Southampton's Love Affair with the Movies is More than a Century Old

Ever since motion pictures were in their infancy — little more than jerky images wobbling across an improvised screen — Southampton has indulged a love affair with the movies. As early as the 1890s, Agawam Hall, the village's all-purpose entertainment center at the foot of Jobs Lane, was drawing crowds to watch and wonder at the primitive spectacles produced by the amazing hand-cranked Robertson's Projectoscope. 

By 1916, Agawam Hall and Robertson's Projectoscope were both superannuated. Agawam Hall was demolished and Southampton movie fans were soon filling the seats at the Crescent Theatre on the east side of Main Street opposite Herrick's for silent swashbucklers, weepers and smoochers like "South Sea Love," which, alas, turned out to be the Crescent's final offering. On January 20 a huge fire destroyed the Crescent along with the Odd Fellows' Hall next door.

"Southampton Business Section Has Biggest Fire in its History" was the banner headline on that week's , which noted that a thousand spectators had braved the cold to watch firefighters battle the blaze for nearly seven hours, dousing it with some 500,000 gallons of water.

Happily, The Garden Theatre on Hill Street, just west of Windmill Lane, was already up and running. That very week it was offering a full schedule of films highlighted by "the celebrated French beauty Andree Lafayette" in "Trilby."

When it first opened, the new 700-seat Garden was rather recklessly hailed in a contemporary account as "the handsomest moving picture theatre in the U.S." a magical place for open-air viewing (with an adjustable steel roof slated to replace a stopgap canvas cover in case of rain). "The auditorium is handsomely decorated with palms," rhapsodized the reporter, "and pictures shown here are all high class and such as appeal to refined and cultured audiences." Box seats in the balcony's loge section were upholstered wicker and commanded a premium.  

In 1928, Michael Glynne, a colorful character who evidently understood early on that the movie business could  bring a man fame, fortune and beautiful women, bought the Garden Theatre, made some improvements and renamed it Glynne's Garden Theatre. Asked by an oral history interviewer about his days working with Glynne, Richard Zimmer recalled that the theater's luxurious accoutrements notwithstanding, the acoustics were so atrocious that in about 1929 engineers were brought in to try to bring them up to speed for the talkies.

By the early 1930s the ambitious Glynne, who also opened movie theatres in Astoria, Bay Shore, Patchogue, Greenport and Sag Harbor, was ready to pull out all the stops and build a new movie theatre in Southampton that would be one of the grandest ever seen on Long Island and be called Glynne's Southampton Theatre. (It survives, though much altered, as our theater.)

Glynne made sure that his showplace was outfitted opulently, boasting, among other things, a huge chandelier that dazzled and terrified every child who ever sat under it and wondered what would happen if it ever swung loose. (When the twinning began, the chandelier left for a new life in a nightclub.) Glynne's Southampton Theatre opened in 1932 with great fanfare and in its heyday was a magnet not only for Southampton movie buffs but for New York City bigwigs as well and their glamorous girlfriends who arrived in chauffeur-driven limos to preview the best Hollywood had to offer. As Zimmer recalled, Southampton was first in line for new releases and if a movie bombed here it was dead. Such was Southampton's importance when its movie theater was the envy of all.

Sources from Archives: "Southampton," Arcadia Publishing, 1996; "One Hundred Years of Healing: Southampton Hospital 1909-2009," , 2009; , January 24, 1924; Southampton Oral History Interviews.