RKO Proctor's Theatre - Newark, NJ

RKO Proctor’s Theatre opened in Newark, New Jersey, on November 22, 1915, as the Proctor’s Palace Theatre. The architect was John W. Merrow, the nephew of Proctor theater circuit owner Frederick F. Proctor. It cost $1,000,000 ($24,874,554.46 with inflation) and took three years to construct the building. The Palace was a double-decker theater, which meant that one auditorium was stacked on top of the other, a rare design choice at the time.  The lower, street-level auditorium had 2,800 seats, and the upper, known as Proctor’s Roof Theatre, had 1,400.

The opening night’s bill consisted of vaudeville performances by Martini and Frabini, Donlin and Deely, Anna Chandler, Henry E. Dixey, Ketchum and Cheatem, Harry Cooper, and the Leach Wallin Trio. Proctor’s was among the largest theaters in the area, leading the city to use it for the opening ceremony of its 250th-anniversary celebration in 1916.  Originally, Proctors was a vaudeville theater, but eventually, it was converted to show silent and later talking motion pictures. In 1926, a Wurlitzer Opus 1430 theatre organ was installed, and a projection booth was added in the rear of the upper balcony. Even though the theater switched over to showing films, the occasional vaudeville show — such as Bela Lugosi’s “Horror and Magic Show”  — still played there.

On August 15, 1929, Proctor’s transferred the ownership of eight theaters in New York and New Jersey from the F.F Proctor Holding Corporation to the RKO Proctor’s Corporation. The theaters included the Proctor’s in Troy, NY, Yonkers, NY, and Newark’s Proctor’s Palace. The theater was renamed RKO Proctor’s Theatre after the sale.  On November 23, 1966,  Bradford M Manning, the manager of the Proctors, and some burlesque dancers were arrested after a performance. Burlesque had been banned in Newark in 1957, and they were charged with “permitting a lewd theatrical performance.”

The Temptations performed at the RKO Proctors in 1967, and the afternoon show went off without a hitch, but 3000 people showed up for the evening performance and became enraged when it was announced that the show was sold out. During the chaos, a young girl was pushed through one of the front windows. The Palace was closed in 1968 when RKO merged with Stanley Warner, who owned Newark’s larger and more profitable Branford Theater. 

The Lobby is currently used as storage for a retail store. The rest of the building remains vacant and, after years of neglect, has started to collapse. In July 2016, the Newark Municipal Council voted to sell the City-owned portion of the building for $5,000 Davidson, Abraham, and Associates, LLC. They plan to demolish the building and build a mixed-use residential and commercial construction. The property was valued at $1.6 million, and demolition costs are estimated to be more than $2 million. No timeline has been announced for the project.