John Eberson (1875–1954) was an American architect best known for his movie palace designs in the atmospheric theatre fashion. (This source and many others give Eberson's year of death as 1964.)
Born in Czernowitz, Austro-Hungarian Empire (today Ukraine), Eberson went to highschool in Dresden and studied electrical engineering in Vienna. He arrived in the United States in 1901 and at first settled in St. Louis. There, while working for a construction company he designed his first theater, the Jewel, in Hamilton, Ohio. A year later found him living in Chicago, and in 1926 he made his final move, to New York City.
Eberson attained national, and even international acclaim for his atmospheric theatres, many of them executed in exotic revival styles, including Italian Renaissance, Moorish Revival and others. The first of these such theatres is considered to be the Orpheum in Wichita. "He specialized in depicting outdoor settings with no formal walls and made the whole auditorium a gigantic stage set that enveloped the whole audience."
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