, but doesn't give me any way to see those matches. Clicking on the up-arrow and down-arrow buttons doesn't do anything.

If you have a PDF version of this, I suggest you e-mail it back to the author: dguss at tufts.edu , and maybe he can replace his scanned-image version with yours (hopefully at the same URL).

[ericjay.livejournal.com]

If you click the download link in my comment above, you can save the PDF and open it locally in Preview, Acrobat Reader, etc. None of these online PDF viewers are great, I just needed some way of sharing the file since LJ doesn't support uploading/sharing media except for images. I'll e-mail the OCR'ed PDF to David Guss as you suggested.

[ron_newman]

In any event, thanks for doing all of this work. (Do you know how to make the Google Docs search work for me?)

[ericjay.livejournal.com]

According to this blog post (http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/11/better-search-in-google-docs-viewer.html), the Enter key mirrors the behavior of the next arrow when there's a search string in the box. I tried it in Safari, and even though the arrow doesn't work, the Enter key does!