Orpheum/NorShor recollections...

Orpheum Theatre Superior St exit, circa 1929
(Superior St. exit later became NorShor entrance) 

The renewed interest in Duluth's historic Orpheum Theater, the four walls of which encase today's NorShor (what remains of it), is brought on by the 100th anniversary of the Orpheum's opening, well covered in today's (Aug. 19) Duluth News Tribune (read Christa Lawler's stories HERE and HERE).

I am quoted in one story and provided a photograph of the Orpheum's former presence on Superior Street, which served as the theater's exit (the entrance was on Second Avenue West) throughout it's 30-year history, and became the NorShor's entrance after the the conversion was completed in 1941. That conversion reversed the entire theater 180 degrees, with the NorShor's screen on the end of the auditorium where the Orpheum's balconies had been. That meant the Orpheum's stage was approximately where the NorShor's existing lobby is.

My quote recalled seeing the blockbuster movie "The Robe" at the NorShor when I was a sophomore in high school in 1954-'55, and was singled out by me in pointing out that the NorShor had such a big outer lobby huge crowds could, and did, line up indoors, although there were times -- and "The Robe" was one of them -- when eager moviegoers filled that lobby, then snaked out onto Superior Street and down the block.

"The Robe" is largely forgotten today, but it was a phenomenon when it was released. It was based on a runaway best selling book by Lloyd C. Douglas and told the fictional story of what happened to the robe Christ wore on his way to his crucifixion. It starred Richard Burton in an early screen appearance, possibly his first. Burly Victor Mature played the gladiator Dimitrius.

The movie was also the first filmed in a then-new and exciting wide-screen process called "Cinemascope."

It was THE movie of the year, and perhaps the decade, although just a couple of years later a black-and --white movie called "Blackboard Jungle" showed up and forever changed American popular music ("Rock Around the Clock") and to some extent filmmaking.

The arrival of "The Robe" in Duluth was such an anticipated event that the NorShor theater operator persuaded the public high schools to release students who wanted to attend the opening matinee. That's when I saw it. Who would choose to stay in school when you could go to a movie?

So, to state the obvious, the public schools released students from classes to go to a movie depicting the crucifixion of Christ and its fictional aftermath. You will never see that happen again, but, hey, it was 1954. Oh, and make no mistake about this: They didn't release us to see a matinee of "Blackboard Jungle." --Jim Heffernan

Orpheum celebration at Historic NorShor this weekend...

Our jewel of downtown Duluth, the Historic NorShor Theatre, is gearing up for renewal with a city led celebration commemorating the centennial of its original theatre form, the Orpheum Theatre.

Tomorrow and the coming weekend will begin the road to renewal for the NorShor. Check out the link HERE to learn more.
And... come on down to the NorShor this weekend for these city-wide events!

NorShor experience was like no other...

by Jim Heffernan
(Originally appeared in the Duluth News Tribune on Sunday, November 19, 2006 and reprinted in my book, Cooler Near the Lake, sold in area bookstores and on line through Barnes and Noble, Amazon and Adventure Publication.)
                        To Save the NorShor, see the editor's note below.

The folks hoping to save Duluth’s NorShor Theater from eventually suffering the fate of the Palace in Superior (turned to rubble last week) asked me to write something about what it was like to attend a movie at the NorShor in its heyday.

I was born just two years before the building that housed the old Orpheum Theater was gutted and turned into what became the NorShor as we know it. It opened in 1941, and its unique art deco design has been hailed as one of the finest example of that style. Vestiges of it can still be seen today in the NorShor’s present–lamentable–condition almost 25 years after it ceased to exist as a regular theater.

But what was it like to go to a movie there in the days before television, when movies were the principal form of entertainment for most folks? It’s been said that 1946 was the peak box-office year for movies in America. That’s about when I started going to movies at the NorShor, accompanied by parents in the early years.

Even to a child, the NorShor was a magic place–at least it was to this child who would rather go to a movie than a ball game any day of the week and twice on Sundays. Duluth had a lot of movie theaters scattered across the downtown and in some outlying neighborhoods, but nothing compared to the NorShor.

Its main entrance was eye-popping, with a hall of mirrors leading from the box office to the auditorium lobby area, which was dominated by a pair of curving staircases leading to the mezzanine and balcony.

