Blue Mouse Theatre Portland
The Blue Mouse Theatre opened in Portland was at 1032 SW Washington Street. The location was originally opened as a Globe Theater in 1912, before being taken over and completely remodeled in 1921 by John Hamrick It used a wurlitzer organ shipped from the factory in 1922. Harry Quinn Mills was organist at the Blue Mouse in 1922 and Dubois Cornish was organist in 1927. According to Balcom & Vaughan records, the organ was last used for silent films in March 1928. The theater hosted the first sound picture in Portland in 1926: John Barrymore's in Don Juan (1926 film).
Hamrick-Evergreen Theatres closed the venue sometime around 1936 and it was reopened again in 1940 by Paul Forsythe, who "presented family films and kiddie matinees" and "was rewarded with success and a host of good patrons, young and old who became loyal Blue Mouse fans." The theater faced eviction when the property was sold, and the building was to be torn down.
The Blue Mouse Theatre signage was moved to the Capitol Theatre building downtown in 1958 (which had itself been closed down). The new location at 626 SW 4th St (also listed as Morrison and 4th Avenue, location of the former Capitol Theatre) was in a less upscale neighborhood, but stayed in business until 1977 when the "Blue Mouse Block" was demolished to "make way for a huge parking facility. According to one account, "There was a faint outcry to 'save the Blue Mouse' but even if it had been a mighty roar, it was to no more avail than the 'Save the Fox' campaign was in San Francisco in 1963."
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Famous quotes containing the words blue, mouse, theatre and/or portland:
““Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.””
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“It is as when a migrating army of mice girdles a forest of pines. The chopper fells trees from the same motive that the mouse gnaws them,—to get his living. You tell me that he has a more interesting family than the mouse. That is as it happens.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“This visible world is wonderfully to be delighted in, and highly to be esteemed, because it is the theatre of God’s righteous Kingdom.”
—Thomas Traherne (1636–1674)
“It is said that a carpenter building a summer hotel here ... declared that one very clear day he picked out a ship coming into Portland Harbor and could distinctly see that its cargo was West Indian rum. A county historian avers that it was probably an optical delusion, the result of looking so often through a glass in common use in those days.”
—For the State of New Hampshire, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)