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Brunswick, known many years ago as
Berlin, has had three old movie houses that we can
count, including a Opera House.
The Opera house was located at 18-20
Railroad Street , at the base of the town. Just
down the street was the Brunswick Hotel. The
next block down, was the Elgin Hotel and a grocery
store and the City Hotel. The entire area is now
a parking lot and railroad yard. I'm not sure what
happened to the area, whether flood, with the Potomac
River a few hundred
feet away or fire, but there is no trace of the
buildings that once stood
here and everything has moved uphill. The parking lot
just accross the street
from the old pasenger depot is where the Opera House
would have been.
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Movies were later
shown in the Casino
Theatre, located at 315 High Street & later at 216
High Street, which
is now known as Potomac Street,between 2nd and 3rd
Street , currently known
as Maryland Avenue and Maple Avenue, in a
building that appears to still
be standing. The insurance map shows the location more
towards the three
story brick building in 1910, and by 1920, the theatre
had moved to the other
end of the same building, the earlier theatre space
being used by a grocery
store in 1920. By then, the blocks that had that
the Opera House were
no longer seen on the map. The post office was just
down the street from
the theatre, on the same block, as were several
smaller stores.
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In 1931, it was the Casino Theatre mentioned in
the Film Daily. Also
by around 1927, a new theatre called the
Imperial Theatre was listed as
well as the Casino , which seated 400, while the
Imperial seated between
300 and 500. Insurance maps show the theatre in the
late 1920's, both
the Casino and the Imperial existing at the same
time. The Imperial
was listed through 1956 as a movie theatre.
The Imperial
theatre which had an address of 226 Potomac
Street ( earlier known as 20 High Street ,
which is just East of Delaware Avenue ) closed
in the 1970's and later the old building caved
in. The location is now a empty lot as seen
below. The bridge in the picture goes over to
Virginia.
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