Back on the main floor, the auditorium walls featured huge dimly lighted murals–female nudes pausing in a forest glade. Art. Well, art deco.

Before each movie began the screen was shielded by a huge curtain inside the imposing proscenium arch. When the feature was ready to begin, and soundtrack music rose, the movie’s image would be projected at first on the curtain, which, in a few seconds, would be drawn back revealing the screen. When the movie was over, as “The End” flashed on the screen, the curtain would glide shut.

I’ve heard that the owners had to keep a member of the union representing stagehands employed at the theater just to open and close the curtain.

No other theater in Duluth even attempted such pageantry or had such class. It made going to movies at the NorShor really special, like dining in a fine restaurant versus stopping by a café for a blue-plate special.

In my experience, after the movie, we’d often peruse the paintings in the narrow but sizable art gallery off the main downstairs lobby where local artists and photographers would display their works.

Still, you were there just to see a movie, even if it was in a unique setting. Once the lights went down and the curtain opened, the NorShor was just any other movie house, but somehow the lavish surroundings enhanced your enjoyment.

All of this cost the theater’s operators money, of course, which was probably why the NorShor charged more than some others movie houses for kids–12 cents. A child could get into the Lyceum for 9 cents.

Editor's note:  
     It was recently announced that the City of Duluth hopes to buy the old NorShor Theater and the vintage Temple Opera Building in downtown Duluth. Duluth Mayor Don Ness said that he envisions the area downtown from Lake Avenue through to 805 E. Superior St (where Sir Benedict's Tavern is located) will develop into an arts and entertainment district that will showcase our downtown. I've always said that if I were a millionaire, I'd do just that. So this plan might help realize that hope to save the NorShor.
     You too can help to save our vintage theater. If you're on Facebook, join the "Save the NorShor" group and let your Duluth city councilors know you want them to vote in favor of purchasing this theater. Better do it right away though as the council votes this Monday on this proposal and that vote will cast the future of the NorShor.  Save the NorShor!

NorShor Theatre remembered...

The NorShor Theatre picture (above) is one of the pictures given to me in the 70's by George Brown, then manager of the theatre. This picture and others in my collection have been widely circulated. Note the marquis for the first movie shown in the theatre after the remodeling of the Orpheum (original entry and facade on the avenue) was transformed into the NorShor: Hold Back the Dawn with Charles Boyer and Paulette Goddard. 

Paul Lundgren contributed a short history of Duluth's NorShor Theatre in the Perfect Duluth Day blog. The Orpheum building (former Orpheum Theatre) that houses the NorShor turns 100 this year and that inspired Paul to write about it. Check out the PDD site HERE for more from Paul about that history.

Tony Dierckins, local publisher and historian, commented on PDD about the vintage pictures of the NorShor I shared with him and also with Laura Ness who compiled a NorShor history piece for the Zeppa Foundation a few years ago. Tony hopes to publish some of those pictures on his web site soon so stay tuned at his site, http://www.x-communication.org, to see those pictures.

Here are my comments on PDD reflecting more on the old NorShor...
Yes, Tony D. has my cache of interior and exterior pictures taken at the time of the grand reopening when the Orpheum became the NorShor; also interior and exterior shots of the Orpheum before it was remodeled. The photos were given to me by the late George Brown, long-time NorShor manager at the time of his retirement in the 1970s. A couple of the shots are of the premiere at the Norshor in the late 1940s of a movie set in old Duluth called “Woman of the North Country.” Filmed in Hollywood with matte-drawing backdrops of old wooden ore docks, It starred Rod Cameron and Ruth Hussey, and the photo shows Cameron alighting from the airplane in Duluth, not Charles Boyer or either Paulette Goddard or Olivia DeHavilland. They didn’t come to Duluth for the opening of the Norshor, but Boyer and Goddard were stars of the first movie shown in the newly remodeled theater, “Hold Back the Dawn.” Tony D. might want to correct that. One star of the Boyer, Goddard, DeHavilland magnitude did appear in person at the Norshor: Ingrid Bergman. She came here to sell war bonds during WW II and gave a sales pitch from the NorShor stage before motoring to the Riverside shipyards to speak to workers. As Paul Lundgren points out, it’s all in those old Duluth News Tribunes on microfilm at the library. Also Duluth Herald. Remember that?”

