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Silver screen cinema madison wi5/16/2023 Admission was $.05 for thirty minutes of silent films, piano music, and illustrated slides. His establishment was a no-frills, airless room equipped with wooden bench seats and a white sheet for a screen. Daily showings of films in Milwaukee didn’t happen until 1902, when an entrepreneur named Max Goldstein opened a storefront theater at North Second Street and Wisconsin Avenue. Grainy, flickering scenes of New York City traffic, a boxing match, and the famous kiss with actors John Rice and Mae Irwin thrilled an audience who paid up to 30 cents for admission, depending on the seat. The first evidence of movies in Milwaukee dates back to Jwhen Thomas Edison’s Vitascope pictures were shown at the Academy of Music Theater, located on Milwaukee Street just south of Wisconsin Avenue. Often the film was less compelling than the atmosphere in which it was shown. That ticket was a passport into a fantasy world of plush draperies, magnificent chandeliers, velvet seats, and exotic architectural motifs, all delivered with impeccable customer service. Admission was fifty cents in the evenings, thirty-five cents during the day. Seeing a film at one of the movie “palaces” was the acme of the moviegoing experience. The Miller, White House, Magnet, Empress, and Princess lined both sides of North Third Street between Wells and Wisconsin. The Wisconsin, Palace, Strand, Merrill, Alhambra, Garden, Warner, and Riverside lined Wisconsin Avenue from Sixth Street to the river. In 1931, while the country was reeling from the effects of a financial depression, more than a dozen movie theaters existed within a six-block stretch of downtown Milwaukee. As a result, many Milwaukee theaters closed permanently before 1960. After 1950, attendance figures for movies began to drop off as the sales of home television sets soared. For others, a short streetcar trip took them to their destination. With nearly ninety cinemas in the downtown and outlying areas, many moviegoers were able to walk to a theater just blocks from their homes. In the years before television sets became available for the home, going out to a movie was the number one form of leisure-time entertainment. Between 19, many Milwaukee residents went to the movies once or twice a week.
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