Back in the days of towns being their own little self-contained ecosystems, many of the neighboring communities had their own movie theater. Growing up in Caldwell, New Jersey, we were blessed with a gem of a theater…. the Park Theater. The theater opened in 1925, replete with a Moller organ for the vaudeville shows of the times. As far as I could tell, the theatre minus the organ was the same in the 1960’s as it was the day it opened. Seating for 1,100 with crushed red corduroy seats, a balcony, an ornate ceiling, and smoke-stained walls that bore witness to the history of past moviegoers of a bygone era.
Like so many baby boomers, the Park Theater was a town treasure where fifty cents gained you entrance, and enough money left over to buy four or five candy bars, a nickel apiece. When the Caldwell Chiefs were not playing, Saturday afternoons we spent watching a double-feature at the Park Theater. Our generation grew up watching movies like Goldfinger, From Russia with Love, Mary Poppins, and Easy Rider to name just a few.
We would ride our bicycles to the theater and leave them across the street at Kiwanis Oval which was behind the Caldwell Public Library. Saturdays at the Park Theater were a rite of passage for a whole generation of Caldwell kids. We made our first awkward attempt at engaging with the opposite sex by throwing Milk Duds down at them from the balcony. One of my first dates was in 1970 to see Love Story. Later, I took my 17-year-old girlfriend to see Carnal Knowledge. Her parents were not happy.
One of the beauties of the Park Theater was that it adapted with the times. In the early 1970’s the Park ran midnight double features highlighting movies such as Reefer Madness, Night of the Living Dead, A Clockwork Orange, 2001; A Space Odyssey and El Topo described as a “Mexican acid Western film on acid.”
My high school classmate Mike Magnotti worked as an usher at the Park Theater from the age of fifteen through his first year of college. Mike was an usher but also served multiple roles, most impressively changing the movie names on the front marquee every Thursday night. Mike’s dad, who had his own landscaping/janitorial business, had the Park Theatre as one of his clients and vouched for his son, which is how Mike got the best job a teenager in Caldwell could have back in those days. Mike moved west in 1973 but coincidently was back in Caldwell attending services at the Presbyterian Church across the street on July 14, 1974, the day the Park Theater burned down. Emptying out of church, Mike and the rest of the congregants witnessed the burning down of an important part of our youth.Mike recalled his days working at the grand old theatre. “I loved that job, and I loved that theater. Some movies I saw so often I almost memorized them. Dr. Doolittle with Rex Harrison was one. Camelot gave me a man crush on Franco Nero. And Bullitt, with the best film car chase ever. When Zeffirelli’s “Romeo & Juliet” released in the end of 1968, they were only allowing the movie to play in limited theaters. The Park Theater won the bid over the Claridge Theater in Montclair, and we had special, big red letters to advertise the film made for the marquee.”
The fire was attributed to a faulty electrical wire and as word got out around town, we all stood across Bloomfield Avenue and watched the grand old theater go up in flames. The last film ever featured on the movie marque was a triple feature of What’s up Tiger Lily, Sleeper, and Bananas. The charge for a triple feature in those days was $4.00.
The Park Theatre was replaced by a bank with a new cinema built in a strip mall at the other end of town. It was a poor replacement to the Park Theater and eventually closed. Today the economics of a large palatial movie house simply do not work, a trend that has been going on for decades. Most moviegoers go to the movies at the mall where there are greater choices of movies, but most are shown in sterile narrow ‘Skinner’ boxes. There are theatres dotting the landscape that have tried to re-invent themselves with stadium seating, alcohol, and better choices of food, but a night at the movies for an average family of four can cost up to $100.00.
There is something to be said for people experiencing the movies collectively. But as our televisions have grown larger with high definition, surround sound and the ability to pause your movie to take a bathroom break or get something to eat from the kitchen, these conveniences have served to help fill the void.
We occasionally go to the movies. However, rather than mourn the moviegoing days of my youth, I feel gratitude that I was alive for those golden years of going to the movies, content now to cuddle on the couch with same woman I took to see Carnal Knowledge at the Park Theatre in 1973.
