The Polk Theatre and the Age of the Picture Palace
Near Lakeland, Florida
On December twenty-second, nineteen twenty-eight, two thousand people crowded into a brand-new movie palace at the corner of Main Street and Tennessee Avenue and watched a Warner Brothers all-talking picture called On Trial. Two thousand of the twenty-two hundred tickets for the afternoon show had sold within an hour of the box office opening at noon. That kind of opening says something about what the Polk Theatre meant to this city.
The architect was Joseph Emile Casale, an Italian-born immigrant, and he built an atmosphere theater, the term of art for a cinema designed to make you feel like you are sitting outdoors. The ceiling is painted to look like a night sky complete with twinkling electric stars. The side walls suggest an Italian hill town, with faux balconies, arched windows, Italianate niches, and lanterns. You sit in what appears to be a Mediterranean piazza watching a movie under the open sky. The effect is disorienting and entirely intentional.
The Polk also had two claims to technological distinction. Its air wash system, one hundred tons of cooling capacity, made it genuinely comfortable in Florida summer heat at a time when most theaters were miserable. And it used the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, the same technology Warner Brothers used for The Jazz Singer the year before, making it one of the first talking picture venues in the region.
The theater survived the Depression, hosted Tommy Dorsey and Elvis Presley, then fell on hard times in the nineteen sixties and seventies as the suburban multiplex ate the movie palace business. In nineteen eighty-two, a group of local preservationists took it over and have operated it as a nonprofit ever since. The stars on the ceiling still twinkle.
