The Branford Theatre opened on December 17, 1920 on Branford Place, a short walk from Broad and Market Streets in downtown Newark. It was designed by Fred Wesley Wentworth and opened with Pola Negri in Passion.
The theater was big, roughly 2,800 seats, and size seems to have been the point. The lobby and stage areas were kept small so the auditorium held as many people as possible. One description called it a “big barn,” which feels a little unfair from the surviving photos. Newark had plenty of barns. This one at least had a Wurlitzer.
The Branford later became one of downtown Newark’s major first-run houses and was tied to the Stanley-Warner circuit. That makes it a useful companion to the Stanley Theatre in Vailsburg. The Stanley was built later, in 1927, as Stanley-Fabian’s second Newark theater. Their flagship Newark house had been the Branford.
By the late 1970s, the Branford had been carved into four screens. It closed in 1982 and the theater was largely demolished a few years later. The site was rebuilt as a strip mall, though NJIT’s DANA project notes that part of the original facade still survives along one side of the building.
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