The Old Park Theater

In Cheryl Turkington’s “Setting Up Our Own City” Mr. John W. Harris recalled: “When I was growing up here, they had two movie theaters...One was the Park Theater, the old Park Theater, which is gone. That’s where the AT&T Building - the ’76 Building – is…And that’s where on Sundays – Saturdays and Sundays – all the kids would go to the Park because Saturdays they would have a double feature and then Sunday they would change it to something else. And that’s where the movies for the kids were at. The Community was the highbrow theater. That’s where they had the movies that were the top ten as far as the critics were concerned.”

In November 2010, on cinematreasures.org, Tom Behrens posted:

“I worked as an usher at the Park Theater in the mid 1960s. Our protocol after the movie began was to walk down the aisle backward in front of the customer, shining a flashlight down on their path so they could see where they were walking. We had uniforms and everything.

Being originally constructed as a traditional theater, the fly area back stage was enormous. I remember the eerily quiet and abandoned dressing rooms underneath the stage. The stage loading door was large enough to back a truck into, and I was told that in the old vaudeville days when the Park was really hopping, they had all kinds of acts on stage, including a circus show with elephants and all. Just a real classic of a theater, with a large balcony that was hardly ever used.”

Side note: I had the great good fortune of being a member of the History Department at Morristown High School with the Mr. Harris. We taught alongside Mr. Verrinder, Mr. Podeszwa, Ms. Kaub, Ms. Kelly, Mr. Bellias, and Mr. Beaver. My word, what a crew. They taught me so much.

Sources: mmtlibrary.org, cinematreasures.org