Here's an anecdote going back to the building's Orpheum days (1911-1940): I once came across a Duluth newspaper review of a popular stage play of the early 1930s, "The Barretts of Wimpole Street," playing at the Orpheum, that listed Orson Welles among cast members in the role of a juvenile. Welles was born in 1915 (thank you Google), so he must have been 16 or 17 when he toured with the play, including its stop in Duluth.

Note: In my book, Cooler Near the Lake, I include a column about the NorShor–a memory piece about what it was like to see a movie at that theatre in its heyday.

Can Bob Dylan save the county jail?

By Jim Heffernan

Taken from the county jail
By a set of curious chances;
Liberated then on bail,
On my own recognizances;
Wafted by a favouring gale
As one sometimes is in trances,
To a height that few can scale,
Save by long and weary dances;
Surely, never had a male
Under such like circumstances
So adventurous a tale,
Which may rank with most romances.
– W. S. Gilbert, “The Mikado”

So, Duluth preservationists have six months to save the old St. Louis County Jail in the Civic Center. Find another use – and user – or the wrecking ball will drop on the venerable lockup in November, decrees the Duluth City Council.

Daunting assignment. Experts say it would be enormously expensive to rehabilitate the former hoosegow because, news reports state, the entire building is held up from the inside by the jail cells installed when it was built in 1923. Remove the jail cells and, the story goes, the four walls would tumble.

Potential investors who might consider turning it into a hotel or apartment building say the cost is prohibitive: Millions upon millions of dollars – more than it would cost to build a new structure of similar size.

Hmmm. It’s a problem, that’s for sure. And only six months to solve it, or the jail is turned into a pile of rubble fit for Del Zotto’s Pit in Gary-New Duluth. I don’t know if they still dump building refuse there, but somewhere beneath the overburden in that western Duluth neighborhood lie the old Lyceum Theater, Spalding Hotel and other buildings preservationists would have liked to save if there had been preservationists when they were torn down.

I’m all for saving the jail – I’d miss it rounding Second Street in my car. And it is handsome on the outside. Looks like it could house offices for important government officials or deliberative legislative bodies or the Lord High Executioner who sings the song at the top of this treatise.

Clearly drastic measures must be taken to save the building.

I have a suggestion that has worked in the past and can be stated in two words: Bob Dylan. (I’m going to dispense with explaining who Bob Dylan is because everybody knows.)

Who has saved the old Minnesota National Guard Armory on London Road in Duluth from being razed? Bob Dylan. He has admitted attending a rock ‘n’ roll concert there in 1959 featuring singer Buddy “That’ll Be the Day” Holly and two other famous musicians a few days before the performers were killed in a plane crash. Save the Armory folks have used that one influential night of rock‘n’roll history – Holly and Dylan, together once – as the raison d’etre for preserving the historic building. Never mind that Liberace also performed there. (I’m going to dispense with explaining who Liberace was because nobody cares.)

Surely preservationists could come up with some link of Dylan with the old St. Louis County Jail. As with the Armory, it wouldn’t take much.

Of course, we can’t have Dylan arrested and held there overnight on a wild Duluth visit as a teenager in the late 1950s. That could stain the reputation of this revered singer-songwriter, although it didn’t hurt the late Johnny Cash to seem like he was a county jail kind of guy.

But what about the night Dylan and his buddies sped down to Duluth from Hibbing to see a movie that hadn’t made it to the Range yet (maybe “Blackboard Jungle” featuring the anthem “Rock Around the Clock”), after which a Dylan pal who shall go unnamed got hold of some rotgut, caused a ruckus at the Coney Island and was hauled off to the stately St. Louis County Jail and held overnight.

And wasn’t it great that Bob Dylan went to the jail the next morning and bailed out his buddy, who was actually a good lad who had just this one bad experience? What a friend he had in Dylan.

It could have happened. Just think, Bob Dylan inside the portals of the architecturally and historically significant St. Louis County Jail in Duluth.

Save that building, for heaven’s sake!

Oh, and while they’re at it, save the Norshor Theater, where Dylan and his buddies might have seen “Blackboard Jungle.” You can’t let a movie house Bob Dylan once might have attended go to wreck and ruin.

And save Clyde Iron. Surely Bob Dylan… Oh, never mind. They already saved it without him.